3 Best Sights in USA

In 1658, more than a dozen Jewish families whose ancestors had fled Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition founded a congregation in Newport. A century later, Peter Harrison designed this two-story Palladian house of worship for them. George Washington wrote a famous letter to the group in which he pledged the new American nation would give "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." The oldest surviving synagogue in the country, Touro was dedicated in 1763 and its simple exterior and elegant interior remain virtually unchanged. A small trapdoor in the platform upon which the Torah is read symbolizes the days of persecution when Jews were forced to worship in secret---and sometimes flee the temple in haste. The John L. Loeb Visitors Center has two floors of state-of-the-art exhibits on early American Jewish life and Newport's history of religious freedom.

Tickets, available at the Loeb Visitors Center, are required for entry into the synagogue.

Nathan Levy, a Colonial merchant whose ship, the Myrtilla, brought the Liberty Bell to America, helped found this Jewish congregation in 1740, making it the oldest in Philadelphia and the second oldest in the United States. The original synagogue was at 3rd and Cherry streets; the congregation's current space, where it has been since 1976, is in the Sephardic style (following Spanish and Portuguese Jewish ritual). The synagogue's Spruce Street Cemetery (about eight blocks away, beyond Old City) dates from 1740 and is the oldest surviving Jewish site in Philadelphia. It was the burial ground for the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community. Guided tours of the synagogue and the cemetery are available by appointment.

This unique Gothic-revival synagogue on Monterey Square houses the third-oldest Jewish congregation in the United States; its founding members settled in town only five months after the establishment of Savannah in 1733. The synagogue's permanent collection includes documents and letters (some from such notables as George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson) pertaining to early Jewish life in Savannah and Georgia, as well as a 15th-century Torah, the oldest Torah in North America.