Congregation Mickve Israel holds a Torah scroll from 1450

A group of Spanish and Portuguese Jews arrived in Savannah on 11 July 1733, just five months after the founding of the Georgia colony. They traveled on a ship named the William and Sarah. By 1735, the group formally adopted the name K. K. Mickva Israel. For nearly a century, these settlers met in temporary rooms across the city. They eventually constructed the first synagogue in Georgia in 1820, located at the corner of Liberty and Whitaker Streets.

The building you are standing in front of today was consecrated on 11 April 1878. While the structure features the pointed arches and buttresses typically associated with church architecture, it serves as the home for the third-oldest Jewish congregation in the United States and the oldest in the South. The congregation is the oldest in the country currently practicing Reform Judaism.

Among the items brought by the original settlers is a Torah scroll that remains in the building’s museum. This scroll was written in 1450 and is bound with cow gut on deerskin. It is considered the oldest complete Torah in North America. Experts believe it was created by people practicing their faith in secret while living under the Inquisition in Spain or Portugal.

The congregation received a letter from President George Washington in 1789. In his message, Washington compared the establishment of the United States to the biblical deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt. He wrote that he hoped the deity would continue to water the nation with the dews of Heaven.

The Georgia legislature granted the congregation a charter in perpetuity through a special act passed on 20 November 1790.