Lesson on Legacy of Religious Freedom at Walt Whitman High School
LESSON ON LEGACY OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AT WALT WHITMAN HIGH SCHOOL (Bethesda, MD) Three students at Walt Whitman High School received awards from Mrs. Joy Ammerman on Friday, March 11, 2011, for writing prize-winning essays in the inaugural Ammerman Essay Competition. Jacob Rosenblum, Kaiwei L. Hsu and Amandine C. Roche received their awards at the School’s Diversity Celebration Assemblies. The competition was sponsored by the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom and funded through the generosity of the Ammerman Family Foundation. The Ammerman Essay Competition focused on the contemporary relevance of a famous letter that George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island of 1790. In one of the most significant statements of religious freedom ever penned, our first president promised that the United States would be a nation that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” and that the exercise of religion is “an inherent natur...