In 1658, fifteen Jewish families emigrated from South America to (what was to become) the United States. These families were of Sephardic lineage and settled together in Newport, Rhode Island, where they established a Jewish congregation. For many years they held weekly prayer services in private homes.
When the need arose for a Jewish cemetery, the community purchased a piece of land on Wednesday, February 28, 1677.
This was the very first piece of land in the colonies which was owned by a Jewish congregation. In this cemetery are buried many of the early members of this congregation, and it is still maintained by the Jewish community.
For more about the Newport Jewish community, see entry for the 8th of Elul.
Links:
The History of Jewish Newport, Rhode Island
Judah Touro: Philanthropist Par Excellence
Viewing the dire lack of formal Jewish education provided to Jewish girls in her native Poland, Sarah Schenirer founded the first Bais Yaakov girls’ school in Krakow in 1917. Despite some initial opposition, the Bais Yaakov school network quickly expanded throughout Poland and beyond. Today, there are hundreds of Bais Yaakov schools worldwide, attended by tens of thousands of students.
Links: The Importance of Jewish Education for Girls; The Woman in Lubavitch
And these words with which I connect with you today… (Deut. 6:6)
Every day these words should be just as new for you as if they were given today. (Sifri)
How could the same mitzvah you did yesterday be new to you today? The same words of Torah as though you never knew them before? The same prayer as though you never said it before?
Through a simple meditation on what is happening when you do that mitzvah, when you study those words, when you pour out your heart in your prayer.
Contemplate that the entire universe is but a glimmer of G‑d’s infinite light. Yet, in this mitzvah, you hold the Creator Himself in your hands. As you learn His Torah, your soul joins with His very essence. In your prayer, you and He are alone as one.
It makes no difference that you feel nothing, that you are not awake to the glory of this moment, that the physical body does not allow you to perceive reality as it is. One day you will see this moment now from a place far beyond this coarse world.
But then it will be only a memory, a souvenir.
Now you have the real thing.
Because, says G‑d, today, in the moment of this mitzvah now, I, just I, beyond any name or definition, I connect with you.
And such a moment is a moment beyond time.