Interesting websites regarding early Jewish settlers of Savannah : http://www.mickveisrael.org/history.html http://www.jewish-history.com/Occident/volume1/aug1843/savannah.html http://www.jewish-history.com/Occident/volume1/nov1843/savannah2.html written by Mordecai Sheftall http://www.jewish-history.com/Occident/volume1/july1843/subscrib.htm http://www.jewish-history.com/Occident/volume1/july1843/subscrib.htm http://www.jewish-history.com/Occident/volume1/jan1844/index.html Be sure to browse around all the links on the pages. Also be sure to research the Jews in South Carolina...some went there from Savannah. Include notices from the Charleston Gazette, the Charleston Courier, and the Jewish Marriage Notices from the Newspaper Press of Charleston. http://www.mish-mash.ca/usa-sc-misc.html Additionally, some books: The following information on books about Savannah Jews comes from: The Lonely Days Were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner, Book by Eli N. Evans; University Press of Mississippi, 1993 in which were comments about the following books and authors: Third to None: The Saga of Savannah Jewry 1773-1983 by Rabbi Saul Jacob Rubin fills an important void in southern history by giving us at last the story of the first Jewish community in the South and the third in North America. B. H. Levy Savannah's Old Jewish Community Cemeteries is a valuable document of source material from the gravestones and community records of the 1733 burial plot granted the Jews of Savannah by General James Oglethorpe. There are short biographies--all that is known--of each person buried there. Historians, novelists, and scholars from all disciplines will be able to draw on this book for years. Third to None is a long-overdue history of the third American community--Savannah, Georgia--to have Jewish settlers. The Savannah Jewish colony, in Jacob Marcus's foreword, "A band of Jewish argonauts--financed by London's Sephardic notables--debarked on the site of Georgia's first settlement." This group of forty-two Portuguese and German Jews, the largest Jewish migration during the colonial period, arrived in 1733, a year or two after the first North American synagogue was dedicated in New York and the second in Newport, Rhode Island. Rabbi Saul Jacob Rubin, of the historic Mickve Israel Congregation, has written a careful book, with forty-five pages of more than eighteen hundred footnotes, twenty pages of photographs, and a thorough index. This effort, sponsored and financed by the Jewish community, could be an important model for other communities. Covering 250 years of history, the book provides many interesting details. Two of the original settlers, Dr. and Mrs. Samuel Nunes Ribeiro, were the forebearers of Uriah Phillips Levy, who saved and then restored Monticello. Jacob Nunez Cardozo was a prolific writer and editor of newspapers in Charleston, Atlanta, and Mobile. His great-grandnephew was Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. Drawing the attention of national leaders, the Savannah Jewish community received letters from three American presidents--Washington, Jefferson, and Madison--on the subject of religious liberty. Rubin writes about Jewish attitudes in the North toward the Savannah Jews during the Civil War. In 1865, during Pesach, in the midst of the hardships and hatreds of the war, Jews in New York and Philadelphia shipped five thousand pounds of Passover food to the Jewish community in Savannah. These symbolic acts of support reflected a sense of national community. Third to None, in pulling together research from many sources to tell its story, belongs with Reznikoff and Engelman Jews of Charleston, Ezekiel and Lichtenstein History of the Jews of Richmond, and Bertram Korn Jews of Early New Orleans as an important volume that future scholars must read if they are to write informed southern Jewish history. B. H. Levy, a lawyer in Savannah who was fascinated with old cemeteries, undertook one of those painstaking four-year efforts that can only be termed a "magnificent obsession." After sifting through records and copying information from the gravestones of the town's early settlers, he wrote Savannah's Old Jewish Community Cemeteries, a jewel of a book which serves as a companion to the Rubin history. Graveyards cry out with their own tragedies, such as the deaths of infants and small children and the toll taken by "warm fever" and other forms of pestilence that shortened life expectancy in that era. But Levy also looked at wills and other writings, building brick by brick a house of details populated by a parade of characters and stories behind the worn gravestones and forgotten inscriptions. Both Rubin and Levy acknowledged their great debts to the superb writers on southern colonial history, Jacob Marcus and Malcolm Stern