Читать книгу The Niagara River - Archer Butler Hulbert - Страница 7

The upper Niagara with its even current and low-lying banks is not specially attractive. Grand Island, two miles below the mouth, divides the river into two narrow arms. This beautiful island, the Indian name of which was Owanunga, so popular to-day as a summering place, is remembered in history especially as the site selected in 1825 for Major M. M. Noah's "New Jerusalem," the proposed industrial centre of the Jews of the New World, but nothing was accomplished on the island itself toward the object in view.

At Buffalo, however, Noah took the title "Judge of Israel," and held a meeting in the old St. Paul's Church, where remarkable initiatory rites took place. In resplendent robes covered by a mantle of crimson silk, trimmed with ermine, the Judge held what he termed "impressive and unique ceremony," in which he read a proclamation to "all the Jews throughout the world," bringing them the glad tidings that on the ancient isle Owanunga "an asylum was prepared and offered to them," and that he did "revive, renew, and establish (in the Lord's name), the government of the Jewish nation, . . . confirming and perpetuating all our rights and privileges, our rank and power, among the nations of the earth as they existed and were recognised under the government of the Judges." Mr. Noah ordered a census of all the Hebrews in the world to be taken and did not forget, incidentally, to levy a tax of about one dollar and a half on every Jew in order to carry on the project. A "foundation stone" was prepared to be erected on the site of the future New Jerusalem; the following inscription was engraved upon it: