Shangarai Chasset - Gates of Mercy

The congregation was founded on December 20, 1827, and the Louisiana legislature chartered it on March 27, 1828. Judah Touro was at first uninterested in it but later supported it generously, and in 1846, on the advice of Gershom Kursheedt, he established a second Sephardic synagogue, Nefutsoth Judah, at Bourbon and Canal Streets. By 1881 the two congregations could no longer exist separately and reunited as the Gates of Mercy of the Dispersed of Judah. In 1937 the merged congregation was renamed Touro Synagogue in his honor.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 0.2 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.3 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 0.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Benito Juarez — steps away
• Ernest Nathan "Dutch" Morial — steps away
• Marie Laveau — steps away
• Déterrer Storyville — steps away