If you want to pray the way the first Jews in North America did, the closest you can come may be weekday services at the Little Synagogue at Shearith Israel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

It’s a room of a few hundred square feet, the rough dimensions of the synagogue the first congregation in New York dedicated downtown on Mill Street on April 8, 1730. The community predated the structure; the Dutch, and later the English, prohibited the colony’s Jews from building a house of worship, so for nearly a century, they met in rented homes.

“All the Jews of New York City could fit in a room this size from 1730 until after the American Revolution,” Shearith’s sexton, Zachary Edinger, said on a recent tour of the synagogue. “All the Jews who live across the street today can’t fit in this room today, so that’s how much we’ve grown”

This chapel replica has some of the original furnishings from Mill Street, and other buildings the congregation occupied as their numbers grew. Four candlesticks from a rented home on what was likely Beaver Street crown the platform at the center of the room. The central reading table, or tebah, and the Ten Commandments over the ark, are from Mill Street. There’s a ner tamid, eternal light, from the congregation’s 37 years on 19th Street. The room’s colonial white wood and red-plush upholstery are a stark contrast to the Tiffany glass and Numidian marble of the main sanctuary, completed in 1897 to seat 700 members of what had since become a prosperous, deeply established community with prime real estate on 70th St and Central Park West.

During regular services, the hazzan, Rabbi Ira Rohde, stands at the tebah, cloaked in a black gown, a white lace collar with two tails around his neck, a soft brimless cap atop his head. He cantillates the traditional Sephardic melodies. Among the faithful there are more jeans, polos and ergonomic sneakers than in yesteryear. There’s no Portuguese to be heard — that was nixed just after the American Revolution — but the ritual hasn’t changed much.

If you squint, you can almost imagine yourself in the Summer of 1776, when standing at that very tebah was the first American-born hazzan, Gershom Mendes Seixas, who bet on an untested experiment in freedom. In doing so he, along with his siblings, following a long legacy of displacement and denied citizenship, helped to create the new identity of a Jewish American.

Their descendants would serve on both sides of the Civil War, write the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, teach Hebrew to the founder of the Mormon Church, serve on the Supreme Court, establish schools for the deaf and publish The New York Times. More recently, members have owned soccer clubs, run music festivals, pioneered research into alcoholism, played in orchestras, taught children, stewarded the environment, designed museums, made aliyah, immigrated to Canada and Guatemala, converted to Catholicism or moved from secularly celebrating Easter to keeping Shabbat and raising their children Orthodox.

Some are also considering a move that would have been unthinkable for their ancestors: returning to the very continent they fled 300 years before.

Arrival 

At the top of the Seixas family tree, monkeys swing from the branches. To their right, Eve tempts Adam with the apple. From this irreverent illustration flows a meticulously-rendered lineage punctuated by drawings of gentlemen in capes and frocks. The chart was made in 1930 by the skyscraper architect Lafayette Anthony Goldstone.

It’s on display in an alcove in the Jewish Museum, a former Warburg mansion overlooking Central Park, a mark of wealth and belonging unimaginable to the refugees listed at the upper parts of the genealogy.

Most early American Jews were Sephardic and had lived for a few generations as Dutch subjects. Their ancestors hailed from Portugal, where the crown forcibly converted Jews to Catholicism in 1496 before commencing an Inquisition in 1536. These “New Christians” left for the Netherlands, where they could worship freely as Jews.

In time, some of the merchant class relocated to Recife, the capital of the Dutch colony in Brazil and a major trade center. In 1654, the Portuguese captured Recife. The Jews, remembering their persecution by that nation, fled back to Amsterdam. One of the 16 ships bound for Holland shipwrecked in the Caribbean. Its 23 passengers, rescued by a French frigate, were dropped off in New Amsterdam. Shearith Israel sprang from that community of exiles. The British seized the city in 1664 and renamed it New York.

When the congregation consecrated the one-story, brick-and-wood synagogue on the seventh day of Passover in 1730, it was roughly half Ashkenazi and half Sephardic, though its customs were Portuguese.

