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The Dominican Republic was a haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis. A museum project could tell that story.
SOSUA, Dominican Republic (JTA) — Sitting inside a small wood-frame shul just around the corner from Playa Alicia, where tourists sip rum punch while watching catamarans glide by, Joe Benjamin recounted one of the most uplifting but often forgotten stories of Jewish survival during the Holocaust.
“I was bar mitzvahed right here,” he said, pointing to a podium at the front of the sanctuary in La Sinagoga de Sosua. It was built in the early 1940s to meet the spiritual needs of about 750 German and Austrian Jews.
At the time, the Dominican Republic was the only country in the world that offered asylum to large numbers of Jewish refugees, earning the moniker “tropical Zion.”
Benjamin, 82, is president of the Jewish community of Sosua and one of only four surviving second-generation Jews remaining in this touristy beach town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. His parents were part of the unconventional colony of Jewish immigrants who established an agricultural settlement between 1940-47 on an abandoned banana plantation overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
“When I talk about that, I get goosebumps,” Benjamin said. “This is a distinction that the Dominican Republic has. It was the only country that opened its doors to Jews.”
Joe Benjamin, president of the Jewish Community of Sosua, inside the sanctuary of La Sinagoga. (Dan Fellner)
At the 1938 Evian Conference in France, attended by representatives of 32 countries to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wanting to flee Nazi persecution, the Dominican Republic announced it would accept up to 100,000 Jewish refugees. About 5,000 visas were issued but fewer than 1,000 Jews ultimately were able to reach the country, which is located on the same island as Haiti, about 800 miles southeast of Miami.
Benjamin was born in 1941 in Shanghai, the only other place besides the Dominican Republic that accepted large numbers of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Shanghai, then a divided city not under the control of a single government, did not require a visa to enter. About 20,000 Jewish refugees immigrated there, including Benjamin’s parents, who fled Nazi Germany in 1939.
In 1947, with a civil war raging in China, Benjamin’s father realized the country “was getting a little difficult” and looked for another place to raise his two children.
“I think my father read it in a newspaper – there was a Jewish refugee colony in the Dominican Republic,” he says. “My father had no idea where that was, but he said, ‘I’m going there.’”
Benjamin’s family took a ship from China to San Francisco, a train to Miami, and then flew into Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital city. At that time, the city was officially called Ciudad Trujillo after the country’s dictator, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.
Photos of some of the 750 Jewish refugees who settled in Sosua in the 1940s on display at the Gregorio Luperon International Airport in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. (Dan Fellner)
Historians suggest the Dominican dictator’s motives in accepting large numbers of Jewish refugees at a time when so many other countries — including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom — turned their backs were fueled more by opportunism than altruism. It’s believed that Trujillo wanted to improve his reputation on the world stage following the 1937 massacre of an estimated 20,000 Black Haitians by Dominican troops. Furthermore, Trujillo liked the idea of allowing a crop of mostly educated immigrants who would “whiten” the country’s population.
“He was a cruel dictator,” Benjamin said of Trujillo. “But it’s not for me to judge. Because for us, he saved our lives. If you’re drowning and someone throws you a rope, you hold on to it. You don’t start asking his motive. You just hold on.”
In 1947, Benjamin was among the last group of Jewish refugees to arrive in Sosua, one of about 10 families known by the other colonists as the “Shanghai group.” The Sosua settlement was run by an organization called the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) that was funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York.
“DORSA would give you 10 cows, a mule, a horse and a cart,” said Benjamin. “My father by profession was a cabinet-maker. He thought he was going to do that here. But there was no market for that. So he dedicated himself to farming.”
Benjamin said conditions in Sosua were “primitive” and a difficult transition for many settlers who had been city-dwellers in Europe. Still, he spoke fondly of a childhood in which he was relatively insulated from the horrors that befell so many other Jewish children his age.
“We had enough to eat,” he says. “We enjoyed the beach. And I went to a Jewish school.”
La Sinagoga de Sosua in the Dominican Republic served the spiritual needs of the Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in Sosua during the Holocaust. It’s now open only for the high holidays. (Dan Fellner)
The school, originally called Escuela Cristobal Colon, opened in 1940 in a barracks and was attended by Jewish children as well as the children of Dominican farm workers. The school still exists and is now called the Colegio Luis Hess, named after Luis Hess, one of the Jewish settlers. Hess taught at the school for 33 years and lived in Sosua until his death in 2010 at the age of 101.
