Rabbi Isaac Leeser רבי יצחק ליסר

Born in Westphalia in 1806, he came in 1824 to Richmond to an uncle and worked in his business. About 1829 he became hazzan of the Mikveh Israel congregation at Philadelphia.

The first thing he did looks small and was not. On 2 June 1830 he preached a sermon in English. Until then there had been no preaching in American synagogues at all—the hazzan sang, and that was that. He, as his biographers put it, 'turned the lectern into a pulpit'; thirteen years later the congregation fixed the sermon as its order, and others followed.

After that he did one and the same thing in different forms: to give in English what exists in Hebrew. In 1837 he published a translation of the Sephardi prayer book. In 1843 he founded The Occident and American Jewish Advocate and edited it for twenty-five years—the country's first Jewish periodical that lasted. In 1845 came his Pentateuch with the Hebrew text and an English translation, and in 1853 the whole Bible: the first translation of Scripture into English made by a Jew, and to the end of the century the standard one for English-speaking Jews.

Shortly before his death, in 1867, he helped found Maimonides College—the first Jewish theological college in America—and was its provost.

He held to the strictly traditional side, but did not think the English language and American usage stood in its way. Out of that combination grew the branch in America that kept the law and spoke English.