Congregation of Mount Sinai, Jersey City, New Jersey, USA

1910

Yitro (יתרו – Jethro), Exodus 18, 1 to 20, 23

Exodus 19, 20
וַיֵּרֶד ה’ עַל-הַר סִינַי, אֶל-רֹאשׁ הָהָר
And Gd came down to mount Sinai, on top of the mountain

In 1654, twenty-three Jews of Sephardic origin settled in Nieuw-Amsterdam1. Little by little the Jews settled everywhere in the United States. In 1766, Isaac Pinto published the first bilingual Hebrew and English prayer book in New York. The Jewish population is estimated at 2,500 people during the War of Independence (1775-1783). In the 19th and early 20th centuries European emigration accelerated.
In 1906, a group of Central Avenue merchants came together to found the Mount Sinai congregation in Hudson City2. The architect Eugène Ciccarelli was then hired to design the building. He built an imposing Romanesque building surmounted by two Moorish copper cupolas in the shape of an onion. On October 11, 1910, former mayor Edward Hoos3 inaugurated it. He unlocks the Table of the Law doors. It is the oldest Orthodox Jewish congregation in Jersey City.

1 Current New York. In 1750, the city would have 300 Jews and more than one million today.
2 Hudson was a city that existed in Hudson County, New Jersey, United States, from 1855 to 1870, when it became part of Jersey City.

3 Based on May 3, 1897 to December 31, 1901

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