Mordecai Sheftall

Mordecai Sheftall (December 2, 1735 – July 6, 1797) was a merchant who served as a colonel in the Continental Army. He was from the Province of Georgia during the American Revolutionary War and was the highest ranking Jewish officer. to Benjamin and Perla Sheftall, who had arrived in 1733 to the Georgia colony on the William and Sarah from London, England, with a few dozen members of other Jewish settler families. The Sheftalls were among the founding members of Congregation Mickve Israel.

Biography Mordecai was born on December 2, 1735, to Perla and Benjamin Sheftall. When he was three years old, his mother died. His father remarried within a year to Hannah Sheftall (née Solomons). His half-brother Levi was born in 1739, with another half-brother, Solomon, being born in 1741. However, he died in 1743, at just two years of age. Mordecai left school at the age of eleven, as there was a severe lack of schools, with his father continuing his Jewish education. Upon his bar mitzvah, he ordered tefillin and s'farim for his son from England. The order arrived slightly late, and his father became worried that the ship holding the tefillin and s'farim got lost at sea or was captured by an "enemy" vessel. England was in middle of King George's war at the time, so he was probably talking about the French when he referred to an "enemy." Sheftall went into business by the time he was seventeen, and was making a nice profit buying, tanning, and then selling deerskin. When he was eighteen, he had made enough money to purchase fifty acres of land near Savannah. By his mid twenties, he was doing business with companies from the Caribbean, Charleston, and Philadelphia, making substantial sums of money. In 1761, when he was twenty-six, Sheftall married Frances Fannie (Freidel) (née Hart, (1740–1820). Together, they had six children: Sheftall, Benjamin, Elias, Moses, Perla and Esther. Elias died as a baby.

Major General Robert Howe promoted Sheftall to colonel; the newly promoted officer appointed his son Sheftall as his aide-de-camp. Sheftall took part in the unsuccessful defense of Savannah on December 29, 1778, where he and his son were taken prisoner by the British. Due to refusing to renounce their loyalty to the Patriot cause, Sheftall and his son were imprisoned onboard the prison ship Nancy.

Religious life Sheftall was an observant Jew. For several years, the only Jewish place of worship in Savannah was a room fitted up by him in his own house, where services were held until about 1774. In 1773, he deeded a piece of land for the purpose of erecting a synagogue, but the project was abandoned owing to the incipient war with Great Britain. He and his brother Levi also donated the land for the Savannah Jewish cemetery, which was known for decades as the "Sheftall cemetery." In 1782, in Philadelphia, Sheftall helped build the synagogue for the Congregation Mikveh Israel. In 1790, Sheftall became president of Congregation Mickve Israel, a position he held for five years.

Death Sheftall died on July 6, 1797.