While the children attended school, men worked on farms and women cooked dinner for their families, who ate communal style. Beds were lined with mosquito netting to prevent malaria. As men greatly outnumbered women — Trujillo did not allow single Jewish women to enter the country — intermarriage was common.
Over time, the agriculture venture failed and DORSA instead decided to promote a beef and dairy cooperative, Productos Sosua, which ultimately proved successful.
After finishing high school, Benjamin moved to Pittsburgh to attend college (he’s an engineer who once built and flew his own airplane), got married and started a family. After 17 years in the United States, he decided in 1976 to return to the Dominican Republic, where he became an executive with Productos Sosua. He worked there until he retired in 2004, when the firm was sold to a Mexican company.
“All my life I talked about Sosua as my home,” he said. “I like it here. Everybody knows me.”
A street mural recognizes Sosua’s Jewish history on the main road connecting Sosua with Puerto Plata on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. (Dan Fellner)
Today, Sosua is vastly changed from the sleepy town in which Benjamin was raised. In 1979, an international airport opened in Puerto Plata, just a 15-minute drive to the west. Sosua morphed into a congested tourist destination known for its golden-sand beaches and water sports. It also became a hub of the Dominican sex tourism industry.
Most of Sosua’s Jewish population immigrated to the United States by the early 1980s. Benjamin estimates that only 30-40 Jews remain in Sosua, most of whom are not religiously observant. As a result, the synagogue hasn’t been able to financially sustain a permanent rabbi for more than 20 years. Services are held only on the high holidays, when a rabbi is flown in from Miami.
Benjamin says a group of seven Jews chips in about $2,500 a month to pay for security and other operating expenses.
“It’s very hard to get the Jews here to pay,” he said. “When we bring in the rabbi, we try to charge something. But we don’t get any people if we charge.”
Next to the synagogue is a small museum called the Museo Judio de Sosua, which offers a window into the town’s Jewish roots. Five years ago, the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo donated $80,000 to the museum to preserve and digitize its archives. However, the museum, which is badly in need of repairs, has been closed for the past year.
The Museo Judio de Sosua, which tells the story of the Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in the Dominican Republic during the Holocaust. The museum is closed while the community waits for funding to reopen it. (Dan Fellner)
Benjamin has been in discussions with the Dominican government in hopes it will soon finance a major renovation of the museum that would include an exhibition hall big enough to accommodate 100 people for events. Benjamin says he is optimistic the project, which has a price-tag approaching $1 million, will be green-lighted by the government.
“They are very positive about it because it could become a tourist attraction,” he says, noting that Puerto Plata and nearby Amber Cove have become popular port-stops on Caribbean cruises originating in Florida. “If it comes to fruition, it will be in the next year. Because if they don’t do it by then, the government changes. And the next government never continues what the previous government started.”
Otherwise, there are only a few remnants of Jewish life in Sosua for visitors to see. In Parque Mirador overlooking the Atlantic, there is a white cement-block star of David, built to honor the Jewish refugees. About 70 Jews, including Benjamin’s parents, are buried in a Jewish cemetery about a five-minute drive south of the synagogue.
The main street connecting Sosua with Puerto Plata has a street mural depicting the town’s history that features a large star of David right above a scuba-diver. And two of the most prominent streets in Sosua — Dr. Rosen and David Stern — still bear the names of two of the colony’s Jewish founders.
Dr. Rosen Street in downtown Sosua is named after Joseph Rosen, one of the founders of the Dominican Republic Settlement Association. (Dan Fellner)
There had been an exhibition about Sosua’s Jewish colony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York but it closed several years ago. All the more reason, Benjamin says, that the Sosua museum reopens as soon as possible so that the story of the Jews who found a Caribbean cocoon to ride out the Holocaust isn’t forgotten.
“Look at what’s happening in the world — there is a rise in antisemitism,” he said. “It’s very important that our history is documented. It will also be a place where Dominican schoolchildren can come and learn about Judaism.”
With the museum closed, the only place in the area to see photos of the Jewish settlers on public display is the departure lounge in Puerto Plata’s airport. Next to a Dominican band serenading travelers with meringue music, there is a display of pictures showing the colonists riding horses, tilling the fields, attending school and praying in La Sinagoga.
