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Abraham Prince

Abraham Prince (ca. 1810s-?), originally from the Netherlands, was a Boston optician and community leader. In the 1830s, he emigrated to the United States via England. In the 1840s, he was among the first seven trustees of Boston's charter synagogue Ohabei Shalom, and in 1845, served on the three-person founding committee that authored its constitution and by-laws. In 1854, he joined with his colleagues in founding the Hebrew Mutual Relief Society and serving as trustee. After a schism between German and Polish Jews in 1854, he became president of the more traditional (and Polish) Warren Street synagogue from 1856-1857. With the tailor, Henry S. Spier, he formed an ad hoc committee representing the Warren Street and Pleasant Street congregations, which in 1858 commended the British government for granting Jews full emancipation. In 1863, he served as president of Ohabei Shalom and gave an address recounting the 25 year history of the community.

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Prayer for a Government of a Republic [after the election of President Franklin Pierce] — by Abraham Prince of Ohabei Shalom, Boston (11 November 1852)

Contributed on: 20 Jan 2025 by Aharon N. Varady (transcription) | Abraham Prince |

This prayer for the government of a Republic (in contradistinction to a Kingdom) was offered in a Letter to the Editor by Abraham Prince (as “A. Prince”), an optician representing their Boston congregation, Ohabei Shalom.[foot]For more on Abraham Prince, Ohabei Shalom, and Boston’s early Jewish community, find “Boston: A Close Community” by Robert P. Swierenga in The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora (2018).[/foot] The prayer appeared in The Asmonean (26 November 1852), on page 5. At the time, reformist minded rabbis and congregations in the United States were interested in liturgical alternatives to the form of the prayer for the government found in Hanotén Teshu’ah, to more pointedly or appropriately signal their approval of the representative government that guaranteed their minority rights and equal representation under the Constitution. . . .