Volume I: A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820 In the autumn of 1654, twenty-three Jews aboard the bark Sainte Catherine landed at the town of New Amsterdam to establish the first permanent Jewish settlement in North America. In A Time for Planting, Eli Faber recounts these earliest days of Jewish life in America, as Jews from Lisbon to Amsterdam to London extended the wanderings of their centuries-old diaspora.