Kosher and Jewish Life in Lancaster

In 1740, Joseph Simon became the first practicing Jew to make a permanent home in Lancaster. He and a handful of relatives formed the core of Lancaster's first Jewish community. Simon provided a room in his home for worship, purchased two Torahs (bequeathed by Simon to Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia) and hired and housed the ritual slaughterers. In 1747, he and his friend Isaac Nunes Henriques, purchased a plot of land for a burial ground "for the Society of Jews in and about Lancaster." This cemetery on the north side of Liberty Street between Lime and Shippen Streets is still in use by the Congregation and has five headstones that date from the colonial period. Unable to find Jewish marriage partners in Lancaster, the children of these early settlers gradually left Lancaster and settled elsewhere. On Simon's death in 1804, there were no Jews left in Lancaster. By the mid-1800s, Jews began to return and in February 1855, Jacob Herzog, a shopkeeper, convened a meeting to establish a formal Jewish congregation. A group of twenty one men chose the name "Shaarai Shomayim" - "The Gates of Heaven" - and on November 17, 1856, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted the congregation its official charter.