Soon after Mill Street’s dedication, the Lisbon-born Isaac Mendes Seixas arrived in New York and in 1740 married Rachel Levy, who had been born in London. Their first-generation children were a blend of Ashkenazi and Sephardic cultures and another yet to be defined: American. Together they modeled, and received guarantees for, the possibilities of life in a young republic unprecedented in its promise of liberty for Jews.

At the Jewish Museum, the success of their integration is on literal display. Goldstone’s family tree is surrounded by portraits of the Seixas family’s peers and silver ritual objects from Shearith Israel. But perhaps the most telling testament to the Seixas’ place in their country is a piece the museum’s director calls “goyische.”

It’s a 19th century sampler stitched by Rachel I. Seixas, likely named for her great-grandmother Rachel Levy, that reads, “Oh may I seek in early youth what guards from future harms/Religion Modesty and Truth/For these have always charms.” A Puritan might have made it.

“I always am sort of stunned by the age of the person,” historian Laura Arnold Leibman told me when we toured the gallery.

Rachel, who was 9 or 10 when she stitched the sampler, was born in Richmond, Va., a granddaughter of Benjamin Mendes Seixas, one of the co-founders of the New York Stock Exchange and a third lieutenant in the New York Militia during the Revolution. Rachel would later marry into the Cardozo family, live through the Civil War and die in 1902 in Minnesota. Her childhood work is a museum piece; her cousin Naomi Seixas, Benjamin’s sixth great-grandchild, designs museums.

“In my day to day life, I walk from the East Village past the Shearith Israel Cemetery, past Benjamin Seixas’ grave, to work, where I work all day long, engaging with projects that continue this legacy of unfinished work,” said Naomi Seixas, 45.

I spoke with her in her modern, open-plan office in the Financial District. On a wall behind her was a blown-up image of the preamble to the Constitution, part of a mockup for one of her projects, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, N.D., which will open on July 4, 2026.

Naomi’s building is a short walk to the Stock Exchange, and if she were to continue down South William Street, she’d hit Seixas Way, the former location of the Mill Street Synagogue. It was in this area that Benjamin was active in the militia movement that sprang up in taverns, co-signing a letter warning New York of imminent war and advising that “every member of the Community capable of bearing arms should acquit himself with military discipline.”

Naomi was born and grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and was raised secular. The family had a menorah and a Christmas tree and she went to Jewish summer camp. Her late father, Peter, who grew up in what his sister called “an extremely nonreligious family,” was a history professor at the University of British Columbia.

What it really meant to be a Seixas clicked for Naomi when she was 12. She was in Philadelphia with her father and they visited Congregation Mikveh Israel, where Gershom Mendes Seixas led the patriot faithful for a time during the Revolution. The rabbi became very animated when her dad introduced himself, and brought them to see Gershom’s portrait.

“All of a sudden I felt a sense of pride, a sense of curiosity and intrigue,” Naomi said. “There was sort of that first real, pronounced moment of understanding that these people were big deals.”

Being a Seixas means having heirlooms divided between your home and historical archives: bibles, oil paintings, steamer trunks of artifacts. But for many, the main inheritance is ideological.

“My family’s participation, and boldness in participation, continues to inspire and hold resonance for me to participate,” said Naomi, who has made history her life’s work. “To show up and do good work and engage with the past, but really work on moments of the present.”

Her ancestors’ boldness can’t be understated. Faced with a choice between loyalty to the crown and an uncertain outcome for the patriot cause, they made a gamble that offered no assurances for their rights as citizens. In August 1776, when the Continental Army lost the Battle of Brooklyn, New York was poised to fall to the British. Gershom Mendes Seixas addressed his congregation, urging them to leave their home for Connecticut.

The words he spoke are lost to history, but their outcome was not. When called to join the cause of freedom, most followed.

Exodus 

The story of Shearith Israel’s evacuation is, like so many incidents from the Revolutionary War, often embellished. As historian Adam Jortner writes in A Promised Land, his book on Jews in the Revolution, Gershom Mendes Seixas didn’t shoulder the Torah out of the city; it was almost certainly shipped ahead to Connecticut, where the community reconstituted itself in Stratford. At least two other scrolls stayed behind with a loyalist remnant of the congregation, and were subsequently vandalized by British troops.

