near Easton's Point. The synagogue was formally dedicated 2 December 1763. Other notable leaders include Abraham Pereira Mendes and Henry Samuel Morais (1900–01). Judah Touro, the son of Isaac Touro and his wife Reyna, made a fortune as a merchant in New Orleans. He left $10,000 ($ in current dollar terms) in his will for the upkeep of the Jewish cemetery and synagogue in Newport. In 1946, Touro Synagogue was designated as a National Historic Site, and it is an affiliated area of the National Park Service. The synagogue was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966. In 2001, the congregation joined into a partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Touro Synagogue is located at 85 Touro Street and remains an active Orthodox synagogue. The building underwent a restoration in 2005–2006, and a recreation of the original dedication ceremony was conducted in 2013 in honor of the 250th anniversary. Annual recitation of the Washington–Seixas letter on religious pluralism On August 17, 1790, the day that President George Washington visited Newport, the synagogue's warden, Moses Seixas, wrote to Washington, expressing the support of the Congregation for Washington's administration and good wishes for him. Washington sent a letter on August 21 in response, which read in part: The Touro congregation annually reads President Washington's letter on religious pluralism and celebrates the occasion with invited speakers. They have included Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan; and Brown University presidents Ruth Simmons and Christina Paxson. Congregation The congregation at Newport, never large, was initially composed of Jews with roots in the Sephardic Spanish and Portuguese diaspora, and by the eighteenth century, with some Ashkenazim. The first Jewish residents of Newport, fifteen Spanish Jewish families, arrived in 1658. It is presumed that they arrived via the communities in Curaçao, home to the oldest active Jewish congregation in the Americas, dating to 1651, and Suriname. The small community worshiped in rooms in private homes for more than a century before they could afford to build a synagogue. The community purchased and dedicated the Jewish Cemetery at Newport in 1677. In the late 1700s, the Jewish community removed the Torah scrolls and sent them for safekeeping, along with the deed to the building, to Congregation Shearith Israel in New York. The keys left the Jewish community and were passed to the Goulds, a Quaker family in