In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a small group of Jewish immigrants carved out their own vibrant community in Staten Island. Jewish settlers clustered around the Arietta Street, St. George, Bergen Point, and Perth Amboy ferries and built seven synagogues and a Jewish community center. Jewish dry goods, candy, hardware, and men's furnishings stores sprung up along the major shopping areas of Jersey Street and Richmond Avenue. As the Jewish population grew, it expanded into new developments in Willowbrook, Eltingville, and Arden Heights and was able to support a Jewish elementary school.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a small group of Jewish immigrants carved out their own vibrant community in Staten Island. Jewish settlers clustered around the Arietta Street, St. George, Bergen Point, and Perth Amboy ferries and built seven synagogues and a Jewish community center. Jewish dry goods, candy, hardware, and men's furnishings stores sprung up along the major shopping areas of Jersey Street and Richmond Avenue. As the Jewish population grew, it expanded into new developments in Willowbrook, Eltingville, and Arden Heights and was able to support a Jewish elementary school.

As one of the five boroughs of New York City, Staten Island has a rich and colorful past, and it is full of places where people have shaped the city, state and nation. To commemorate its 350th anniversary, local community leaders and educators have gathered together this unprecedented collection. Walk in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin, Susan B. Anthony, Langston Hughes, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and the Dalai Lama; visit Revolutionary War sites; relive the entrepreneurial drive and inventiveness of business and medical pioneers; and imagine the lives of Irish, Norwegian, Italian, Sri Lankan and Liberian immigrants. Its shores are awash in history, from Lenape trails to Dutch and French farms, from the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company to legendary sports figures and quaint historic districts. Their struggles, hardships, triumphs and achievements, in spectacular and everyday Staten Island locations, are brought to life.

This is a Holocaust story like very few others. It's about a youngster who turned on his persecutors and showed them that Jewish blood is not cheap. And he lived to tell his story! A. Romi Cohn -- today a well-known mohel, businessman and philanthropist -- was a precocious, active 10-year-old yeshivah student when the Nazis invaded Poland. Soon afterward, they and their puppet regime took over his native Czechoslovakia. The Nazis did not have to round up Czech Jews, the Czechs did it for them, and even paid the conqueror to take the Jews off their hands.