רפאל חיים יצחק קריגל

Rav Refael Chaim Yitzchak Carregal (5494/1733–5537/1777), whose name is spelled Carigal and Karigal in English sources, was a chacham and shadar of Chevron, and the first rabbi known to have reached the colonies that later became the United States. He learned in Yerushalayim and in Chevron and received semicha at seventeen from his rebbi, Rav David Melamed, a shadar himself.

In 5514/1754 he set out on the first of his missions for the kehillah of Chevron, and from then on his life was spent largely at sea. Two years in Constantinople were followed by many kehillot across the east and in Europe; at twenty-eight he was appointed rav of the kehillah of Curaçao in the Caribbean, where he remained until 1763, and then he returned to Chevron. In 5528/1768 he took up the staff again, traveling to France and on to London, where for some two years he taught in the beit midrash for a hundred pounds a year; a year in Jamaica followed, and then the year he spent in the British colonies of North America. He was in New York and in Philadelphia, and from Adar to Tammuz of 5533/1773 he lived in Newport, Rhode Island as a guest of the kehillah, darshening before them in Spanish.

In Newport he became close to Ezra Stiles, later the president of Yale, and the two learned together, going through the meaning of the pesukim that speak of Mashiach; Stiles worked on his Hebrew with him, and the letters they wrote one another, mostly in Hebrew, are kept among the Stiles papers at Yale. Stiles filled pages of his diary with him, setting down his bearing, his manner and his high fur cap, and commissioned his portrait from the painter Samuel King for the college; by his own record the two met twenty-eight times in six months. His derasha for Shavuot, printed in Newport in 5533/1773 with the support of the merchant Aharon Lopez, was the first Jewish sermon published in America.

In the summer of 5533/1773 he sailed for Suriname, and by 1775 he was in Barbados, where he was niftar two years later at forty-three. His matzeivah, etched in three languages, still stands in the Nidhe Israel cemetery there.