“When they came here, the Jews found no antisemitism at all in this country,” said Benjamin. “They were as free as anybody. They had a wonderful life.”
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SoCal rabbi charged with murder in Costco gas station incident
A Chabad-affiliated rabbi has been charged with murder in the death of a man in the parking lot of a Costco store near Los Angeles.
The Ventura County Sheriff’s department says Rabbi Abba Bryski, 35, struck a man with his car by the pumps of a Costco gas station last Tuesday night in Camarillo, about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Bryski was arrested at the scene.
The victim, identified as Nicholas Lang, 28, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Bryski’s father, Rabbi Moshe Bryski, is executive director of Chabad of the Conejo, a network of several synagogues in the West San Fernando Valley that includes locations in Agoura Hills, Calabasas and Thousand Oaks.
Rabbi Moshe Bryski did not respond to an inquiry.
Abba Bryski will be arraigned Monday on felony charges of murder and use of a deadly weapon and a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.
The incident happened just before 9 p.m. when Lang was reportedly painting the lot. Local news footage showed yellow paint splattered on the ground and on Bryski’s white sedan.
The Costco store does not open until Oct. 30, though the gas station opened in advance.
A police report from Bryski’s arrest says he is a rabbi and educator, though it is unclear where he teaches. Chabad of the Conejo does not list Abba Bryski on its website.
Chabad of the Conejo has served the West Valley for decades. A 2014 article that quotes Abba Bryski saying its various Jewish learning programs had then taught over 3,000 students dating back to the 1990s.
A 2018 photo published by the Thousand Oaks Acorn, a local news site, shows Moshe and Abba Bryski together at the dedication of a Torah scroll.
Bryski’s initial court appearance was scheduled for last Thursday, but was continued twice for reasons that are unclear.
The post SoCal rabbi charged with murder in Costco gas station incident appeared first on The Forward.
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Planned auction of a Holocaust-era Torah fragment sparked outcry, then intervention
(JTA) — A Torah scroll fragment believed to have been used as parcel paper by Nazi SS soldiers is expected to be donated to a US Holocaust remembrance organization after a Norwegian auction house listed it for sale last week, sparking an outcry.
A spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry told JTA that Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar had directed the ministry and Israel’s embassy in Norway to intervene to prevent the sale of “a sacred manuscript looted by the Nazis.”
“Thanks to the embassy’s efforts, the auction was canceled and the parchment will be donated to a Holocaust remembrance organization in the United States,” the spokesperson said.
The Torah fragment is expected to go to Remember Us The Holocaust (RUTH), a San Diego Holocaust remembrance organization working to establish a permanent museum. In a statement sent to JTA, RUTH said it had worked over 48 hours to “secure the fragment for preservation” and Holocaust education.
The organization also enlisted Adolfo Roitman, the former curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and head of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, to advise on its “appropriate treatment and respectful exhibition,” the statement said.
Moisés Salinas Fleitman, RUTH’s executive director, told JTA that the donation had been confirmed by email last Tuesday but had not yet been finalized. He said there was “no expert confirmation as of yet of the provenance of the scroll,” and that the consignor had told RUTH the parchment was “found on a public market in Poland” over three decades ago. RUTH had not yet inspected the fragment or any evidence supporting that account, he added.
Salinas Fleitman said his understanding was that the fragment had been withdrawn from the auction, but RUTH could not confirm what had happened amid conflicting news reports. The organization also declined to identify the person in possession of the fragment, citing its policy of protecting anonymous donors. RUTH’s procedures for verifying authenticity and legitimate provenance take time, the organization said, adding that the organization would not accept the fragment unless both could be established.
The controversy began when the fragment was put up for auction Oct.18 by Oslo-based Valkyrie Historical Auctions, an online auction house specializing in Third Reich memorabilia.
The handwritten calfskin parchment, estimated to fetch between $1,500 and $2,000, was advertised as a “sad and powerful symbol” of the destruction of European Jewish life.
Valkyrie identifies its president as Norbert Podlesny, a historian and author of a trilogy on the Holocaust. The auction house says its items are examined by experts and carry a lifetime guarantee of authenticity. Neither Valkyrie nor Podlesny responded to repeated inquiries from JTA.
