Touro Synagogue

Harrison never traveled to see a synagogue built before designing one. He worked instead from pattern books and from what the congregation described of Amsterdam's Esnoga and London's Bevis Marks, then set the building at an angle to its own street so the Ark could face precisely east. The exterior is a plain, almost windowless Georgian box in brick; nothing on the outside announces what the interior does. Inside, twelve freestanding Ionic columns, each cut from a single tree, ring three walls and carry a women's gallery, one column for each tribe of Israel. A trap door beside the bimah opens onto a crawl space, built, tradition holds, so the congregation could hide its Torah scrolls on short notice. The building was dedicated in December 1763. Twenty-seven years later George Washington answered its congregation's own letter with the sentence the synagogue is now best known for, that the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.