Colonial Roots

Congregation Shaarai Shomayim is heir to one of the oldest Jewish communities in North America and traces its roots back to early 18th century, when Joseph Simon, the first practicing Jew who made a permanent home in Lancaster, settled here in 1740.  Simon ran a store on the site of the former Watt and Shand Department Store and he lived across the street on the southwest corner of Penn Square where Citizens Bank now stands.  Simon, Levy Andrew Levy, his nephew, and Joseph Solomon, an uncle of his wife, formed the core of Lancaster’s Jewish community in the 18th century.  They were the first Jews to settle in Lancaster who openly practiced their faith and raised families here.  Simon was unquestionably the patriarch of Lancaster’s colonial Jewish community.  Highly regarded by his peers, wealthy but presumably illiterate, Simon provided a room in his home for worship, purchased two Torahs (bequeathed by Simon to Congregation Mikvah Israel in Philadelphia), and hired and housed the ritual slaughterers.

In 1747 he and his friend and neighbor, Issac Nunes Henriques, purchased land for a burial ground “for the Society of Jews in and about Lancaster.  This cemetery on the north side Liberty Street between Lime and Shippen Streets contains five headstones that date from the colonial period and is the fourth oldest Jewish burial ground in North America.  Simon’s death in 1804 marked the end of Lancaster’s colonial Jewish community and there was no one left to care for the cemetery.  Jews began to return to Lancaster in the mid-1800’s and at the time members of Congregation Shaarai Shomayim began to take care of the long-neglected cemetery.  By the early 1900’s, Shaarai Shomayim moved to establish formal ownership of the colonial era cemetery which was granted by the courts in 1902.

Continue reading, Establishing Our Congregation; or view the previous section, History Introduction.