My family and I visited my sister and brother-in-law's lovely summer home on Grand Island often when my kids were teenagers. Grand Island, in that season green and beautiful with stalwart old trees standing guard on the shores, is located on the Niagara River near Buffalo, N.Y, and is within driving distance of Montrealers from Canada. But I didn't know the historic importance of the Island until I found a yellowed old clipping today while I was browsing through my parents' old books. I didn't know about Ararat.
According to a long ago (at least 50 years have passed) article written by David Birkan in a Montreal Jewish newspaper, in the year 1820 a dynamo of a writer/adventurer/politician called Mordecai Noah petitioned the New York State Legislature for the sale of Grand Island. The purpose was to establish a site for a proposed homeland for the Jewish people.
And the petition was granted! Mordecai Noah, who as it happens was also the first Jew to hold a diplomatic position (consul to Tunis) in the U.S. and later entered politics throughTammany Hall, was assisted by a Christian friend who purchased 17,000 acres of Grand Island for the Jewish homeland. It was to be called Arafat. Noah had been motivated by the sad condition of North African Jews that he had witnessed while a consul (and also during his adventures liberating American citizens from the grasp of pirates on the Barberry Coast). He did not think Palestine was a good choice for the prospective homeland because at that time it was a backwater of the Ottoman Empire, and the four Jewish communities he encountered were very poor.
In his advocacy of Grand Island as a home for the Jewish people, he was, according to Birkan, the first political Zionist in the world, pre-dating Theodore Herzl's courageous efforts by three-quarters of a century. What to me was most amazing is that he elicited support for a Jewish state — the first official pro-Zionist statement, long preceding Britain's White Paper in 1917 or Harry Truman's endorsement of the State of Israel — from then U.S. President John Adams as long ago as 1818. To quote from Birkan's article, Adams declared:
"I really wish the Jews again in Judea, an independent nation, for, as I believe, the most enlightened men of it have participated in the amelioration of the philosophy of the age …. I wish your nation may be admitted to all the privileges of nations in every part of the world." And then Noah got New York State to okay the land purchase on Grand Island in order to establish a Jewish homeland. He hoped that Grand Island would also become a refuge for the North American Indians, whom he believed to be members of the Lost Tribes, and therefore Jews.
It was indeed a grand idea, but despite an impressive initial founding ceremony (with many officials) on Sept 2, 1825 and invitations extended to Jews all over the world, Noah was the only Jew who showed up. Reluctantly, he gave up his dream of a Jewish homeland on Grand Island.
If the Jewish people had supported him, Grand Island might have become Israel, U.S.A.
