Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/674

Rh meals for Jewish soldiers taken prisoners by the British, after the fall of Savannah. Her intense patriotism so disturbed the British commander, that for a time he ordered each woman to remain in her house, but finally, owing to their constant communication and assistance to the patriots, Mrs. Minis and her daughter were ordered to leave the town; they accordingly went to Charleston, of which place the husband was one of the patriot defenders.

In Westchester County we meet another patriotic Jewess, Esther Etting Hays, the wife of David Hays, also a Revolutionary soldier. When Tarleton with a party of British raided the village of Bedford in 1779, Tory neighbors entered the house where Mrs. Hays was lying upon a sick bed with a new-born infant. They demanded information, which she was supposed to possess, concerning the patriot plans, on her refusal to comply the house was set afire. The mother and child were saved only by faithful negro servants, who conveyed them to a shelter in the wood.

Among the noble examples of Jewish womanhood at this period were Mrs. Moses Michael Hays, of Boston, and Mrs. Reyna Touro, who, in a Puritan community, with hardly any Jewish associations, brought up their children as observant Jews, Judah Touro and his brother becoming the great communal workers of the next generation.

The beginning of the nineteenth century finds women taking a more active part, by their organization of benevolent and charitable institutions. The most prominent name at this period is that of the noblest daughter American Judaism has produced, Rebecca Gratz, who was born in Philadelphia in 1781. Like Rebecca Franks, she, too, was born to wealth and social position; she too moved in the most exclusive society and possessed, like her, beauty, grace and culture. She, too, might, doubtless, have made a match as brilliant, as distinguished as her name-