Congregation Shearith Israel

Stand on the pavement at Central Park West and listen for a moment. Behind you, the park's trees move in the wind. Taxis hiss past on the avenue. In front of you rises a pale stone facade with tall columns, calm and formal, like a small temple dropped onto the Upper West Side. This is Congregation Shearith Israel. Most people walk past it without knowing they are looking at the home of the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.

The name is Hebrew. Shearith Israel means "Remnant of Israel." New Yorkers also call it the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and that second name holds the key to the whole story. The congregation does not come from Eastern Europe, as many later Jewish communities in this city did. Its roots run back to the Jews of Spain and Portugal, who were expelled or forced to convert in the late fifteenth century. They are known as Sephardic Jews, from the Hebrew word for Spain.

The story in New York begins in 1654. A small group of Jewish refugees, often counted as twenty-three people, arrived at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. That was the town that later became New York. They had come from Recife, in Brazil. The Portuguese had just taken that region from the Dutch, and Jews who had lived there in relative freedom now faced the Inquisition again. So they sailed north, with very little, into an uncertain welcome.

That welcome was cold. The colony's director, Peter Stuyvesant, wanted them gone. He wrote to his employers, the Dutch West India Company, asking permission to expel them. But some of the company's own investors in Amsterdam were Jewish, and the company refused. The refugees could stay. It was not equality — they still had to fight for basic rights, like trading and owning land. But it was a foothold, and the congregation counts its beginning from those years.

Here is the first surprise. For a very long time, this was not one synagogue among many. It was the only Jewish congregation in New York. Every Jewish New Yorker, whatever their background, belonged to this one community until the 1820s. Only then did a second congregation form. So for well over a century and a half, the story of Jewish New York and the story of Shearith Israel were the same story.

For decades the community worshipped in rented rooms. Then, in 1730, it built its first real synagogue, on Mill Street in lower Manhattan. That street no longer exists under that name. It sat near today's Financial District, among the narrow lanes close to the old waterfront. The congregation also kept a burial ground downtown, near Chatham Square on the edge of present-day Chinatown. A small fragment of that early cemetery still survives there, among tenements and shopfronts.

The American Revolution split the community, as it split the city. When the British occupied New York, the congregation's minister, Gershom Mendes Seixas, left rather than stay under British rule. Many members followed him. After the war, Seixas returned, and he is often remembered as one of the clergymen present at George Washington's inauguration in New York in 1789. Small as it was, the congregation was woven into the founding of the country.

As New York grew, the community moved north with it. It built new synagogues further uptown, one after another, following its members as they left the crowded southern tip of the island. The building in front of you is the result of that long migration. It was completed in 1897, designed by the architect Arnold Brunner. He chose a classical style, with columns and clean lines, rather than the Moorish domes that many synagogues of that period used.

That choice was deliberate. Classical architecture, borrowed from ancient Greece and Rome, was the language of American public buildings — banks, courthouses, libraries. By building in this style, the congregation placed itself firmly in the American civic tradition. Look at the facade. The columns, the pediment, the restrained ornament. It feels less like a statement of difference and more like a statement of belonging, from a community that had been here since the colony was Dutch.

Now the second surprise, and perhaps the most moving one. Inside the building there is a smaller chapel, known as the Little Synagogue. It holds furnishings and ritual objects carried forward from the congregation's earlier homes, including pieces linked to the Mill Street synagogue of 1730. Among them are millstones said to come from the old Mill Street site. So, standing here on the Upper West Side, you are connected by physical objects to a lane in colonial Manhattan.

The community also keeps something less visible but just as old — its way of praying. Services here follow the Western Sephardic tradition, the customs and melodies of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who settled in Amsterdam and London, and then in the Americas. Most members today come from many backgrounds, not only Sephardic ones. Yet the old order of prayer continues. Some of the tunes heard inside would be familiar to worshippers in Amsterdam or London today.

Over the centuries, many well-known New Yorkers passed through this community. The poet Emma Lazarus came from a family with deep roots in the congregation. She wrote the sonnet now mounted at the Statue of Liberty, with its famous lines about the tired and the poor. It is worth holding that thought as you stand here. A community that began as refugees turned away by a colonial governor helped shape the words that greet newcomers in the harbour.

Take one more look before you go. The stone of the facade, the steady rhythm of the columns, the trees of Central Park across the avenue. Joggers and dog walkers pass without a glance. Inside, a tradition that crossed the Atlantic more than once keeps its old melodies. As you walk on, past the brownstones of West 70th Street, notice how quietly this building holds its place... and how much history fits behind one calm stone front.