blog tribute to the 349th anniversary of Arrival Day:
349 years ago today, the ship St. Catherine landed at New Amsterdam carrying 23 Jewish settlers. They were not the first Jews to set foot on American soil - the merchant Solomon Franco had visited Boston in 1649 before returning to Holland - but unlike Franco, they came to stay. They were the founders of the six million strong Jewish community of the United States, and the day they landed - September 7 - is Arrival Day.I can only plead busyness and distraction, and add this to my teshuvah for Rosh Hashanah. It's a great idea about a date in Jewish history which will be the subject of a public commemoration next year. Go there and read. And Jonathan's previous posts on Jews in early America (linked from the blogburst) are also great snippets of history.
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