Even at the end of the 19th century, much of California’s Sierra Nevada remained unmapped and unexplored, a fact that drove Theodore Seixas Solomons—a native of the San Francisco Bay area—to search for a path through its wildest area. He and his friend Ernest Bonner succeeded in doing so in 1895, even if a snowstorm cut short their adventure. Michael Hoberman writes:
Theodore Seixas Solomons was the only member of his storied family to follow mountaineering as a lifelong avocation, but he was not its first pathbreaker. In August of 1776, his great-great-grandfather, Gershom Mendes Seixas, the youthful hazan of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel, earned a place in history through an unequivocal act of loyalty to the cause of the American Revolution. Refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to the Crown that would have been demanded of him had he remained in the city in the face of an imminent British invasion, Seixas led several congregation members who shared his affinity for the rebellion northward to Connecticut. In 1789, Seixas would be the lone Jewish clergyman (and probably lone Jew) in attendance at George Washington’s inauguration.
Three-quarters of a century later, in 1852, Theodore Solomon’s father, Gershom Mendes Seixas Solomons, traveled to and settled in California, at the height of the Gold Rush. He would become one of the founding members of San Francisco’s famed Temple Emanu-El. Theodore’s immediate family included one sister (Adele) who earned an M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston and another (Selina) who led the suffragist movement in California.
In 1974, Solomons was memorialized with a trail of his own, but even that act fell short of achieving its purpose of raising public consciousness about his contributions to wider knowledge of the High Sierra. The Theodore Solomons Trail is a rigorous 280-mile, lower-elevation alternative to the much more popular and well-known John Muir Trail.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/jews-in-the-wilderness