American Jewish Archives Journal, Vol 44, No. 01 (1992)

Portuguese Sephardim in the Americas 171
congregation is its mention in correspondence of the New York and
Philadelphia congregations regarding a congratulatory letter to
George Washington after his April 1790 inaugural.
An 1856 list of twenty-eight founders mentions only one Sephardic
name, but since almost all the founders came from the more estab-
lished communities, the Sephardic minhag was unquestionably the
rite of Richmond's Congregation Beth Shalome ("House of Peace").
The town's first Jewish resident, Isaiah Isaacs, contributed a lot for a
communal cemetery whose site has been preserved, although most of
the graves have long been covered over.
By 1818 Beth Shalome had purchased land for a synagogue, dedi-
cated five years later. Isaac H. Judah functioned as hazzan. He was
succeeded by Isaac B. Seixas, a nephew of New York's Gershom
Mendes Seixas, and then by the latter's scholarly son-in-law, Israel
Baer Kursheedt.
The 1830s saw an influx of immigrants from the Rhineland and
Bavaria who joined Beth Shalome, but by 1839 they had broken away
to form German-rite Beth Ahabah ("House of Love"). With the pass-
ing of generations the social distinctions between the descendants of
Beth Shalome and the rising Beth Ahabah gradually diminished. In
1877, Rev. Isaac Pereira Mendes departed for the Savannah pulpit,
and a move was begun to merge the two congregations. Beth
Shalome maintained its independence with a lay reader even after its
building was sold to the Orthodox Sir Moses Montefiore Congrega-
tion, but in November of 1898 the surviving twelve members accept-
ed an invitation to join Beth Ahabah, and Beth Shalome went out of
existence."
New Orleans
The last community in North America to form a "Portuguese" con-
gregation was New Orleans. Banned by the French Black Code until
1803, when Louisiana became part of the United States, Jews were
slow to settle in New Orleans. Few of the early arrivals were family
men, and intermarriage was rife. Thus it was 1828 before a congrega-
tion was formed. This seems to have been entirely instigated by the
efforts of a Sephardi temporary resident from Philadelphia, Jacob da