Sympathy for the patriots was already ripe by the time most of the congregation left, thanks in no small part to Gershom, the first Jewish religious leader born in the 13 colonies. Gershom conceived of himself as an American and a Jew. His own religious education likely ended with his bar mitzvah, a few years before he was elected to the position of hazzan at the age of 22. At that time, the role didn’t have much cachet. He served at the pleasure of the adjunta, or board, and his service was that of a poorly-paid factotum, leading prayer but also tutoring bar mitzvahs and performing brises. Before Seixas, the hazzans, imported from Europe, rarely ever preached.

Gershom led a fractious community that his predecessors often had difficulty controlling. Records from the time note how one member called his own brother a “bastard” at a baby naming. In 1755, a loud argument during Yom Kippur services — about whether to close a window in the women’s gallery — prompted assault charges. In this litigious environment, Jortner notes, Gershom did something extraordinary when a congregant sued Shearith Israel for defamation: He took the matter to the local government.

This decision reflected a man at home in the milieu he was born into, a world teeming with Enlightenment thought. As rabbi and Jewish history scholar Jacob Rader Marcus notes in his 1969 profile of Gershom, “‘reason’ was one of his favorite words.”

In May 1776, Congress recommended a day of fasting and prayer ahead of impending war. In the text, there was a rare invocation of Jesus. Rather than recuse himself on those grounds, Gershom called on the almighty to “put it in the heart of our sovereign lord George the Third” to turn his “fierce wrath from North America.”

“Seixas and the Jews simply joined the fast — and thus the revolution,” Jortner wrote.

This was not without its risks, but the gamble was calculated.

Gershom was thinking through the implications of independence, Jortner believes. When he heard patriots discussing the country they wished to form, they didn’t mention a church or monarch leading it. Instead, they invoked the rights of men who would decide the nature of the government for themselves.

“He sees in that the opportunity, perhaps, for Jews who have not been considered to be citizens, to take on that role, to suddenly become and have rights as members of the society that they previously had not been,” Jortner told me. “If your society is determined by who’s a person, who’s a citizen and not who believes what, then there’s the possibility that the disenfranchised can also have a say and potentially be protected, not just just tolerated.”

On the parade grounds, there was a preview of this acceptance. Unlike in other armies throughout the world, where Jews were segregated in their own militias, in the Continental Army, they marched with the Christians. But while the arrangement hinted at something like equality, it was only that: a hint.

“People looking back at the Revolutionary War really have this fantasy that American Jews fighting in the war know that it’s going to work out well for them,” said Laura Arnold Leibman, author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects. In fact, “there’s no guarantee that it’s going to actually be better than what things were under the British.”

The certainty of something more than tolerance wasn’t granted after the 1781 Battle of Yorktown, which won the war for the patriots. It wasn’t quite settled when the Constitution was ratified in 1788. Nor was it resolved when Gershom Mendes Seixas is said to have attended — if not, as legend has it, helped officiate — George Washington’s presidential inauguration in 1789.

It wasn’t until 1790, when Gershom’s brother Moses passed a letter to Washington, and Washington responded, that the question of how Jews would belong in the new nation got its clearest answer.

These are the words of Moses

While much of his family decamped for Connecticut in the summer of 1776, Moses Seixas remained in Newport, R.I., and lived through British occupation.

The Jewish community there dates to around 1658. The popular narrative holds that Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams, was a champion of religious liberty. This was not quite the case, Rhode Island’s Historian Laureate Keith Stokes told me.

“His general feeling was, ‘I don’t really care who you are, what you are, as long as you are obedient to His Majesty’s laws and you pay your taxes and you’re a good resident,’” Stokes said.

Under an early charter, non-English “resident aliens” were not required to profess a religion, making Rhode Island attractive for Jews and other religious minorities like Quakers.

