Some of the pioneers of this new Jewish immigration came from England, but as in the earlier period of the Spanish Jews, the Germans and the Polish soon followed, or came simultaneously. A typical instance was that of Cincinnati, where the first Jewish congregation in the Ohio Valley was formed. The first Jew to settle there was Joseph Jonas (b. in Exeter, England, 1792; d. in Cincinnati, May 5, 1869), who came to America in 1816 and lived for a short time in New York and in Philadelphia. He left the latter city on the second day of January, 1817, and arrived in Cincinnati on the eighth of March. He was a watchmaker by trade, and had little difficulty in establishing himself. He was a curiosity at first, as many in that part of the country had never seen a Jew before. Numbers of people came from the country round about to see him, and he related in his old age of an old Quakeress who said to him: “Art thou a Jew? Thou art one of God’s chosen people. Wilt thou let me examine thee?” She turned him round and round and at last exclaimed: “Well, thou art no different to other people.”[27] Jonas remained the only Jew in Cincinnati for about two years, when he was joined by Lewis Cohen of London, Barnet Levi of Liverpool and Joseph Levy of Exeter. These four, with David Israel Johnson of Brookville, Ind. (a frontier trading-station), conducted in the autumn of 1819 the first Jewish service in the western portion of the United States. Solomon Buckingham, Moses Nathan and Solomon Menken came there from Germany in 1820. The last named established the first wholesale dry goods house in Cincinnati. The six Moses brothers, one of whom, Phineas (d. 1895), lived to the age of ninety-seven, arrived in the following two years, and about this time Joseph Jonas was joined by his three brothers, Abraham, Samuel and George; their parents and a fourth brother, Edward, coming some time afterwards. Services were held only on Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur until 1824, when the number of Jewish inhabitants reached about twenty. (See “Publications,” IX, p. 155, for fourteen Jewish names from the Cincinnati Directory of 1825.) In the first month of that year the Congregation “Bene Israel” was formally organized, and at a meeting held some time thereafter it was resolved to build a suitable house of worship. There was not, however, sufficient wealth in the new community to enable the congregation to undertake the work unaided, and an appeal was sent to the older congregations in the United States and also to England, for help in the proposed undertaking. A copy of this appeal has been preserved (in “Publications,” X, pp. 98–99) and reads as follows: TO THE ELDERS OF THE JEWISH CONGREGATION AT CHARLESTON.