Slom Scholarship

The Aaron and Rita Slom Scholarship Fund for Freedom and Diversity

The Aaron and Rita Slom Scholarship Fund for Freedom and Diversity was created in March of 2003 by friends and family to honor Aaron and Rita Slom’s 50th wedding anniversary. Aaron participated in the ongoing vitalization of Touro Synagogue and was congregation president in the 1960s. Rita is a vital member of both the congregation and the Touro Synagogue Foundation and was the first woman to become congregation president in 1999. The scholarship fund honors Aaron’s memory and Rita’s continued vision for educating future generations.

Rita-Slom-ScholarshipThe fund provides a minimum of two college scholarships for high school seniors. Those interested in applying must submit an interpretive written work focusing on the George Washington Letter in context with the present time. When George Washington visited Touro Synagogue in August, 1790, he wrote “To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island” that “happily the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance….” These words have made Touro Synagogue an international symbol of religious freedom.

The presentation of the awards takes place at Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI,  during the annual reading of the George Washington Letter. Scholarship award recipients are encouraged to attend.

Slom Scholarship Guidelines & Application

Scholarship Application 

Scholarship Guidelines

2024 applications and essays will be accepted beginning on March 1, 2024.

NOTE: You may submit your scholarship materials via email to: meryle@tourosynagogue.org

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Seixas-Letter-symbol

To read the Washington and Seixas Letters please click on the icons above.

Judge George Alexander Teitz Award

The Teitz Award is a non-monetary award from the non-sectarian Touro Synagogue Foundation. It is given annually to an individual or institution that best exemplifies the contemporary commitment to the ideals of religious and ethnic tolerance and freedom, expressed in President George Washington’s 1790 Letter “to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island.” In the letter, Washington pledged that the government of the new nation would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Teitz-AwardThe first recipient of the Teitz award was Senator Claiborne Pell. In 2008 the award was given to Brown University’s Interfaith House, a student-led residence and a component of the university chaplaincy’s work in religious discourse. Previous recipients include Robert Satloff, Executive Director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands; Judge Fausto Pocar, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY); Benjamin B. Ferencz, Prosecutor for the Nuremberg war crimes trials; The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF); and the World Peace Foundation Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.