Tercentenary Observance of American Jewish Settlement Begins

The American Jewish Tercentenary, an eight-month-long, country-wide observance that will include participation of Federal, state and local officials, and Jewish organizations on all levels –from the smallest local units to the most influential national groups–opens this Sunday.

The formal opening of the observance begins with a religious ceremony Sunday afternoon at Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue in this city which is the direct descendant of the first Jewish house of worship founded in this country by the 23 Jews who started the first settlement in North America in 1654. The observance will be closed formally with another religious service on May 29, 1955, at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in Washington.

In between these two religious events, there will be many observances of various types–religious, civic, artistic, and scholarly.

On the very opening day of the Tercentenary, Sunday, governors of a number of states will formally proclaim their states’ participation in the celebration, while the mayors of 250 cities will issue local proclamations.

A committee of three hundred, under the chairmanship of Ralph E. Samuel, has been working out plans for the Tercentenary for the last two and a half years. The theme of the observance, “Man’s Opportunities and Responsibilities Under Freedom,” will run through every phase.

The American Jewish Historical Society will convene its annual conference Monday and Tuesday, at Peekskill, N.Y., where nationally known authorities in American and Jewish studies, under the chairmanship of Prof. Moshe Davis, will formulate plans on the future of American Jewish historical writings. The Society’s parley this year is devoted specifically to the Tercentenary. Another scholarly project will be a 10-volume documentary history of the Jews in the United States, to be carried out by a committee of scholars headed by Prof. Salo W. Baron, of Columbia University.