The Teitz Award is a non-monetary award from the non-sectarian Touro Synagogue Foundation. It is given annually to an individual or institution that best exemplifies the contemporary commitment to the ideals of religious and ethnic tolerance and freedom, expressed in President George Washington's 1790 Letter “to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island.” In the letter, Washington pledged that the government of the new nation would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

 

The first recipient of the Teitz award was Senator Claiborne Pell. In 2008 the award was given to Brown University’s Interfaith House, a student-led residence and a component of the university chaplaincy’s work in religious discourse. Previous recipients include Robert Satloff, Executive Director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands; Judge Fausto Pocar, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY); Benjamin B. Ferencz, Prosecutor for the Nuremberg war crimes trials; The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF; and the World Peace Foundation Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.