“The first Jews that would arrive, there’s no discussion about religious freedom,” said Stokes. “They’re simply wanting to be tolerated. Tolerating is a good thing because they’re not being persecuted. No one is breaking down the doors of their temple.”

Toleration was tolerable — up to a point. When the Revolution ended and a government was formed, the Jewish communities in the colonies were increasingly frustrated with the open question of their status. Certain states still required a religious test for residents to qualify as full citizens. In 1787, Jonas Phillips, an Ashkenazi merchant in Philadelphia, wrote a letter to George Washington objecting to a law in Pennsylvania’s Constitution that required an avowal of the “devine inspiration” of the New Testament to hold public office. (Washington’s response was never recorded.)

Moses Seixas, then the lay leader of a diminished Jewish congregation, seized on the opportunity of an August, 1790 visit by the president, on the occasion of Rhode Island’s late entry into the union, to confirm his people’s full share in the new country.

“Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits,” his letter to Washington began. It alluded to the past days “of difficulty, and danger,” in which the God of Israel protected the general.

Then, it made its main ask, not in the form of a question.

“Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”

Reading the words, one is struck by its assertions. The Constitution laid out some conditions for religious freedom, but was vague on who counted as a citizen. These lofty statements, Jortner argues in his book, were only an interpretation, and a hope, of rights to be granted.

Washington understood the subtext for what it was: a request for assurance.

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington wrote in his response to the Newport Congregation, dated the day after his arrival. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”

Washington made the issue explicit — this was no longer tolerance, but something more. He then quoted Seixas’ words back to him.

“For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Washington conceived of the country, Jortner said, as one in which all classes of citizens participate.

“It more or less happened that way,” Adam Peltz, 43, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund and a descendant of Moses Seixas and Jonas Phillips, said of the promise made in Washington’s letter. “For the most part, people are free to worship or not worship as they please. And that is not true in most places.”

The lesson of the letter, he believes, carries a greater significance: a call to make a difference, but also to “have relationships outside of your little world in order to make it happen.”

But even as the community in Newport made the case for their citizenship, they bumped against one of the founding contradictions of the country.

When author Richard Kreitner reads Washington’s letter, and its requirement that “they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens,” he sees a careful qualifier about how this group must behave to “merit the goodwill of the other inhabitants.”

“I don’t think Washington had it in his mind, but I think that does imply a silence on slavery,” Kreitner said.

Bondage

Certain names are a tradition in the Seixas family — Abigail, Gershom, Benjamin, Grace, Rachel. The first to adopt a Jewish name after the Inquisition was, fittingly, Abraham Mendes Seixas, born Miguel Pacheco da Silva. He had his lech lecha moment in the 1720s, leaving Lisbon with his family for Bordeaux then London. From there, his son, naturally named Isaac, sailed to the New World, where he would found the clan’s American branch.

Migrations continued through the generations, from New York to Rhode Island and down south to Virginia, South Carolina and Louisiana. In the late 19th century, Henriette Rosine Clark (née Seixas), a descendant of Benjamin, resettled in Guatemala, where her English-born husband was extending the railroad from Mexico.

In May 2026, Clark’s great-grandson, Andreas Kuestermann, a hotelier in Antigua, Guatemala, was in Charleston with his husband, Pedro, to visit a graveyard where two Abraham Seixases are buried.

Abraham Mendes Seixas was Isaac’s son and Gershom, Benjamin and Moses’ brother. He was the only Jewish officer in the Continental Army of South Carolina. He was also a slaveholder and the manager of an infamous facility called the Charleston Workhouse, where enslaved people were tortured away from the eyes and ears of the urban population. (I was unable to locate his descendants.)

The other Abraham, Benjamin Mendes Seixas’ son, is Kuestermann’s great-great-great-grandfather. His son James Madison Seixas moved to New Orleans, fought for the Confederacy, and married into a prominent Creole, Catholic slave-holding family that owned the Belle Pointe plantation.

“In a way, it’s just part of history,” Kuestermann, 52, who is also a descendant of the Guatemalan president Carlos Herrera, said of his forebears’ involvement with slavery. “I have no way of judging, because we are not from that era.”

Many Seixas descendants heard stories of relatives on both sides of the Civil War. Nate Hoffman, 56, Gershom Mendes Seixas’ fifth great-grandson, recalls both Confederate gray and Union blue in his grandmother’s steamer trunks of heirlooms. A smaller number of those I spoke with were aware of some members of the family’s role in slavery.

God’s Little Acre, the historic African burial ground in Newport, R.I., has a headstone of a woman named Ann Seixas, who died in 1881. Her parents, Peter and Sara Seixas, took the name of the family that enslaved them. Peter was a mariner. They lived in a home that didn’t exist after they became free. Not much more is known about them.

Historian Keith Stokes, who is descended both from Sephardic Jewish and enslaved Black Rhode Islanders, is careful when discussing Jews and slavery in Newport, a town in which even Quakers, a group noted for their abolitionism, participated in the practice.

“Those Jews who were slave owners and participated in the slave trade, which included the Seixases, it had nothing to do with their religion,” said Stokes. “It had everything to do with the fact that they were 18th century merchant traders, and in fact, most Jews in Newport that time who were not merchant traders did not own slaves and did not invest or participate in slave voyages.”

Jews did not have a leading or disproportionate role in slavery in Newport or anywhere else in North America. (Their involvement was more visible, but by no means dominant, in the Caribbean.) The narrative that says otherwise largely comes from the 1991 Nation of Islam text The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, roundly condemned by historians. The claims have been sensationalized, but early American Jews were much like every other early American. Some opposed slavery, some were perpetrators and many did nothing either to advance or thwart its progress.

“He’s a man of the 18th century, through and through, good, bad or indifferent, warts and all,” Stokes said of Moses. “We shouldn’t judge him, or anyone, based upon, unfortunately, an 18th century custom that kept all men blinded.”

But what about Abraham, whose distinction in the army is overshadowed by his job managing the Workhouse and a disgusting verse advertisement of his wares printed in the South Carolina State Gazette?

He has for sale
Some negroes, male,
Will suit full well grooms,
He has likewise
Some of their wives
Can make clean, dirty rooms.
For planting, too,

He has a few
To sell, all for the cash,
Of various price,
To work the rice
Or bring them to the lash.

“That’s horrible, and quite frankly, he obviously didn’t celebrate Passover,” Nate Hoffman said when I read him these words.

To observe Passover and engage in slavery seems a contradiction to our modern understanding, when some contemporary Haggadot include the spiritual “Go Down Moses.” But as Richard Kreitner argues in his book Fear No Pharoah: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery, the Jews of the 18th century didn’t necessarily view the story of Exodus as a call for collective liberation.

“It comes down to two differing interpretations,” Kreitner told me. “One being that the lesson is that Jews should never be oppressed, and we should do anything we need to do, go anywhere we need to go, oppress anybody we need to oppress in order to protect ourselves and make sure that we are never victimized again. The other view being that the lesson of the Exodus is that slavery is wrong, oppression is wrong, and we should fight for emancipation of all kinds.”

If not every Seixas of the 18th or 19th century landed on the latter lesson, many of their descendants did.

Nate Hoffman’s grandmother Abigail, born in 1912, joined the Daughters of the American Revolution to make a point about the Jewish role in the country’s founding. Her grandchildren said she was publicly critical about the organization’s exclusion of Black members and was a champion for civil rights.

Adam Peltz recalls his Seixas-descended grandmother living with a sense of “what might be called noblesse oblige” or “you could call it tikkun olam.”

“It’s a complicated family history,” Peltz said, “you kind of have to deal with the fact that people are going to break all sorts of ways, and you just try to pick the best way that you can.”

The awful truth may be that, in his time, someone like Abraham Mendes Seixas may have considered his job at the Workhouse, a place a survivor named James Matthews likened to hell, as a kind of civic service.

Bernard Powers, Jr., founding director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston, said the Workhouse was a revenue source for the city and a pivotal part of preserving the operation of the system of slavery.

