The Aaronsburg Story

This quiet Pennsylvania village was founded in seventeen eighty-six by Aaron Levy, a Jewish immigrant who became one of Centre County's earliest settlers. Levy laid out the town and, in a remarkable act of religious tolerance, donated land for both the Lutheran and Reformed congregations here, and gave the Lutheran congregation a pewter communion set.

His generosity was not forgotten. On October twenty-third, nineteen forty-nine, tens of thousands of people gathered in Aaronsburg for a daylong celebration of religious and racial understanding. The event featured a massive outdoor pageant staged on a natural hillside just north of this site. In a postwar America still navigating deep divisions, the town that a Jewish merchant built became a symbol of what pluralism could look like.