אברהם יצחק רייס

Rav Avraham Yosef Rice (c. 5560/1800–5622/1862), born Avraham Reiss, was the first rav with semichah to hold a rabbinical position in the United States. He was born in Gochsheim near Schweinfurt in Lower Franconia. From an injury sustained in infancy he carried a limp all his life. He learned in the yeshiva of Würzburg and received semichah from Rav Avraham Bing, continued under Rav Wolf Hamburger in Fürth, and afterward led a small yeshiva at Zell, a village near Würzburg. His marriage to Rosalie Leucht came during the 1830s, and in 5600/1840 the couple crossed to America. After a short effort to revive the kehillah in Newport, Rhode Island, he took the position of first rav of Congregation Nidchei Yisrael in Baltimore.

He gave his drashot in German and later at times in English, and he held to the full order of the piyyutim in the tefillot without abridgement. His insistence on Shabbat and kashrut set him against a good part of his baalei battim: when he ruled that one who was mechallel Shabbat should not be called to the Torah the opposition was such that he had to give way, though he held that no one should answer amen to the berachot such a man made. As the only rav in the country with semichah he was sent shailot from across America, and his name was known among the lomdim of Germany as well. He wrote often in Isaac Leeser’s periodical The Occident, pressed for the founding of an American beit din, and in 5605/1845 opened a Hebrew school, among the earliest in the country.

In 5609/1849, unable to hold back the demand for changes at Nidchei Yisrael, he stepped down and founded a shul of his own that stood on strict Orthodoxy, supporting himself meanwhile with a dry goods store and afterward a grocery. The minyan he began around that time, most likely in his own home, grew into Congregation Shearith Israel, which has stayed Orthodox for the whole of its history. In 5622/1862 he was called back to the rabbanut of Nidchei Yisrael on the undertaking that it would remain strictly Orthodox; he was niftar a few months later.