350 YEARS 'HAVEN TO HOME' CELEBRATES JEWISH LIFE IN AMERICA.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

America has a long tradition of making its Jewish immigrants and citizens feel at home.

In fact, that tradition goes back to George Washington. The proof is revealed in two historic documents on display at the ``From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America'' exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center through Feb. 12.

The show commemorates the arrival of 23 Jews in New Amsterdam - now New York City - in 1654 from the Portuguese colony in Recife, Brazil. The Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, didn't want them but was overruled by the Dutch West India Company after Jews in Holland protested.

The exhibit features 200 artifacts and documents from the Library of Congress, plus objects from other institutions, including the Skirball itself. This multimedia exhibition debuted at the Library of Congress in September 2004. Smaller versions of the show traveled to the Cincinnati Museum Center and New York's Center for Jewish History. This is the only West Coast venue.

In one of this show's first galleries, there are letters related to a 1790 visit by Washington to one of the nation's earliest synagogues, the Newport, R.I., Hebrew Congregation. One - from the congregation's Moses Seixas to Washington - is the original; Washington's reply is a facsimile, one of the few in the show. Together they make what the exhibit's catalog calls ``arguably the most important exchange of letters in American Jewish history.''

In his letter of welcome, Seixas worries whether Jews will be discriminated against in the U.S., as in the European countries they fled, or whether the young, idealistic nation formed by revolution will be ``a government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.''

Washington's quick reply, easily readable because of his bold, legible penmanship, repeats Seixas' phrase and then goes further: ``It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.'' In other words, Jews had the absolute legal freedom to exercise their religious beliefs in America. They needn't be at the mercy of someone else's commitment to tolerance.

``That freedom is different for the Jews, and for all those who came to America, from the world they knew before,'' said Michael Grunberger, head of the Library of Congress' Hebraic Section.

But that was a freedom that has been threatened and in turn has needed to be vigorously defended, as other documents in the exhibition reveal. In 1862, during the Civil War, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant signed General Order No. 11, expelling all Jews as a class from Tennessee. The United Order B'ne B'rith of Missouri, a Jewish organization, protested straight to President Lincoln. His message to rescind the order, written on the back of an envelope, is in this show. ``It's a turning point in American Jewish history,'' Grunberger said.

As it did to many others in the U.S., the Civil War divided Jews according to where they lived. Judah Benjamin, who had been a U.S. senator from Louisiana, became Jefferson Davis' right-hand man in the Confederate States of America and served in three Cabinet posts, including Secretary of War. The show contains a Confederate $2 bill and a $500 bond bearing his likeness.

While the political artifacts are fascinating, the show also includes material related to the daily life and accomplishments of American Jews. There is, for instance, the passport application from magician Harry Houdini. It's under his actual name, Weiss, and says he was born in Appleton, Wis. (Actually, he was born in Hungary but came to Appleton as a boy. His father was a rabbi there.)

Emma Lazarus' personal journal, containing her ``The New Colossus'' poem, has been loaned by the American Jewish Archives. Its lines, ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,'' were inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in 1903. And not only are composer Irving Berlin's lyrics to his ``God Bless America'' on display, but a video monitor shows him and Boy Scouts performing the song on a 1968 ``Ed Sullivan Show.'' (Berlin, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, gave all royalties to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.)

Yet for all the show's manifestations of civic pride and patriotism, and all the documents relating to Jewish assimilation into the American workplace, there is a melancholy side to the exhibit. It chronicles the inability of American Jews in the 20th century to stop the Holocaust as well as Russian anti-Jewish riots called pogroms.

But they did try. One of their strongest efforts to stop anti-Semitic violence - Grunberger labels it an ``iconic item'' - is a petition from American Jews to Russia's Czar Nicholas II protesting the murderous 1903 Kishinev pogrom in Bessarabia. The U.S. government tried to deliver the petition on behalf of its Jewish citizens, but the czar refused. The American Jewish Committee was formed as a result of the efforts launched by that petition drive. So the petition was preserved for history's sake at the U.S. Treasury Department - where it lives on today as an act of bearing witness.

``It's really the greatest hits of the Library of Congress and other important repositories of Jewish heritage in America,'' said Lori Starr, senior vice president of the Skirball Cultural Center, of this exhibition. ``People from all walks of life can come to see this show because all come from somewhere else.''

FROM HAVEN TO HOME: 350 YEARS OF JEWISH LIFE IN AMERICA

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; noon to 9 p.m. Thursday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Through Feb. 12

Tickets: $8. [phone]. www.skirball.org.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1) ``Waiting for the Forwards'' (1933), by Lewis Wickes Hine, shows young newsboys ready to deliver the Yiddish-language newspaper.

(2) The 1960s ad campaign for Levy's bread featured a number of non-Jewish people eating what's billed as ``real Jewish Rye.''

(3) Jewish refugee children, en route to Philadelphia aboard the liner President Harding in 1939, wave at the Statue of Liberty as they pass New York.