LOEB

NEWPORT — When the first films of Nazi concentration camps made it to the outside world during World War II, John L. Loeb Jr. was in his formative years as a student at Hotchkiss, the exclusive Connecticut prep school.

To his horror, Loeb’s classmates cheered.

“We don’t like Hitler,” they said, “but at least they killed the Jews.”

Loeb, the scion of a wealthy Jewish family which has been part of American history since the 1600s, brought that searing memory to Rogers High School to the generation just now coming of age.

He asked them to examine the idea of religious freedom, one of the founding principles of the United States, by drawing on history in their own backyards — a letter sent by George Washington to the congregation of Touro Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in the country.

A former U.S. ambassador to Denmark in the Reagan administration, Loeb said he wants the entire nation to take to heart the words Washington wrote in 1790, during a yearlong campaign to win ratification of the Bill of Rights by each of the 13 states.

A few days after visiting Newport, in August of that year, Washington assured the Jews that his government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The phrase repeated part of an address in which a warden of the synagogue had welcomed President Washington to Newport, reaffirming that he shared with the Jews the same concept of equality under the law for practitioners of all faiths.

Last week, Loeb challenged the entire student body — more than 800 students — to use Washington’s letter as the starting point for an essay on religious freedom.

Three writers who submit the most insightful papers will receive cash awards of $500, $250 and $100.

In addition, the winners will each receive a $50 stipend that will be donated to charities they believe most embody the principle of Washington’s letter, according to Rogers Principal Patti DiCenso.

Loeb said he inaugurated the idea of an essay contest on religious freedom about 10 years ago at his alma mater, Hotchkiss. The high school in his hometown, Harrison, N.Y., also has adopted the idea.

This year, quite apart from the competition at Rogers, the contest has found a national sponsor in the Council for America’s First Freedom, based in Richmond, Va.

Students are being asked to submit essays evaluating how well the United States has lived up to the ideal of religious freedom as it was embodied in Washington’s letter.

A total of about 70,000 teachers nationwide have received e-mails inviting their students to participate, according to spokeswoman Sandra Poulsen.

The council expects to receive about 2,500 entries by the deadline at the end of next month.

Prizes of $3,000, $1,500 and $750, provided by the John L. Loeb Jr. Foundation, will be announced next April.

The council, a nonprofit educational organization without political or religious affiliation, promotes the notion that all liberty stems from the freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief.

The council commemorates the fact that Virginia passed the first law on religious freedom in 1786, Poulsen said.

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Virginia law foreshadowed the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which guarantees religious freedom based on the separation of church and state.

The council’s high school student essay contest is an annual event, with the theme changing every year.

In Newport last week, Loeb told the students how he endured four years of “ferocious anti-Semitism” at Hotchkiss.

“It got me tremendously interested in religious differences,” he said.

As a student at Harvard in the late ’40s and early ’50s, Leob was invited to parties in Newport, where he first learned about Touro Synagogue and the letter from George Washington.

Loeb discovered that he shared a common ancestor with the Touro brothers, key stewards of the synagogue during its early history.

And he learned that some of his forebears are buried in the nearby Jewish Cemetery, which inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write a poem in 1852.

“Everyone needs to know the name Touro,” he said.

The synagogue is “a national shrine, a symbol of religious liberty.”

To help spread that message, as well as document important pieces of Jewish history in America, Loeb has spearheaded the construction of a visitors’ center, a museum adjacent to the synagogue which is expected to open next year.

In Europe, synagogues had been built in out-of-the-way places in backwater towns.

But in Newport a prominent location was chosen, reflecting a “new attitude” when the synagogue opened in 1763, he said.

It’s ironic, Loeb said, that despite Rhode Island’s reputation as the epicenter of religious freedom in America , Jews were not afforded the full rights of citizenship until 1830, often going to Massachusetts to become citizens.

He told the crowd of teachers and students assembled yesterday not to let intolerance go without a response.

At Hotchkiss, Loeb said, teachers did nothing about the anti-Semitism that pervaded the student body until his junior year, when they finally tracked down the ringleader.

Their way of addressing the problem was to put boxing gloves on the two boys and let them fight it out, he said.

Loeb had a reputation as a “greasy grind,” he said. He studied as an escape.

Slight and thin well into his teens, Loeb had yet to grow into the imposing figure he would cut as an adult.

“By some miracle,” he said, he managed to blacken his opponent’s eye slightly and “word got out.”

“After that, it all died down,” Loeb said.

gmacris@projo.com