Francis Salvador's gravestone:

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

BOSTON - With memories of last week's Fourth of July festivities as dim as the fireworks that lit up the skies, it is perhaps appropriate to recall those who contributed to those freedoms we hold so dear. For many of us, the holiday is a secular reason to party, bereft of Judaic meaning. However, a historical examination reveals that, once again, where there were Jews, there were pivotal, contributory roles.

Polish-born Haym Salomon is known as a major, if not the major, financier of the American Revolution. "He was forced to flee," explains writer Sy Brody of Delray Beach, Florida, "due to his fight for freedom alongside Pulaski and Kosciusko, later military heroes in the American Revolution." Salomon, devoutly religious and fluent in ten languages, joined the radical Sons of Liberty.

George Washington is said to have desperately appealed to Salomon on Yom Kippur, who momentarily halted services until necessary pledges were secured from congregants. He contributed much of his own fortune, located buyers for unsecured bonds, and extended no commission loans to the Continental Congress.

"Generals Washington, Lafayette, Von Steuben and others," says Brody, "often came to him for food and material aid. Revolutionary leaders' diaries testify…that when money was needed for the Revolutionary War, you went to Haym Salomon."

He was twice arrested and imprisoned by the British as a spy, and in a sad twist of fate, died a pauper in 1985.

South Carolina's Francis Salvador was the first Jew elected to an American colonial legislature; the only Jew to serve in a Revolutionary Colonial Congress, and the first Jew to die in the name of American liberty. Fatefully, on July 1, 1776, Cherokees, under inducement by the English Superintendent of Indian Affairs, attacked his commissioned settlement. A la Paul Revere, Salvador rode 30 miles to sound the alarm. He was captured on the front lines and scalped, dying at 29.

According to L. Edward Purcell's 1993 book "Who Was Who in the American Revolution," Isaac Franks, a Jew but a practicing Christian, fought in the Continental Army at age 17 against the British on Long Island. Captured, he escaped by sea in a leaky rowboat, became a foragemaster in Washington's army and was commissioned at West Point as an ensign in a Massachusetts regiment. In 1793, he lent his Germantown house to George Washington during Philadelphia's Yellow Fever outbreak (it became the "Germantown White House").

Nathan Levy's ship brought the Liberty Bell to America; Jewish merchant Moses Michael Hays commissioned the work of silversmith Paul Revere. Gershon Mendes Seixas, a chazzan at Congregation Shearith Israel, was one of thirteen clergymen present at the Presidential inauguration of George Washington. Abraham Alexander was another Revolutionary War hero. Grace Mendes Seixas Nathan was referred to by New York's Jewish Museum (who sponsored the 1998 exhibit "Facing the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America") as a "matron, poet and Revolutionary patriot." Her descendants include Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo and Emma Lazarus, whose "The New Colossus" is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Eminent early American families included the Hays and Touros of Boston and Newport; New York's Hendricks and Seixas; Philadelphia's Gratz (Rebecca Gratz, a philanthropic educator, founded the first Hebrew Sunday School and orphan home; through Mathilda Hoffman, her friend and Washington Irving's fiance, she inspired Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe"); Baltimore's Ettings and Cohens; and Norfolk's Myers.

Twenty-three Brazilian Jewish refugees who sailed to New Amsterdam in 1654 are the first acknowledged Jews to arrive in North America. Descendants of expelled Spanish and Porguguese Jews as well as others from Western and Central Europe soon followed. About 500 Jewish households formed America's Jewish community by the 18^th century. Mainly merchants, traders and property owners, they enjoyed a mostly tolerant atmosphere which permitted religious freedom. 4,000 Jews lived in the New Republic by 1830 (Ashkenazis outnumbering the original Sephardi), as they began the delicate balancing act of Judaic tradition with American lifestyle which continues to the present day.