Seixas arrived in Charleston just before the Revolution, but adapted quickly to his new home’s customs.

“They were blending in with the mores and the worldview of the society that they were a part of,” Powers said of Charleston Jews, for whom historian James William Hagy dubbed South Carolina “the Happy Land.” “And those values were pervasive, they were forceful. And it would have taken an exceptional person to really resist them.”

A family history of persecution didn’t ensure moral clarity when it came to the suffering of others. The evidence was not only in Newport and Charleston, but even in Shearith Israel where, Kreitner recounts, congregant Luis Moses Gomez could be seen walking to services at the Mill Street synagogue with a retinue of enslaved servants carrying his tallitot and siddurim.

Both Kreitner and Leibman marveled at the circumstances of the Sephardic families who left Europe to escape the violence of the Inquisition, resettled in America and visited violence on others.

Kreitner can imagine the logic: “What better way to prove that you are, yourself, not a slave, than to own slaves?”

But, as Naomi Seixas told me, history is not a clean narrative.

A biracial woman named Sara Rodrigues Brandon was born enslaved and Christian in 1798. She and her brother converted to their father’s faith of Judaism and established themselves in London and New York, where they were understood to be white. Sara’s son, a generation removed from slavery, would marry the granddaughter of Gershom Mendes Seixas, the hazzan of Shearith Israel. Another son became president of the congregation.

Her descendants alive today come from that line of the family, said Leibman, the historian who wrote a book on the Brandons.

“Members of this family have been both contributory and complicit and our responsibility is to acknowledge that,” Naomi Seixas said. “Responsibility comes from that complexity.”

There is now, her relations agree, an effort to abdicate responsibility, as the current administration rewrites a complex narrative, not just of the nation’s original sin, but of who counts as an American.

To bigotry no sanction

This spring, Abby Seixas read Moses Seixas’ letter to Washington in her granddaughter’s kindergarten class. In the 1990s, she read it at Touro Synagogue in Newport, and before that, her father did. (The synagogue didn’t quibble over the fact that they were descended not from Moses, but from his brother Benjamin.)

Abby, 76, her brother Noah and her late brother, Peter, Naomi’s father, grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, in Westchester, N.Y. She remembers only ever going to one Passover Seder in her childhood. The family dyed Easter eggs and was affiliated with the secular humanism of the Society for Ethical Culture. But Frank Seixas, a physician who campaigned for treatments for alcoholism, was committed to his revolutionary pedigree.

“I think dad’s pride in being related to the Seixas ancestors had to do with the contribution that they made to the founding and the importance of that and liberal, open society,” said Noah Seixas, 70, an industrial hygienist and professor emeritus of occupational health at the University of Washington.

Rachel Kimelfeld, Abby’s daughter, remembers her mother reading Moses’ letter at Newport. Now observant, she leads the after-school program at her children’s Jewish day school in Seattle.

“Coming from a completely secular upbringing, kind of moving into this more religious space, it does feel cool to have some religious bonafides — way, way back when,” Kimelfeld said.

But Kimelfeld, her mother and her uncle, with roots that stretch back to the colonial period, are watching their government’s treatment of vulnerable groups, and its flouting of democratic norms, with deep concern.

Abby, a psychotherapist, volunteers at a clinic once a week helping mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants fill out employment authorization forms. One Sephardic man working with her asked if she got involved because of her background. It dawned on her that her heritage has been an “implicit throughline” in her life, one that colors her sense of responsibility for this country.

“To make our union more perfect,” Abby said, “we’ve got a ways to go, but that’s the direction we want to go, not toward the direction we currently are going.”

“Fairness, inclusion and civil liberties and freedom of religion and separation of church and state,” Noah Seixas said. “We should be celebrating it, but instead, we’re grasping to hold on to it.”

When he went to the 2017 Women’s March, he brought a sign quoting the Newport letters: “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Noah’s great-niece, Maya, 10, said the letter’s words are still important. Asked in a video call if she still thinks there’s bigotry and persecution in this country, she nodded solemnly.

