I was very fortunate to be able to take a couple of day trips from the conference in Boston. One of them was to the town of Newport in Rhode Island to see the Touro Synagogue and the Jewish Cemetery there. I won’t give any details of the cemetery except to say some pretty influential people were buried there.

There are a number of organisations with the Touro name in America, they are either named after Judah Touro or his brother, Abraham, both of whom were philanthropically minded.

Our story starts in 1492 with the Alhambra Decree where the Jews were given the choice to either convert or leave Spain, they were given four months and using this effective three month window many Jews took boats to Portugal and Amsterdam among other places. This was repeated in the 1500s in Portugal where they were again given a choice: convert or leave. As the story goes one of the boats went off course and they landed in Jamaica where anybody who could prove they had been born Jewish were allowed to get on a boat which landed in New York. Thus began Shareth Israel, the first Jewish community settlement in continental North America.

Around 1658 another ship comes from Barbados and lands in Newport with 15 Jews who form a quiet community. The first written evidence of Jews in Newport comes in 1677 when they buy the cemetery. Land was purchased for the Hebrew Synagogue in 1658. Isaac Touro came from New York to be the first Cantor. The Synagogue is eventually named after his sons (not because they gave lots of money and it was deliberately named after them but due to one official calling it the Touro Synagogue in one piece of correspondence, the name stuck), Abraham and Judah as they both left bequests of $10,000 to the State specially for the upkeep of the building. Despite there being no Jews still living in the area their  sister, Rebecca, was most insistent in the State continuing to use the money for the Synagogue and Quakers were engaged as caretakers…several generations of Quakers. It finally returned to use as a Synagogue under the instructions that it will always be Orthodox, there are currently two co-presidents and the female one sits upstairs in the balcony.

What is really different about Newport is how ecumenical the town is. Normally the churches are in the centre of town and the synagogue is somewhere else. In Newport they are all equidistant from the centre of town and they all worked together. The Jews lived in harmony in Newport, Rhode Island, in contrast to many other places around the world.

We were given a tour of the inside of the Synagogue, we weren’t shown the Priest’s Hole that was used to hide people during the Civil War it was something I heard about later on in our trip. It’s a lovely little Synagogue and we didn’t have nearly enough time there but it was lovely to visit.