Three hundred and seventy years ago this week, a group of 23 Sephardic Jews arrived on the shores of New York — then called New Amsterdam — and created the first organized Jewish community in the city.
What a difference a few centuries make: Today, New York City is home to the largest Jewish population of any city in the world.
On Thursday, the City Council voted on a resolution to honor both, turning Landing Day from an event marked by a few Jewish leaders into an official date on the city’s calendar. The resolution aims to “commemorate the arrival of the first Jewish community in New Amsterdam in 1654 and to celebrate the continuing importance of the Jewish community in the City of New York.”
Landing Day has been commemorated in the city several times throughout history, most recently last year at a ceremony to recognize the 369th anniversary of the community.
That event was held at the Jewish Tercentenary Monument at Peter Minuit Plaza in Battery Park, erected by the State of New York in 1954. The small memorial includes a flagpole adorned with a plaque that explains its purpose is “to honor the memory of the twenty three men, women and children who landed in September 1654 and founded the first Jewish community in North America.”
Still, Landing Day — and the existence of this early New York Jewish community — is not widely known among Jews or New Yorkers, which is one of the reasons that Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side on the City Council, sponsored the bill to give it the city’s sign-off.
“When the City Council passes something like this, it’s official,” Brewer told the New York Jewish Week. “It goes into the city record and becomes part of the city’s history. It’s not a holiday, per se, but it is recognized, and it gives it legitimacy.”
The resolution was spearheaded by Howard Teich, the founding chair of the Manhattan Jewish Historical Initiative, who organized last year’s commemoration and partnered with Brewer to bring the resolution before the City Council.
“We just have to change the narrative of the community right now,” Teich said about the ceremony last year, adding that he felt Jewish communal discourse was too often focused on fear and division. “We’ve got to spread a positive message of who we are, what we’ve accomplished, how we’ve worked with other people, what we’ve started, the difference we’ve made in the time we’ve been here and, really, what America has meant to us as a people.”
Moving forward, New York City will honor Landing Day every year throughout the second week of September. While the exact day the Jews landed in New York is not known, records indicate it occurred during the week before Rosh Hashanah, which that year was on Sept. 12, 1654.
That year, nearly two dozen Sephardic Jews arrived in New York after fleeing persecution in Recife, Brazil, which had recently been colonized by the Portuguese. Three Ashkenazi Jews — Jacob Barsimson, Solomon Pietersen and Asser Levy — had arrived from Europe weeks earlier and helped advocate for the group to stay in New York when Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general of New Amsterdam, rejected the new refugees because he wanted to establish a colony solely for Dutch Reformed Christians.
With urging from the Dutch West India Company — which, at the time, operated heavily in what was known as New Netherland, and which had many Jewish investors — Stuyvesant was overruled and the group remained.
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They went on to establish the first Jewish congregation in the United States, the Mill Street Synagogue. The congregation was later renamed Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and moved uptown to West 70th Street in 1897.
The resolution had 22 sponsors in City Council, including Eric Dinowitz, the chairman of the city council’s Jewish Caucus, as well as fellow caucus members Lincoln Restler, Inna Vernikov, Julie Menin and Lynn Schulman and several non-Jewish City Council members.
Brewer first introduced the resolution in May. On Tuesday, the Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations signed off before receiving a council-wide vote Thursday.
“Three hundred and seventy years later, there are more than million Jews in New York City — more than any other city worldwide — and it kind of started with this group,” Brewer said.
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