Jews arrive in New Amsterdam

In January 1654 the Portuguese recaptured Recife in Brazil from the Dutch, and its Jews, whose congregation Kahal Zur Israel had the first synagogue in the Americas, had to leave. Most went back to Amsterdam, but in early September 1654 a group of 23 Jews, four couples, two widows and thirteen children, reached the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam aboard the French ship Sainte Catherine, nearly penniless. The director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, asked the Dutch West India Company for permission to expel them, calling them a "deceitful race". The company, among whose shareholders were Jews of Amsterdam, refused in April 1655, allowing them to stay on condition that their poor be supported by their own community and not by the colony.

Jews such as Asser Levy then won the right to stand guard, to trade and to own property, and in 1656 a burial ground. Their congregation, Shearith Israel, still active in Manhattan, is the oldest in North America. New Amsterdam became New York in 1664, and the 23 refugees from Recife are counted as the beginning of American Jewry, today one of the two largest Jewish communities in the world.