On Sept. 13, a group gathered in Washington, D.C., for something other than a Rosh Hashanah celebration.
As is now tradition around the Jewish New Year, tour guide Ami Greener led a group on a two-hour walking tour of the Jewish history of the nation’s capital. And as Greener pointed out, the History of Jewish Washington Walking Tour by Off the Mall Tours is a great activity to pair with traditional New Year’s worship, which is exactly what he does: one day of shul, one day of touring.
“People are visiting town, they’re visiting family. ‘What are we going to do?’ They might say, ‘Hey, let’s do this thing Sunday instead of synagogue,’” he said. “When I lived in New York, the JCC did something all night there that attracted people that might not want to sit the whole morning.”
The tour starts on the corner of H and Eighth Street NW and ends in front of the Capital Jewish Museum about half a mile away. It traverses Judiciary Square and Gallery Place and touches on a number of pieces of Jewish history from the colonial era to today.
“This tour is of a neighborhood where the first Jews that moved into town settled, close to what was the center of D.C. back then. It tells the story of the challenges and the successes and how the community evolved, but also why this community continued to today as well,” Greener said.
The tour tells a number of stories, from how a piece of congregational legislation was needed to approve the first synagogue to the time that President Ulysses S. Grant sat through an entire Jewish service.
The tour’s most popular dates are around or on holidays. Greener, who has been doing tours in Hebrew and English for a decade, said Christmas Day is often the one that gets the most traction. Off the Mall Tours also offers another tour specifically around Passover, which is both a time that Jews are visiting family in D.C. and around when the weather starts to warm up.
Greener said that the Rosh Hashanah tour is often well-attended by Israeli visitors, who come to the nation’s capital around the New Year for a couple of reasons.
Some come to see family, but others are looking for a less religious environment around Rosh Hashanah.
“Most of the Israelis [we see] are actually secular, and some of them, that’s why they’re here for the holidays,” Greener said.
Regardless of how religious they are, one thing Greener said the Israelis are always shocked by is the dynamic of houses of worship changing hands.
“They’re really surprised to see synagogues that became churches, for example, Washington Hebrew [Congregation], which is a Baptist church today, or Ohev Sholom, which is today a Chinese Baptist church,” Greener said. “For them, that’s an interesting thing — to see these synagogues that aren’t synagogues anymore.”
This time of year is not notable just for the holidays or the well-attended Jewish tour, but for being a rare occasion when parts of D.C. look as Jewish as they used to be in centuries past. Today, many Jews live in the suburbs. But during the High Holidays, there are many Jews walking the streets of Washington together.
“On Yom Kippur, you’ll actually have a situation where you’ll have a lot of Jewish people coming out of synagogue around that time and walking in the street, and that’s kind of reminiscent of how that whole area of I Street would have been at the turn of the 20th century,” he said. “You’ll have Jews walking up and down the street, and so that kind of harkens back to the days when that [area] was the center of Jewish life.”
Greener said the lively nature of the Jewish community around the High Holidays makes for a special scene on this tour each year, and that 2026 will be no different. He’s hoping, as per usual, attendees got to experience Jewish D.C. in a unique and informative way.
“That will be the most interesting part of the tour and doing it on Rosh Hashanah. You might get people for Christmas who are visiting town … but I think for Rosh Hashanah, you might have people say, ‘Hey, let’s do this thing,’” Greener said.
aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com
