A 'Landing Day' ceremony in Lower Manhattan celebrates the first Jewish community in the US

(New York Jewish Week) — When a small group of people convened next to an inconspicuous plaque steps from the entrance to the Staten Island Ferry’s Whitehall Terminal, they weren’t there to catch a boat leaving the island.

Instead, they had come to the southern tip of Manhattan to celebrate a ship that had arrived on its shores centuries before.

The gathering was the 369th anniversary of an event most New Yorkers don’t know about, let alone celebrate: the arrival of the first Jewish community to the United States in 1654. That lack of awareness is exactly what Howard Teich, the founding chair...