Subject
title
Proclamation Declaring May 2025, as Jewish American Heritage Month
end
Department
Mayor and Council
Recommendation
Staff recommends Mayor and Council read and approve the proclamation and present it to
Rabbi Moishe Kavka, Co-Director, Chabad of Rockville.
Discussion
May is Jewish American Heritage Month the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Jewish Americans who helped form the fabric of American history, culture, and society.
The American Jewish Committee, a non-partisan global advocacy organization for Jewish people requested that Jewish American Heritage Month be celebrated in Rockville, Maryland during the month of May.
The American Jewish community was founded in 1654 by a group of 23 Jews - men, women, and children - fleeing persecution in Recife, Brazil. Over the past 369 years, Jewish Americans have lived in this country as loyal and patriotic citizens. The Jewish community has contributed through sharing its culture and values in all sectors of American society.
The need for religious and cultural tolerance is paramount, in these times of rising antisemitism. Tolerance towards all the different cultures here in America is needed.
A brief American Jewish History by: Jonathan D. Sarna and Jonathan Golden
Brandeis University (edited)
American Jewish history commenced in 1492 with the expulsion of Jews from Spain. This action set off a period of intense Jewish migration. Seeking to escape the clutches of the Inquisition, some Jews in the sixteenth century sought refuge in the young Calvinist republic of The Netherlands. A century later, hundreds of their descendants crossed the ocean to settle in the new Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil, where Jewish communal life became possible for the first time in the New World. When Portugal recaptured this colony in 1654, its Jews scattered. Refugees spread through the Dutch Caribbean, beginning fresh Jewish communities. A boatload of about 23 Jews sailed into the remote Dutch port of New Amsterdam and requested permission to remain. This marked the beginning of Jewish communal life in North America.
Colonial Jews never exceeded one tenth of one percent of the American population, yet they established patterns of Jewish communal life that persisted for generations.
• First, most Jews lived in cosmopolitan port cities like New York and Newport where opportunities for commerce and trade abounded, and people of diverse backgrounds and faiths lived side by side.
• Second, many early American Jewish leaders and institutions were Sephardic, meaning that their origins traced to the Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula. Sephardic Jews maintained cultural hegemony in Jewish life into the early nineteenth century, although by then Ashkenazi Jews, meaning Jews who traced their origins to Germany, had long been more numerous.
• Third, Jews organized into synagogue-communities. Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Newport each had one synagogue that assumed responsibility for the religious and communal needs of all local Jews.
Mayor and Council History
This is the third time Mayor and Council have presented this proclamation.