From 1783 until late in his life he also somehow found the time to serve as a teacher in his congregation’s religious school.
Relationship with Non-Jews
“After the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War in New York, the governors of Columbia College petitioned the state legislature to make the college into a university, a request that was granted on May 1, 1784. In the same year the New York state legislature, possibly in recognition of his patriotic flight and his position as nominal head of the Jewish community, elected Gershom Seixas to the Board of Regents of the university, an office that was converted to a trusteeship in the reorganization of 1787. He served until 1815, attending 127 such meetings. His election was significant, showing the esteem in which he was held throughout the community, and is even more interesting in view of Columbia’s sectarian affiliation with the Church of England. The busy minister also served as a trustee for the New York Humane Society.
“Indeed, Seixas had a fine relationship with the gentile community. N. Taylor Phillips writes that his grandfather, a contemporary of Gershom Seixas, told of the high esteem accorded the hazzan. Many times Seixas welcomed Episcopalian ministers and sometimes even the Catholic Bishop of New York to his services, often in their ecclesiastical vestments. This would seem a radical departure from Jewish practice, as would Seixas’ delivery of sermons in the Episcopal diocese of New York, which Phillips also alludes to. There is evidence that Jew and non-Jew alike were welcome to hear his sermons, but there seems to be no documentary proof for the assertion that the hazzan delivered sermons in the churches of New York.”
Personal Vignettes[ii]
“On January 18, 1804, Sarah Abigail, oldest daughter of Hazan…Mendes Seixas and his wife Elkalah Myers Cohen, was married by her father to Israel Baer Kursheedt. The bridegroom, a native of Singhafen-on-the-Rhine, had arrived in the United States in 1796. Sarah was the favorite child of Hazan Seixas, and her husband was his favorite son-in-law.
“Kursheedt[iii] had a varied career in business. In 1812 he settled in Richmond, Virginia, where he stayed until his return to New York in 1824. At frequent intervals Hazan Seixas wrote to his daughter Sarah or, as he sometimes called her, Sally, and these letters have come down to us through the direct line of the Kursheedt family.”
The letters give us insight into the personal life of hazzan Seixas. Below are some selections (the original spelling and punctuation have been retained).
“It more interesting to observe that Hazan Gershom Mendes Seixas, the Sephardically named Sephardic minister of a Sephardic synagogue, makes a very free use of Ashkenazic terms and of Hebrew words in the Ashkenazic pronunciation. It was his practise to use the Ashkenazic Hebrew script, and he seems to take a gleeful delight in using such terms as Shule, Hosin and Hosen (bridegroom), Good Shabess and Good year, Taulass (prayer shawl), Koogle or Kugle (pudding), Kindbett (childbirth)…. This free use of Ashkenazic terms is to be interpreted not as a gracious Sephardic concession to an Ashkenazic son-in-law, but as a reflection of the usage in the New York Jewish community of the time. For although the tradition of the synagogue was Sephardic, the personnel of the congregation was and had been for over a century predominantly Ashkenazic.
“We get numerous intimate glimpses of life in the Hazan’s household, and of the close reckoning that was needed to make both ends meet. Like everyone else of his day he played the lottery in the hope of bettering the family fortune, but apparently with no success.