Jewish Daily Forward: Liberate the Letter!

When Ron Chernow was travelling the country last year to talk about his new biography of George Washington, he was often asked about Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I. — the one that famously promised that the United States government would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

“There were very few speeches that I made where people didn’t ask about that letter,” Chernow recalled. “I can vouch for the fact that there’s tremendous curiosity out there.”

He’s curious, too. Even though Chernow spent six years reading through Washington’s papers to research his book, and was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his effort, he’s never seen the original letter. In the last decade, hardly anyone has.

That cannot go on. As the Forward has documented in recent weeks, the letter that embedded religious freedom as a core American value has been hidden away in a nondescript arts storage facility in suburban Maryland ever since the museum in which it was housed closed its doors in 2002. The museum was run by B’nai B’rith International, which was lent the letter by its owner, the Morris Morgenstern Foundation, a private foundation based in Ventura, Calif. And neither B’nai B’rith nor the foundation has offered a convincing reason for why this iconic document has not been allowed to be publicly displayed.

So it’s time to persuade them otherwise. Joseph J. Ellis is another Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has written an acclaimed book about the first president, and he, too, has never seen the letter. “It would be an honor to have it displayed,” Ellis said. “I’d like to see it myself.”....