How Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes and Rabbi Bernard Drachman Saved Shabbat — and Reshaped American Life
On July 4, 2026, America will celebrate its 250th birthday. As the country prepares for this historic milestone, with year-long festivities culminating on Independence Day, this is a fitting moment to recall a quieter American story — one that touches the life of every Jew, and indeed every American worker, who has ever enjoyed a two-day weekend.
It is the story of how two Orthodox rabbis, fighting to save Shabbat in America, ended up giving the entire country its weekend.
Who Was Rabbi Mendes?
Rabbi Hayim (Henry) Pereira Mendes (1852–1937) was one of the most extraordinary Jewish leaders America has ever known.
Born in Birmingham, England, into a distinguished Sephardic rabbinical family with roots in Jamaica, London, and Amsterdam, he came to New York in 1877 to serve as Minister and Hazan of Congregation Shearith Israel — the historic Spanish and Portuguese synagogue founded in 1654, the oldest Jewish congregation in North America. He served there until 1923, and as Minister Emeritus until his death in 1937. In 1884 he also earned a medical degree from New York University, though he never opened a practice. He gave his life entirely to Kelal Yisrael, the totality of the Jewish people.
His accomplishments are staggering:
- Founder and first president of the Orthodox Union (OU) in 1898 — the institution that today certifies kosher food worldwide and represents Modern Orthodox Judaism in America.
- One of the early teachers at Yeshiva University, serving as professor of homiletics at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary from 1917 to 1920, helping to shape a generation of American Orthodox rabbis.
- Founder of Montefiore Hospital in 1884, organized to honor Sir Moses Montefiore’s 100th birthday. Today, Montefiore is one of New York’s largest medical centers — a 14-hospital system in the Bronx and the primary teaching hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
- Co-founder of the Federation of American Zionists, at the personal request of Theodor Herzl himself.
And he was the leading voice for Shabbat observance in America.
The Crisis: Shabbat in 1900
By the turn of the twentieth century, Shabbat observance in America was collapsing.
The American work week ran six days, Monday through Saturday. Almost no employer — not even most Jewish-owned factories — gave workers Saturday off. A Jewish immigrant who refused to work on Shabbat would usually be fired by Monday morning.
To make matters worse, every state had “blue laws” — Christian Sabbath laws that forced almost all businesses to close on Sunday. The purpose of these laws was explicitly religious: to keep workers and merchants out of the marketplace so that they would attend church on Sunday morning, the Christian day of worship. Protestant lobbyists wanted to clear away every competing activity — shops, theaters, sports, taverns — so that nothing would distract churchgoers from the pews.
The result for shomre Shabbat (Shabbat observers) was devastating. A Jew who closed his store on Saturday for religious reasons was then forced by the government to close it again on Sunday — to help Christians get to church. He had only four and a half working days while his competitors had six. Financial ruin was almost certain.
Rabbi Israel Herbert Levinthal summed up the crisis in 1925: “If we see Jewish life crumbling before our very eyes in America, it is mainly because of the fact that we have lost our Sabbath.”
The Reform Surrender
While Orthodox rabbis fought, the Reform movement chose a very different path — one that made their own lives much more comfortable.
In Germany in the 1840s, the radical Reform rabbi Samuel Holdheim had moved his congregation’s Shabbat services to Sunday. The idea crossed the Atlantic. In 1885, the Reform rabbinical conference in Pittsburgh officially endorsed Sunday services, declaring that “there is nothing in the spirit of Judaism to prevent the holding of divine services on Sunday.”
Some Reform congregations moved their main weekly service to Sunday morning entirely. Others kept Saturday services but openly encouraged work on Shabbat. The Reform establishment, dominated by economically successful German Jews, simply was not inclined to challenge the prevailing schedule of the American economy.
For Reform Jews, this solved the economic problem at a stroke. No conflict with the work week. No fight with the blue laws. No risk of unemployment. But it came at a terrible cost: the surrender of the very mitsva that the Aseret haDibberot (the Ten Commandments) name as the eternal sign between HaShem and Israel.
The Fight: Mendes and Drachman
Rabbi Mendes’ partner in the struggle was Rabbi Bernard Drachman (1861–1945), his Ashkenazi counterpart. Rabbi of Congregation Zichron Ephraim on East 67th Street and another of the early professors at Yeshiva College, Rabbi Drachman served as president of the OU from 1908 to 1920.
Rabbi Mendes served as vice-president of the Jewish Sabbath Observance Society. Rabbi Drachman served as president of the Jewish Sabbath Alliance of America, which kept a full-time legal counsel — his brother Gustave Drachman — defending Jewish shopkeepers in court for twenty years.
Their work was unglamorous and deeply personal. Rabbi Mendes’ office adjoining Shearith Israel was open from morning until night. Among the callers every single day was “a shomer Shabbat for whom he finds employment.” Day after day, year after year, the rabbi personally found jobs for Jews who refused to work on Saturday. He traveled repeatedly to Albany to testify against the Sunday closing laws. He fought to have university examinations rescheduled away from Jewish holy days. He intervened with the government to obtain furloughs for Jewish soldiers on Yom Tov.
For fifteen years — through legislatures, through courts, through direct appeals to employers — the Orthodox rabbis were defeated again and again. Christian Sabbatarian organizations like the Lord’s Day Alliance outlobbied them. Non-Jewish merchants opposed any exemption for Jewish shopkeepers, claiming it would give them an unfair advantage.
The Breakthrough: 1915–1927
In 1915, Rabbi Drachman did something unprecedented. He traveled to the Lord’s Day Congress in Oakland, California — a national convention of Christian Sabbatarians — and addressed them directly. He proposed something no one had proposed before: a five-day work week, with both Saturday and Sunday off for everyone, Jews and Christians alike.
The idea slowly took hold. Beginning in 1919, the Sabbath Alliance allied itself with Jewish-led labor unions, which were also pushing for a shorter work week. In 1920, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers passed a formal resolution endorsing the five-day week. In 1924, a convention of Orthodox Rabbis of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut endorsed the two-day weekend; that same year, 50,000 garment workers struck for it. In 1926, 100,000 clothing workers struck across New York and Philadelphia. By 1927, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics declared the five-day work week “practically the rule in trade agreements in the clothing industry.”
From there it spread, decade by decade, to the rest of the American economy. Rabbi Mendes lived to see it. He died in 1937, ten years after the victory.
The two-day American weekend — Saturday and Sunday — that today every American takes for granted as a basic feature of modern life, was, in significant measure, the achievement of Orthodox rabbis fighting to save Shabbat.
