Slom Scholarship
The Aaron and Rita Slom Scholarship Fund for Freedom and Diversity
Friends and family created the Aaron and Rita Slom Scholarship Fund for Freedom and Diversity in March of 2003 to honor Aaron and Rita Slom’s 50th wedding anniversary. The Sloms were and continue to be vital participants in the ongoing life of Touro Synagogue. Aaron was the congregation president in the 1960s, and Rita became the first woman president in 1999. Rita continues to be active in the congregation and the Foundation. The scholarship honors the memory of Aaron and Rita’s continued vision for educating future generations.
A minimum of two college scholarships will be awarded. High school seniors interested in applying must submit an interpretive written work focusing on the George Washington Letter “To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport” in context with the present time. Washington wrote this letter in 1790 after his first trip to Rhode Island as President. In his eloquent reply to a letter written by Moses Seixas, warden of the local Jewish congregation, Washington attested to the new government’s commitment to freedom of religion, an entitlement he regarded as an “inherent natural right.” He restated from the Seixas letter that the federal government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” These words have made Touro Synagogue an international symbol of religious freedom.
The awards presentation will take place in Newport, Rhode Island, during the annual George Washington Letter Reading event on Sunday, August 16, 2026. Although not mandatory, scholarship recipients are encouraged to attend.
Slom Scholarship Guidelines & Application
2026 applications and essays will be accepted beginning on March 16, 2026.
NOTE: You may submit your scholarship materials via email to: tsfn@tsfnewport.org
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 TSF Newport organization. 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.”
The 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.