The auction house’s original listing explicitly described it as having been plundered by SS soldiers during the Holocaust, an account its representative subsequently disputed in comments to a Norwegian newspaper. The parchment was also described as having been used to wrap a package sent to Germany.
The Valkyrie website recorded a winning bid of $8,500 on the Torah fragment, more than four times the upper estimate for the parchment.
Video footage of the live auction reviewed by JTA shows bidding on the fragment proceeding, with offers rising incrementally. The footage does not establish who placed the bids or whether a transaction was ultimately completed.
Conflicting accounts have left it unclear whether the fragment was formally withdrawn, purchased by the auction house itself or simply withheld from the winning bidder.
Other lots in the same auction included a death certificate for a Polish prisoner at Dachau, a book from the scientific library at Auschwitz, and a dress bearing a yellow Star of David marked “JUIF.”
The controversy went public after the Foreign Ministry condemned the planned sale in a post on X headed “A Nazi celebration in Oslo.”
The ministry also criticized Norway’s proposal to end dedicated funding for school trips to former Nazi concentration camps, with the funding instead transferred to general local government allocations.
“Auctions of sacred texts looted by the Nazis: IN. Visits to extermination camps: OUT,” the ministry wrote.
Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), said that the auction house had taken steps to remove the fragment from public sale but added that those measures “in no way” resolved the issue.
“There are many unanswered questions,” Taylor told JTA.
He urged Valkyrie to identify the seller, explain how the fragment had been acquired, disclose what provenance information accompanied it and undertake further research into its history. He also questioned why the auction house had agreed to sell the parchment despite its original description as Nazi-looted property.
“There is a profound contradiction in recognizing an object as a symbol of the Holocaust while treating it as something to be bought and sold,” he said.
He said the case exposed a “lack of historical awareness” of how the systematic plunder of Jewish property, both private and communal, formed part of the Nazis’ campaign to annihilate European Jewry.
“This is not simply an antique or a historical curiosity. It is a sacred Jewish object that represents a community’s religious life and the devastating destruction of that life during the Holocaust,” he added.
WJRO has called on the Norwegian government to launch an investigation into the auction house’s handling of the fragment, Taylor said, adding that similar questions had arisen concerning other objects previously sold by it.
Taylor also called for “a coordinated international effort” to tackle the trade in sacred Jewish objects looted during the Holocaust and still held by private collectors.
“This is not about private collections, this is about the memory of the Jewish people,” he said.
Norway is among 35 countries that have endorsed the 2024 Best Practices for the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. The nonbinding guidelines cover Holocaust-looted religious and communal property, including sacred scrolls, manuscripts and synagogue objects, and recommend returning objects determined to have belonged to Jewish communities to successor communities or institutions. They do not automatically require restitution of an item offered through a private auction.
The dispute follows other controversies over the sale and ownership of Holocaust-era artifacts. Last November, a German auction house canceled a planned sale of more than 600 concentration camp-related objects, including prisoners’ correspondence, identification documents and a yellow Star of David, following protests from Holocaust survivors and Jewish organizations.
Earlier this year, Poland returned 91 Jewish religious objects to Greece, decades after they were seized by the Nazis from synagogues in Thessaloniki. WJRO helped coordinate their restitution following years of research and negotiations.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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People accusing El-Sayed of Muslim Brotherhood ties will accuse Jews of dual loyalty too
Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, has said that he has no ties to, and disavows, the Muslim Brotherhood. It does not matter how many times he is asked about this, or how many times he answers, because there will be those who insist that it is a real concern. Their position relies not on reality, but on a deep-rooted idea Jews should recognize: that people who are “other” hold dual loyalties, and that those dual loyalties are a danger to America.
El-Sayed has had ample reason and opportunity to assert his distance from the group, as he has been asked about it over and over again. (The connection to the Muslim Brotherhood specifically seems to be a tweet from El-Sayed’s half-sister saying their mother was once involved with the organization.) He was asked at a town hall earlier this month to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood; he was asked about the Muslim Brotherhood earlier this month on Meet the Press; he was asked about it by Fox News; and he was accused without evidence by his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, of being “bought” by the Muslim Brotherhood and of being a national security risk in their debate last week. Other Democrats were also asked to weigh in: CNN, for example, asked Sen. Chris Murphy if Democrats were “concerned about this with El-Sayed.”
