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Rav Henry Pereira Mendes (5612/1852–5698/1937), known also by his Hebrew name Chaim Pereira Mendes, was an American rav, born in Birmingham, England, who led Congregation Shearith Israel in New York for more than four decades. He came of an old Spanish and Portuguese rabbinic family that had settled in Jamaica in the early 1700s. His father, Rav Avraham Pereira Mendes, served in Kingston and Montego Bay in Jamaica, in Birmingham, and at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island; his grandfather, Rav David Aaron de Sola, was rav at Bevis Marks in London, and his great-grandfather, Rav Raphael Meldola, was the chief Sephardic rabbi of London. He learned rabbinics at Northwick College and studied at University College in London, and later took an M.D. at the New York University medical school in 1884.

In 1874 he became minister of the newly formed Sephardic kehillah in Manchester, England. Three years later he was called to Shearith Israel in New York, where he served until 1920 and then held the title of Rabbi Emeritus. From 1917 to 1920 he was also professor of homiletics at Yeshiva Isaac Elchanan. He composed settings for the chazan and choir of Shearith Israel in keeping with the Amsterdam Sephardic musical tradition, and his setting of uv’nucho yomar is sung there to this day at the close of the Torah service, when the sifrei Torah have been returned to the aron.

He had a hand in founding a long list of institutions. In 1884, the centenary of the birth of Sir Moses Montefiore, he moved his kehillah to gather the leading Jews of New York to mark the year with practical work; from it came the Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids, which grew into the Montefiore Medical Center. In 1898 he pressed for the founding of the Union of Orthodox Congregations, joining the kehillot of the United States and Canada, and was elected its president, and in 1902 he helped found the Young Women’s Hebrew Association in New York. Theodor Herzl asked him to bring the Zionist movement to America; he consented, formed the first Zionist association on his return, and became a founder and president of the Federation of American Zionists.

In 1892 he was shot in the abdomen in his own home by a beggar and barely survived; years later, when that man was niftar, he paid for his funeral and saw to it that he received a proper Jewish burial. He wrote widely — among his works Jewish History, Ethically Presented, The Jewish Religion, Ethically Presented and Jewish Daily Life, Ethically Presented — and with his brother was among the founders of The American Hebrew in 1879. He was niftar at his home in Mount Vernon, New York, in October 1937, a week after suffering a heart attack, and was buried at Beth Olam in Cypress Hills, Queens.