On Sunday, April 9, 1865, Generals Grant and Lee met in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Lee surrendered, and the Civil War came to an end, with 360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate soldiers dead. The news broke all over the United States on April 10, which, in the Hebrew calendar, was the morning before the eight-day holiday of Passover was to begin.
We can imagine the elegant symmetry that those Jews sympathetic to the Union cause saw in the advent of their Festival of Freedom, commemorating the Israelite exodus from slavery coincided with the Confederacy’s defeat. … We can imagine their finding a double meaning at their Seder tables that Monday evening, as they uttered the immortal words of the Haggadah: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
It was four days later, on Friday evening, April 14, 1865, when the president was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Carried to a boarding house across the street, Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15. It is often told that all those crowded around his deathbed turned to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who said simply, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Jews heard it from their fellow Americans on the day of the celebratory service held on the Sabbath during Passover, on Saturday, April 15th. Bertram Korn, in his American Jewry and the Civil War, describes the scene:
“Jews were on their way to synagogue or already worshiping when tidings of the assassination reached them. . . . Jews who had not planned on attending services hastened to join their brethren in the sanctuaries where they could find comfort in the hour of grief. The Rabbis put their sermon notes aside and spoke extemporaneously, haltingly, reaching out for the words to express their deep sorrow. . . . Samuel Adler of Temple Emmanuel in New York began to deliver a sermon but he was so overcome that he could not continue.
Alfred T. Jones, Parnas of Beth El-emeth Congregation of Philadelphia, asked [the well-known Jewish scholar and writer] Isaac Leeser to say something to comfort the worshipers; he did, but it was so disconnected that he had to apologize: ‘the dreadful news and its suddenness have in a great measure overcome my usual composure, and my thoughts refuse to arrange themselves in their wonted order.’” …
One of the most striking—and indeed, controversial—moments took place in Congregation Shearith Israel, in New York, the oldest Jewish congregation in America.
There, Marken recounts, “the rabbi recited the Hashkabah (prayer for the dead) for Lincoln. This, according to the Jewish Messenger, was the first time that this prayer had been said in a Jewish house of worship for any other person than those professing the Jewish religion.”
“It is, indeed, somewhat unusual to pray for one not of our faith, but by no means in opposition to its spirit, and therefore not inadmissible. We pray for the dead, because we believe that the souls of the departed as well as of the living are in the keeping of God. . . . The prayers, therefore, offered up this day for the deceased President are in accordance with the spirit of the faith which we have inherited as children of Israel, who recognize in all men those created like them in the image of God, and all entitled to His mercy, grace and pardon….”
At the same time, the reciting of the prayer—which asks on behalf of the deceased for a “goodly portion in the life of the World to Come”—also embodied the belief the members of Congregation Shearith Israel had in Lincoln’s spiritual immortality. …
The Passover story… has always been linked to that of America. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin first suggested that the seal of the United States depict Pharaoh drowning at the Red Sea, with the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.” Matthew Holbreich, a scholar at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center, and Yale’s Danilo Petranovich, note in a coauthored article that even before the Civil War, Lincoln drew on the same biblical imagery to predict the possibility of divine punishment for slavery; in his eulogy for Henry Clay in 1852, Lincoln reflected that “Pharaoh’s country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea for striving to retain a captive people, who already served them more than four hundred years. May like disasters never befall us!” …
Holbreich and Petranovich write, “Lincoln envisioned the eradication of slavery in terms of a moral resurrection.”
The Passover of April 24, 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s death, 150 years since the end of the Civil War, 150 years since American Jews first said a prayer for the soul of a non-Jew, a man named Abraham.
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On April 19 and April 20, 1865 New York City did a day of fasting and held memorial services for the president.
On April 24, 1865 the slain president’s funeral procession went through massive crowds in New York City.
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Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel (“The Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue) in New York and director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. The article has been condensed and edited. For the full version, which includes Lincoln’s use of the Passover passage from the Book of Ezekiel 37, see The Weekly Standard for April 20, 2015.
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