While the first Trump administration was quick to attack immigration and refugees — and, to the dismay of Seixas descendants, distort their relative Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty — the second term has placed an emphasis on Christian nationalism alongside nativism.

In May, as part of the Trump administration’s 250th anniversary festivities, House Speaker Mike Johnson and a group of faith leaders congregated on the National Mall for a “Day of Jubilation, Prayer and Thanksgiving,” following the more muted affair of “Shabbat 250.” The only non-Christian clergy on the program was Meir Soloveichik, a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission and the rabbi of Shearith Israel, where Gershom Seixas was once hazzan.

“I don’t think it weaves the tapestry of what our country is fully,” Nate Hoffman said of the roster of religious leaders.

Most Seixas descendants I spoke with bristled at the Day of Jubilation’s argument that America’s founding had a Christian impetus. The event shared apocryphal myths about Washington praying at Valley Forge and applied a largely contemporary evangelical lens to founding fathers with diverse beliefs. Maybe a bigger problem than these revisions are the attendant appeals to “heritage Americans,” which some conservatives deploy to implicitly exclude anyone who isn’t white or Christian from the country’s origins.

Rabbi A. James Rudin, who married the second cousin of a Seixas and was formerly the inter-religious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, insisted the idea of Christian nationhood, as intended by the founders, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

“They had every opportunity to insert a Christian phrase or reference to Jesus in the Constitution and in the Declaration of Independence,” Rudin said.

And they didn’t.

Jortner said that legislation to make the country, or parts of it, explicitly Christian has been litigated.

“When Georgia makes its new state constitution in 1789, they have a choice. They’re urged, ‘Get those Jews out of there,’” he said. “Not only do they not do that, they get rid of their state church entirely. South Carolina creates a state church in 1778 and then gets rid of it in 1790 because it’s not working and everybody hates it. George Washington is asked by the Jews, ‘Hey, are we going to be in this thing that we’re making here?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’”

Aryeh Green, a descendant of Gershom Mendes Seixas who ran the foreign press resource group MediaCentral in Jerusalem and was an advisor for Natan Sharansky, takes a more nuanced view. When asked how his forebears would treat the contention that America is a Christian country, Green says Gershom wouldn’t disagree with the claim, but might argue that American freedoms derive from the founders’ Christian understanding of the Hebrew Bible. Built into that understanding, he said, is the imperative “to be a Christian Zionist and love and support and and promote the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland.”

Kimelfeld, while now religious herself, was disturbed by the news of the event on the National Mall. She’s alarmed as a Jew and a citizen — by rising antisemitism and othering of Jews, and by the breakdown of norms under Trump. To that end, with the encouragement of her husband, an Orthodox Jew from the former Soviet Union, she recently received Portuguese citizenship, and got her mother to do the same.

They’re not the only Seixas descendants to have a backup plan.

Which promised land?

The Chatham Square Cemetery is located behind two locked gates in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan. On Memorial Day, Shearith Israel decorates the graves of members who served in the Revolutionary War: Benjamin Seixas, Gershom Mendes Seixas and Jonas Phillips, among others. Many of the markers’ inscriptions are faded by weather and time, but on an early June day in 2026, miniature American flags were newly planted.

Naomi Seixas recalled going to the first Memorial Day festivities after Oct. 7, 2023 and hearing a speech imagining how the revolutionary generation would have interpreted Hamas’ attack on Israel, stressing both the early Americans’ patriotism and their longing for Zion.

This ran counter to what her father told her growing up: “America was the promised land.”

Not all of her ancestors thought this way. In his time, Gershom undoubtedly saw the U.S. as the best place to be Jewish. But Jacob Rader Marcus noted the hazzan’s excitement over rumors that Napoleon was looking to restore the Jewish state during a 1799 campaign in the Middle East. In his sermons, Gershom said his people’s tenure in the United States was part of a “long and gloomy captivity,” where despite their guarantees of citizenship, they remained strangers.

Aryeh Green, 63, met with resistance from his grandmother Edith, a descendent of Gershom, when he decided to make aliyah in 1984.