American Jews should object to this cynical, baseless fearmongering because it is wrong and destructive in and of itself to charge that a person who is Muslim is a threat to national security. American Jews should also recognize it for what it is: a charge of dual loyalty, and one they should speak up against if they do not want similar charges leveled against Jewish politicians. This is true even if they disagree with El-Sayed or do not want to see him win in next week’s midterm elections.
For American Jews, dual loyalty is an old and familiar antisemitic trope. It’s a suspicion and accusation that has followed us around the globe and across decades and says that we can never really be loyal to the country or society in which we find ourselves because we are secretly loyal only to each other or, more recently, to Israel.
American Jews — understandably, given the history of this trope — are attuned to politics that smack of dual loyalty. For example, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote in his book that, when he was being vetted as a potential running mate for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, he was asked if he had ever been an Israeli agent and felt that that was inappropriate. In fact, being asked about loyalty to other countries is a regular occurrence in obtaining a security clearance.
Nevertheless, Shapiro’s alertness to it speaks to the sensitivity American Jews, and particularly politicians, feel around being accused of dual loyalty, especially as Israel becomes a “litmus test” in Democratic party politics. For example, was congressional candidate Scott Weiner chased from a rally for trans rights solely because he had declined to say that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza (before he said they did days later), or was it because he’s Jewish?
And this past weekend, a RebellionPac ad in which a couple can’t buy eggs because, they say, the United States sends money to Israel, concludes with “Mike Rogers is for they/them” — cutting to photos of Israeli politicians — “Abdul El-Sayed is for you,” suggesting that being supportive of Israel is at odds with being supportive of Michigan, which some Jews feel creates a permission structure for antisemitism and suspicion toward Jews.
U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, once again put forth his specific version of the dual loyalty trope, in which to be a true American Jew is to vote for him because he supports Israel, by saying American Jews should be “ashamed of themselves” if they voted for El-Sayed.
It is not enough for American Jews to be against dual loyalty when it is leveled against us. We just need to be against it. Because if you do not want it to be acceptable to cast aspersions regarding a candidate’s race, religion, or ethnicity, and if you do not want there to be different, special, higher bars that candidates need to meet because of their culture or where they pray, then you need to be against that for anyone. Otherwise, you’re accepting it for everyone.
I am not equating Israel with the Muslim Brotherhood, nor am I defending the Muslim Brotherhood. What I am saying is this: If you are offended by the idea that Jews need to prove that we are not first and foremost loyal to Israel, or by the notion that Jews should be punished for perceived connections to Israel, then you should also be offended by what politicians and pundits are demanding of El-Sayed. You should do this not only because not doing so is hypocritical (though we, as a nation, seem long past the point of hypocrisy mattering), but because the more comfortable we are having charges of dual loyalty in our politics, the more comfortable we are having charges of dual loyalty in our politics for everyone, including Jewish candidates.
I made a similar point last week on X (formerly Twitter) and was promptly accused of hating myself and Jews, loving the Muslim Brotherhood, and having my priorities wrong. In one response to my post, which read, “You don’t get a more tolerant, accepting, pluralistic, liberal country by accusing people of another religion of inherently hating and being disloyal to it and you, it is simply not going to work,” someone wrote, “I don’t want a more tolerant society you stupid twat, I want my kids to be safe at Jewish day school and I don’t want 24/7 security at shul.”
What I found most fascinating about this person’s reply was the idea that Jewish institutions could be safe in the United States, where we are a small minority, without ours being a tolerant society. That struck me as almost as fanciful as thinking that we could allow charges of dual loyalty for Muslim candidates and then turn around and ask that Jewish candidates not have to face dual loyalty accusations or special extra litmus tests.
Much as a society in which antisemitic conspiracy theories are allowed to flourish is ultimately a more conspiratorial, paranoid, and less trusting place for everyone, a polity where candidates are regularly charged with dual loyalty or disloyalty on the basis of their religion or ethnicity is just that — a political discourse where charges of dual loyalty are leveled against ethnic and religious minorities. We don’t get to choose against whom dual loyalty cards are played. We only get to choose whether we think it’s acceptable to play them at all.
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