Tailoring tradition: Rosh Hasannah in US cultural history

By David Geffen - Jerusalem Post
Monday, September 29, 2008 - Web Link
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September 28, 2008

From beaver hats to baseball, American Jews throughout their 354-year history have tailored High Holy Day observances to fit their new surroundings far from Europe's shores.

Initially the changes were minor, and the traditional observances of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur were fairly widespread in America.

In 1768, in Newport Rhode Island, Aaron Lopez, a new American Jewish business magnate, announced he would close his businesses for four days. These included Saturday and Sunday for Shabbat, and Monday and Tuesday for Rosh Hashana.

When it came time to dress for the New Year in 1765, Joseph Simon, a noted merchant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, sought to purchase not just breeches, but beaver fur for a new hat.

Already by 1761, 107 years after Jews first arrived in the colonies, they had veered from the ancient Hebrew verses and could pray from an abridged, English text, locally printed for the first time by American Jewish patriots in New York.

This pamphlet "Evening Services of Roshashanah and Kippur or the Beginning of the Year and the Day of Atonement" appeared without an author listed. The late Prof. Abraham Karp, an American Jewish historian, felt the author was Isaac Pinto, the most knowledgeable Jew in New York at the time. However, Pinto, in fear of the hierarchy in London, didn't claim authorship. Five years later, when a translation into English of the services for the other holidays appeared, Pinto took credit.

A more traditional item to help American Jews keep track of the religious calendar was created more than a decade later by Abraham Eleazar Cohen, a Philadelphia resident who was a schoolmaster and an attendant at the Mikveh Israel synagogue.

In the midst of the American revolution, Cohen wrote by hand, in Hebrew, a luach-calendar for 5539 (1778-1779).