Visit Ebenezer From the Georgia Salzburger Society
☞ R E M I N D E R ☜
Tomorrow, Saturday the 12th, is the Day!
Please join us for LANDING DAY
activities from a 12:30 PM meal
through close of the Museum at 5 PM
(please see our schedule in this announcement).
Everyone is welcome. ... See more
LANDING DAY 2016
"And we vowed to have a yearly thanksgiving in His honor, on which we would use our diary to bring back to their memories the trials of the wondrous Divine Guidance."
~ Detailed Reports of the Salzburger Emigrants who settled in America by Samuel Urlsperger, Volume I, page 55
On Saturday, the 12th of March, 2016, the Georgia Salzburger Society (GSS) will hold our annual Landing Day meeting at Ebenezer. All descendants of Salzburger immigrants and all our friends are invited to join us at Jerusalem Lutheran Church, at Ebenezer, to mark the anniversary of the landing of the first transport of Salzburgers in Georgia.
On Friday, the 12th of March, 1734, aboard the ship Purysburg, Salzburgers first sailed up the Savannah River, and were welcomed by those who had helped to found Savannah and the British Colony of Georgia only thirteen months earlier. In Savannah the next morning, Benjamin Sheftall and his wife Perla (Ashkenazi Jews who spoke both High German and English, and who had arrived only eight months earlier) presented the 50 or so weary travelers with a breakfast of "good rice soup."
☞ SCHEDULE ☜
Our annual Landing Day meeting is held on the Saturday closest to the 12th, and, in this 282nd anniversary year, the meeting falls on Saturday the 12th.
• At 12:30 PM, we will gather for a meal of ♨ Good Rice Soup ♨ in the Jerusalem Lutheran Church Social Hall, to commemorate the Salzburgers' first breakfast in Georgia.
• At 2 PM, our meeting begins in the church. The program includes election of new GSS board members, hearing committee reports, and a guest speaker, Thomas Wülfing, Deputy Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Southeastern United States.
• Following the meeting, we'll adjourn to a Reception in the Old Parsonage to honor new and outgoing GSS board members.
• The Museum will be open during its regular Saturday hours, 3-5 PM.
Please take this opportunity to be thankful, to celebrate and to remember.
_____
Note: At the Salzburger immigrants' first worship service on dry land, the Scripture reading was from the second chapter of Sirach (from the Apocrypha), and their hymn was Herr Gott, dich loben wir (Lord God We Praise Thee, Martin Luther's 1529 German paraphrase of the Te Deum). Additionally, these new Georgia colonists shared other selected Bible verses of comfort remembered from their long journey.
Note: The image shows the ships The London Merchant and The Simonds passing the Isle of Wight (England) as the third transport of Salzburgers set sail for Georgia in the fall of 1735 (arriving in February of 1736). Baron Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck (1710–1798), who was with the first and third Salzburger transports, sketched this illustration of the ships sailing past the row of prominent "Needles" west of the Isle of Wight at Alum Bay; they were named for the very slender formation shown left of center, which was known as Lot's Wife (and which was, however, not made of salt, but of chalk). Today, the three larger "Needle" formations remain, but Lot's Wife collapsed in a storm in 1764. ... See more