Lopez, Rebecca Hays Touro, 1779-1833

Rebecca Touro Lopez successfully appealed to the Rhode Island State Legislature to preserve the Touro Synagogue of Newport, one of the first cases of the government preserving an unoccupied historic building. But in 1824, Lopez persuaded the court to give the funds left by her brother to preserve the building to a local agent who could repair and maintain the synagogue. The beautiful Touro Synagogue was restored, became a National Historic Site, and later sparked a lively argument in verse between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Emma Lazarus about the Jewish experience in America. Lopez, who married Joshua Lopez when she was in her fifties, requested a Newport burial and was interred in the cemetery of the synagogue she had fought to preserve. In 1824, Rebecca Hays Touro petitioned the Rhode Island state legislature on behalf of preserving Touro Synagogue in Newport, Her family moved to New York in 1779, and shortly afterward to Kingston, Jamaica, where her father died in 1784. The family then relocated to the house of her uncle, Moses Michael Hays, in Boston, where her mother died in 1787. When her uncle died, she moved to her brother Abraham’s house in Boston, and when he died in 1822, she went to live in New York with the Lopez family. Isaac Touro, Rebecca’s father, had emigrated from Holland via Jamaica in about 1758 to be the first hazan (minister or reader) of Newport’s congregation. Its synagogue Yeshuat Israel (Salvation of Israel), dedicated in 1763, would come to be known as the Touro Synagogue. Isaac Touro and his wife, Reyna Hays Touro, had two sons, Abraham, and Judah, in Newport before Rebecca was born. A fourth child, a son, was born in New York and probably died young. The assembly responded to Rebecca Touro’s petition on January 12, 1825. The two-year restoration of the synagogue was begun in 1827. Late in life, when she was fifty, and he around sixty, Rebecca married Joshua Lopez, son of one prominent colonial Newport merchant, Aaron Lopez, and grandson of another, Jacob Rodrigues Rivera.

In her will, Rebecca Touro Lopez asked for Newport burial. In December 1833, her body arrived from New York by steamboat, the synagogue was opened for a service, and she was buried with other members of her Newport community.