On East Wacker Drive and North Wabash Avenue, not far from the heart of Chicago, three bronze figures stand together in a grouping most people pass without a second glance. At the center of the Heald Square Monument is George Washington. On his right stands Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance of the Continental Congress. On his left, there’s a Polish Jewish immigrant named Haym Salomon.
The statue has stood since 1941. Salomon’s contribution is still older and larger than the monument suggests. As America celebrates its 250th birthday this year, Salomon’s story is worthy of celebration.
Salomon was born around 1740 in Leszno, Poland, into a Jewish family that knew, by long inheritance, that the world could close in at any moment. He was brilliantly educated, fluent in eight or nine languages and possessed an extraordinary financial acumen. He immigrated to New York in 1772, just as the political storm that would become the Revolution was gathering.
When the war came, Salomon did not wait on the sidelines. He became an agent for the patriot cause, was captured by the British, imprisoned and escaped — then captured again. He nearly died for the proposition that human beings could govern themselves.
But the part of his story that changes everything is financial. The Continental Congress was chronically, embarrassingly broke. Washington’s soldiers were shoeless at Valley Forge, in part because the government that sent them there could not pay them. Robert Morris, scrambling to keep the Revolution solvent, turned repeatedly to one man: Haym Salomon.
What followed was one of the most consequential acts of quiet patriotism in American history. Salomon became the primary broker of the Continental cause — raising loans, negotiating bills of exchange and personally advancing money to the men who would shape the nation. He subsidized James Madison directly; Madison could not afford to remain in Philadelphia to serve in the Continental Congress without Salomon’s support. He funded Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish general who had crossed an ocean to fight for liberty. Salomon gave, and gave, and gave again.
How was such a man rewarded for his remarkable service to this country?
Not well. The loans were never repaid — not in his lifetime, not to his heirs. Salomon died in January 1785, only 13 years after coming to this land. He was 44 years old. He died in poverty, his estate worth almost nothing, and his family left with debts instead of assets. The Constitution he helped make possible was ratified two years after his death, the Bill of Rights, four years after that.
I am a rabbi, and in the weeks leading us to the semiquincentennial, our Torah reading fell on a portion called B’haalotcha — a Hebrew word that means, roughly, “when you cause the lights to go up.” It describes the kindling of the great menorah in the Mishkan, the ancient portable sanctuary. But the Torah’s phrasing is deliberate: not “light the menorah,” but cause the flames to rise. The medieval commentator Rashi notes that the phrasing served as instruction to Aaron, the high priest,to hold the flame to each wick until the light rose on its own — and only then to step back.
There is something in that image I cannot shake when I think about Salomon. He did not live to see the light rise. He held the flame to the wick at enormous personal cost — his fortune, his freedom and ultimately his life — and trusted that if he held it long enough, the flame would find its own life. It did, and we are standing in that light today.
America’s 250th anniversary has arrived in a moment of fierce political division. Arguments about who this country is for, who it has always been for, and who gets to claim its founding promise have never been louder. Into that argument, Salomon’s story inserts a quiet and clarifying fact: The American Revolution was not sustained by famous names alone. It was sustained by many hands, among them the hand of a Polish Jewish immigrant who asked for nothing in return.
The next time you are walking at Wacker Drive and Wabash Avenue, stop at that statue. Look at the Jewish man standing at the shoulder of the father of our country and take a moment to consider the many overlooked people whose contributions helped to create and sustain the country that we call home.
Rabbi Michael Siegel is senior rabbi at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago.