Jewish families had lived and worshipped in Newport, Rhode Island since the middle of the seventeenth century, drawn in part by the colony's unusually broad tolerance for religious dissenters, before the community completed a permanent synagogue building in 1763. The building, designed by the colonial architect Peter Harrison in a restrained Georgian style, is the oldest surviving synagogue structure in the United States, though not the oldest congregation.
The synagogue's best known moment came almost three decades after its dedication, in 1790, when President George Washington visited Newport and received a welcoming letter from Moses Seixas, warden of the congregation, expressing hope the new federal government would extend liberty of conscience to Jews as fully as to any other citizens. Washington's reply, addressed to what he called the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, promised that the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, a phrase since become one of the most quoted American statements on religious liberty, still read aloud there on the anniversary of the visit.
That promise was tested by circumstance more than by any single later event. Newport's Jewish population declined sharply after the Revolutionary War as the city's mercantile fortunes shifted elsewhere, and the synagogue went through long periods without a resident congregation substantial enough to maintain regular services, preserved chiefly by bequest.
Today the synagogue is home to Congregation Jeshuat Israel, holds services regularly, and is administered as a National Historic Site, a colonial era building whose most famous words were never its own but a president's answer to it.