David Levy was born on the island of St. Thomas and came to Florida as a child with his father, Moses Levy. He studied law in Virginia, returned to Florida, and threw himself into territorial politics with an energy and ambition that quickly set him apart. He served as a territorial delegate from 1841 to 1845, pushed aggressively for Florida statehood, and was at least partially responsible for drafting the state's first constitution.

When Florida became a state in 1845, David Levy became its first senator and the first Jewish person ever elected to the United States Senate. He added his family's ancestral Sephardic surname to his name, becoming David Levy Yulee. The Washington Post wrote about him that, as a senator from Florida, he was better known than the state he represented.

He served two terms in the Senate and then turned his attention to the project that would define his legacy: Florida's first cross-state railroad. He chose Fernandina Beach as its eastern terminus, moved the original town to its current location to accommodate the line, and platted the new streets to mirror Manhattan. Fernandina even has its own Central Park. The Florida Railroad ran 156 miles from Fernandina to Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast, connecting Florida's two coasts for the first time and earning Yulee the permanent title "Father of Florida Railroads."

Today, Levy County and the town of Yulee in Nassau County both bear his name.

While Yulee was transforming Fernandina, Jewish life was quietly taking root across North Florida. Before the 1930s, Jacksonville's Jewish population was the largest in the state. The community there dated to the 1850s, with Florida's first Jewish cemetery established in Jacksonville in 1857 and its first synagogue in 1876. Jewish merchants ran dry goods stores, groceries, and department stores. By 1928, roughly 40 percent of Florida's entire Jewish population of 10,000 lived in Jacksonville. It was the center of Jewish life in the region and was just 30 miles south of Amelia Island.

Much farther down the coast, Key West had one of Florida's earliest Jewish congregations. Pensacola had organized Jewish life by the mid-1800s. And in St. Augustine, just 85 miles south of Fernandina, a small group of Eastern European immigrants was working on building a synagogue from scratch.

In 1907, a man named Tarlinsky, the first president of a fledgling congregation called Sons of Israel in St. Augustine, had a problem. His congregation had only eight men, two short of the ten required for a minyan, the quorum without which Jewish communal prayer cannot formally take place. He worked his network, and word came back that two Jewish men were living 85 miles to the north, working in an oyster factory in Fernandina.

S.A. Snyder, born Solomon Schneidermann, and Jacob Ross, born Jacob Chosodovich. Like so many Jewish immigrants of their era, they had traded the names of the Old World for ones that might open doors in the new one. The doors they walked through had led them to the banks of the Amelia River.

They made the move and helped establish the first minyan of St. Augustine. Snyder eventually adapted to Florida's cattle industry and became a pillar of that community. Sons of Israel was chartered with the State of Florida in 1908. A synagogue was built and dedicated in 1924, and today it is the oldest continuously operating synagogue in Florida. Two Jews in an oyster factory in Fernandina Beach were part of the reason it exists.

One of the most significant marks a Jewish figure ever made on Amelia Island came from a man who never lived here. Julius Rosenwald was the son of Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in Germany. He built Sears, Roebuck and Co. into America's largest retailer and then devoted much of his fortune to a cause he believed was inseparable from his own people's values: the education of African-American children in the segregated South. Partnering with Booker T. Washington, the Rosenwald Foundation built more than 5,300 schools across the South between 1912 and 1932. Peck High School in Fernandina Beach was one of them.

The project began in 1880 when locals started petitioning for an African American school in Fernandina. In 1885, a small school was opened, and two years later, Mr. William H. Peck became its principal. In 1901, the parcel on South 10th Street was purchased, and after gathering support from the local community, Peck turned to the Rosenwald Foundation, which contributed $20,000. The school was completed in 1927 and named in Peck's honor.

Of the nearly 5,000 Rosenwald schools constructed, fewer than 500 survive today. Fernandina's Peck School is one of them. It still stands on South 10th Street, now the Peck Center, a functioning community space.

Sometime in the early twentieth century, a family named Fishler arrived in Fernandina Beach from Romania. Morris and Clara Fishler came to a town of about 3,000 people that had a small handful of Jewish families but no synagogue, no rabbi, and no Jewish infrastructure of any kind. Morris had come to take over a store, but eventually entered the shrimping industry, a somewhat unlikely occupation for a man described by his family as an observant Jew. Clara kept a kosher home, no small feat in a small Florida coastal town. The family had a running joke that they made money in the shrimp business because Clara would not let anyone eat the shrimp.

For Jewish life, the family looked to Jacksonville. When their daughter Margaret married Dr. Joel Fleet in 1940, the ceremony was held at the Jacksonville Jewish Center. Margaret went on to sing in synagogue choirs her entire adult life, devoted herself to Hadassah, and remained proudly and actively Jewish until her passing in 2013.

Her brother Herbert - also known as Hymie - built his life entirely in Fernandina Beach. He played on the first basketball team ever fielded by Fernandina High School, earned his law degree, came home, and never left. He served as the city's attorney for roughly two decades, sat on the city commission, and spent half a century woven into the civic life of Nassau County. On February 21, 1987, the Nassau Sound bridge was dedicated in his honor and named the MacArthur-Fishler Bridge.

The Fishler family may not have been famous, but their contributions to our island's history should not be forgotten, and their dedication to keep their faith even in a town so far from Jewish life is tremendously honorable.

For much of the twentieth century, Jewish life on Amelia Island was informal. While Jewish people lived on the Island, there was no synagogue and no rabbi. Jewish families lived alongside their neighbors and would make the short trip to Jacksonville for important Jewish holidays or gather with friends in homes for holiday services and social events.

Lou Goldman, a longtime island resident, tells the story of hosting the first public Passover Seder on Amelia Island sometime in the late 1980s. He put an ad in the local paper with one word, "Seder," and his phone number. He did not expect many people, but more than 50 showed up.

That quiet hunger for an established Jewish community never went away. When Douglas Greene, a real estate investor, moved to Amelia Island around 2010, he found a small group of Jewish residents getting together on Friday nights, but, as he put it, "it was more of a social scene." Greene wanted more. He reached out to Rabbi Yoseph Kahanov of Chabad Lubavitch of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville, and together they negotiated with the city of Fernandina Beach to purchase burial plots in the Bosque Bello cemetery, which were enclosed and sanctified as a Jewish burial ground.

Then Greene woke up one night with a thought that changed everything. "Okay, I got Jewish death taken care of. Now I need to start working on Jewish life."

He and Rabbi Kahanov began looking for a young couple willing to move to Amelia Island and build something from nothing. They found Rabbi Levi and Mindy Katz. He was from the Miami area, she from Key West, both from Chabad families, both at home in the culture of a Florida island community. "We felt they would be perfect," Greene said. "Particularly Mindy, who grew up on an island like ours."

In the fall of 2024, Rabbi Levi and Mindy Katz moved to Fernandina Beach and established the Chabad Jewish Center of Amelia Island and Nassau County. In 2025, they opened the doors of Nassau County's first synagogue at 5472 First Coast Highway and placed a mezuzah from Jerusalem on the front door.

"This is truly a historic moment for our community," Rabbi Katz said. "In all of Amelia Island's long history, there has never been a dedicated Jewish space."