“She felt I was betraying our American heritage, our American Jewish ancestry, this country that’s been so good to us,” he said on a call from Beit Shemesh in Israel.

He sat her down and traced the Seixas family through time. How the generation before Gershom came from Portugal, and before that, the family lore goes, they were in Spain. If one went back far enough, he concluded, the family was in Eretz Israel, expelled by the Romans in the first century.

“It gave her pause. It took her a little time, but she eventually recognized that the Jewish people’s return to our ancestral homeland was no less important to our identity,” said Green, who was interviewed for Michael Hoberman’s book Imagining Early American Jews.

Looking at America today, Green thinks Gershom would be “distressed” by how many Jews are not traditionally observant, “proud” of Jewish contributions to the country and “shocked and incredibly dismayed” by Jews who voted for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and at how classic American values have been overshadowed by “the political correctness of the new woke attitudes or the antisemitism that’s unfortunately now part of our public life.”

Alert as Kimelfeld is to rising antisemitism, she very much did not want Israel to be her plan B, hence her new Portuguese citizenship, which opens the door to the rest of the European Union. (She and Abby began the application process during the pandemic, before the government phased out a Sephardic Right of Return law.) Others who explored the opportunity, looking at Jewish history, told me it’s never a bad idea to have more than one passport: Conditions can be good in any country, until they aren’t.

Kelsey Peltz, 25, a descendant of Moses Seixas, is planning to apply for Portuguese citizenship after her uncle Adam finishes applying — it’s easier to be approved, she explained, when a relative has already been accepted. She wants to connect with her family history there. At home in the U.S., she’s not happy with the way things are headed.

She is appalled by politicians pushing hate and violence committed by ICE.

Peltz was shaken by violence between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protestors at her alma mater, Tulane. She has at times thought twice about wearing a Star of David necklace in public. Once, on the subway, she caught herself whispering about Passover plans to friends, and questioned why she lowered her voice.

“I feel like I am afraid to tell people that I’m Jewish,” Peltz said, noting negative assumptions she believes are circulating now. “Once that fear comes inside me, I try to fight it.”

Following the example of her ancestors, she hopes to improve the country’s direction by staying here, using her vote and donating to causes she believes in. “I try not to be a doomsayer,” she said.

“America’s the only place I’ve ever known,” Kelsey’s uncle, Adam Peltz, told me. “I’m a 10th generation New Yorker, I certainly feel like I belong here as much as anyone. But, if my ancestor was smart enough to have an escape plan when things were gonna go terrible, don’t I owe it to that lineage?”

Adam and Kelsey’s cousin Avigail Ben-Gad, 29, was born in the U.S. but grew up in Haifa, Israel. Her father, Michael, an economics professor at the University of London, had his class disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters who he says threatened to behead him, and demanded he be dismissed from his position.

“I used to be very skeptical when I heard people say that we were in a situation like 1930s Germany,” said Ben-Gad, a PhD student in Sephardic history at Hebrew University. “And then, of course, what happened to my dad happened. And I just thought, ‘You know, this is exactly what I’ve read about as happening 80, 90 years ago in German and Polish universities.’”

Avigail thinks the climate for Jews is better in the U.S. than in Europe, but says the incident makes her “happy to be in Israel.”

Thinking back on what her ancestors would make of Jews’ status in the U.S. today, she guessed they would be surprised that her cousins were now planning to become citizens of Portugal, the nation whose mistreatment first led to their journey to America. Then again, those early Jews might have been thrilled by the development, concluding “finally, it’s possible to be Portuguese and Jewish.”

After Moses Seixas and Washington exchanged letters, the United States became unique among nations for this proposition: There was no contradiction between being a Jew and a citizen. That promise has held steady long enough for 10 generations of the Seixas family to thrive here. Will it hold for 10 more?

While preparing for all eventualities, Adam Peltz is committed to the experiment his ancestors started. “We’re here,” he said, “And in fact, we have an obligation to make this the best place we can, and keep the American project going.”

The post This family of Jewish refugees defined American patriotism. Now they’re worried where their country’s headed. appeared first on The Forward.