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Touro Synagogue
The oldest synagogue building in the United States
Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, is the oldest synagogue building still standing in the United States and the only one surviving from the colonial era. It was built for Congregation Jeshuat Israel, a community of Sephardic Jews drawn to Rhode Island by the colony's unusual guarantee of religious liberty, and dedicated in December 1763. The architect Peter Harrison set the building at an angle on its lot so that worshipers inside face east, toward Jerusalem.
In 1790 the congregation welcomed President George Washington to Newport, and his reply became one of the founding statements of American religious freedom: the government of the United States, he wrote, 'gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.' The letter is read aloud at the synagogue every year. Designated a National Historic Site in 1946, Touro is still an active Orthodox synagogue, though its ownership was the subject of a long legal fight between two congregations that ended in 2019.