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Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869), a Philadelphia philanthropist, founded the first Hebrew Sunday School in America and participated as a founding member in several other nonsectarian and Jewish charitable organizations which were among the first to be organized and run by women. Besides her good works, she is remembered today for her beauty, her thwarted love affair with a non-Jew and the persistent story that she was the inspiration for the character of Rebecca in Scott's novel Ivanhoe.
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About Me
- Susan Sklaroff
- I discovered Rebecca Gratz when I became a docent at the Rosenbach Museum & Library which has a lovely portrait of her by Thomas Sully. To learn more, I began to read the hundreds of Gratz family letters which survive in libraries around the country and found wonderful stories about Rebecca as well as information about customs, events and technological changes of her time. I cannot fit all this material into the talks I give on Rebecca nor into my proposed book. This blog makes it accessible to those who are interested in Rebecca Gratz and antebellum America.
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