Judah Touro - Charitable Works

Charitable Works

Judah Touro's lasting fame, however, was as a philanthropist. He contributed $40,000—an immense sum at the time—to the Jewish cemetery at Newport, and bought the Old Stone Mill there, at that time thought to have been built by Norsemen, giving it to the city. The park surrounding it is still known as Touro Park.

In New Orleans, he used his business profits to buy and endow a cemetery, and to build a synagogue, an almshouse and an infirmary for sailors suffering from yellow fever, as well as a Unitarian church for a minister named Mr.Theodore Clapp whom he greatly admired. The infirmary became the largest free hospital in Louisiana, the Touro Infirmary. He was a major contributor to many Christian charities in New Orleans, as well as to such varied causes as the American Revolutionary War monument at Bunker Hill, and the relief of victims of a large fire in Mobile, Alabama. In a New Orleans fund-raising drive for Christians suffering persecution in Jerusalem, he gave ten times more than any other donor. One profile of Touro particularly praised his willingness to give both to Jewish and non-Jewish religious causes: "An admirable trait evinced, was the unsectarian distribution of charity, while the donor ever continued a strict adherent to the principles of his faith." His $20,000 donation to The Jews' Hospital in New York City (now Mount Sinai Hospital) led to its opening in 1855.

Touro also participated in charity on a personal level, giving $1,500 to a woman who asked for help for her starving children and paying the $900 debt of an alcoholic man with a large family so that the man's children would be spared the separation from their parent. These stories are said to represent only a small portion of his personal giving, as he preferred to remain anonymous. Morais remarks, "It would be an impossibility to enumerate all the acts of munificent beneficence performed by Judah Touro."

At his death, his estate provided endowments for nearly all the Jewish congregations in the United States, bequests to hospitals and orphanages in Massachusetts. His bequeaths funded the first Jewish residential settlement and almshouse outside of the Old City of Jerusalem, Mishkenot Sha'ananim. In total, his will gave more than $500,000 to different causes, a sum which would equal approximately $9 million in modern terms. His will also included another bequest, to his cousin Catherine Hays—"as an expression of the kind remembrance in which that esteemed friend is held by me." Hays, however, died in Virginia only days before Touro's own death.

He is buried in the Jewish (Touro Cemetery) of Newport. The inscription on his tombstone reads: "To the Memory of / Judah Touro / He inscribed it in the Book of / Philanthropy / To be remembered forever."