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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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A Chabad Jew was stabbed in NYC. He returned the next day to continue wrapping tefillin.
(JTA) — Less than 24 hours after he was stabbed in midtown Manhattan, Yosef, a Chabad-Lubavitch man from Crown Heights, was back on the same street where he’d been assaulted, popping into Diamond District businesses as usual to help employees wrap tefillin.
Yosef, 26, who did not share his last name to maintain his privacy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was back on 47th Street on Thursday afternoon, the day after the stabbing, without missing a beat in his Monday-through-Thursday rounds even as police investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
A number of the people he visited pieced together that the widely circulated footage of a man being stabbed the previous night was of him.
“They were in shock. They were obviously scared for me,” said Yosef, who has been wrapping tefillin and distributing Shabbat candles to Jewish Diamond District employees for about three years. He started that routine when his father, a Chabad Jew who works in the jewelry business, realized he needed his son’s help to handle the demand for those acts. Yosef told Chabad.org that he was “still shaken” by the attack a day later.
Still, he told JTA, “We can’t allow some hate to stop us.”
Yosef said he felt it was important to communicate that message because “we need more mitzvahs in the world, we need more light in the world.”
Yosef was taken to Bellevue Hospital on Wednesday evening around 6 p.m., where medical staff assessed that he had no internal bleeding and would not need stitches. No arrests have been made, but the assailant has been described as a woman in her 40s.
The attack has renewed concerns about security that have faced Chabad adherents and institutions, which often host public events and maintain a visible street presence. But the threat didn’t diminish their presence in midtown Manhattan on Friday.
Multiple Chabad men stood under a bright yellow tent on the sidewalk wrapping tefillin for a steady stream of workers in the heavily Jewish Diamond District.
“The Rebbe says that the way to defeat darkness is only through the addition of light,” said Shmuel Cohen, who was handing out small photographs of the movement’s late leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Cohen told JTA that he had not heard about the attack that took place just down the block two days earlier, though his partner under the sidewalk tent had. Cohen said that the best way to respond is through “the observance of Torah and mitzvot without being ashamed of our Judaism but presenting it to everyone.”
Also on Friday, Chabad officials met with New York Police Department representatives for their annual meeting about security ahead of Chabad’s international conference in Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood where the movement is headquartered. The conference begins on Nov. 5.
Chabad has been targeted in multiple high-profile attacks in the past year, including the deadly Bondi Beach shooting in Australia in December. The following month, a man rammed a car into the doors of the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn, raising further questions over how the movement should balance its commitment to making its events accessible with security.
Meanwhile, Jews have been targeted in more than half of hate crimes committed in New York City in 2026, despite making up about 12% of the city’s population.
“Security is our top priority. Our goal is to provide an environment where every participant feels safe and can fully experience the purpose and spirit of the gathering,” said Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, a top organizer of the upcoming conference.
In the wake of the attack, Yosef said he is not concerned about going out in public as a visibly Jewish person and doesn’t plan to change how he approaches the world.
“I was wearing the same clothes on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday,” he said. “I didn’t change my routine.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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They met on a Birthright trip then married. Now this American Israeli couple’s internet fame has turned to infamy.
Ethan and Hila Klein first met at Yad Vashem — Israel’s Holocaust museum — in 2007, a meet-cute they recounted, giggling, years later for their millions of YouTube followers.
“I think I went up to her and said something like, ‘They had it coming, don’t you think?’” said Ethan, known for his edgy humor and infamous internet trends, including Vape Nation and Papa Bless. “No I didn’t say that. I wonder if you would have laughed though.”
They were on a Birthright trip, Ethan an American and Hila an Israeli soldier on leave to join the group. Soon after the trip ended, Ethan moved to Israel to be with Hila, and the two began making videos under the name H3H3 Productions (the H for Hila and the 3 standing in as an E for Ethan). They married, moved to America, and started a popular podcast.
A Jewish love story, until Thursday, when Hila, now mother to their three children, accused Ethan publicly of having a months-long affair.
“The betrayal I feel is immeasurable,” Hila said in an Instagram post. “My only family on this side of the world. How do I even begin to make sense of this?”
Ethan reposted her statement.
Their podcast is run by a handful of crew members who often chime in and participate in various skits and bits. The crew also shared a statement saying they stand with Hila and refuse to work with Ethan, though they added they don’t know what this will mean for the future of the show.
A couple roiled by Oct. 7
The left-leaning, secular couple’s videos and podcasts focused primarily on pop culture, internet drama and general politics, not Jewish or Israeli issues.
Both Ethan and Hila would make statements sometimes when tensions in Israel flared, and they would occasionally speak out against IDF actions that upset them.
In 2021, Ethan started a podcast with political commenter Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing influencer, called Leftovers, a nod to their leftist politics.
Then came Oct. 7.
Ethan, an American Israeli dual citizen like Hila, was horrified by the attacks but quick to call the IDF genocidal in the aftermath. In their first episode together after Oct. 7, Ethan and Piker said the show would continue through their disagreements. The episode was tense, and it was their last.
As Piker’s rhetoric on Israel intensified and became at times antisemitic, the two began a nasty internet feud, culminating in a nearly five-hour livestreamed debate.
Piker posted about the news of the affair on X, sharing a video of Ethan and expressing disgust for men who cheat.
“Now this is a high caliber man [with] good morals,” Piker said sarcastically. He also posted “Judge me by my enemies” after sharing Hila’s statement.
Hila, who owns a makeup and clothing company, increasingly came under scrutiny by Piker and others after Oct. 7 for her service in the IDF. Artists refused to work with her. One model she hired publicly disavowed her after finding out she was Israeli.
The couple was harassed, sometimes online, sometimes in-person, as they attempted to take what they viewed as a nuanced stance in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. The united front seemed to fortify their relationship, as Ethan, ever outspoken, routinely came to his wife’s defense.
Their show lost thousands of subscribers, but loyal fans stuck with them — fans who now say they are gutted and confused by the news of the affair. Many in disbelief noted that Ethan had Hila’s face tattooed on his arm less than two years ago as a surprise for her.
“The greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother,” says the quote surrounding the tattoo.
The Forward attempted to contact the Kleins through their work emails and did not immediately hear back.
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These Jewish college students have some ‘nonnegotiables’ for El-Sayed
At the University of Michigan, first-year student Robert Kashan, 18, and sophomore Jacob Reich, 19, sat behind a large blue sign. “Some things are nonnegotiable,” it declared in all caps.
The sign laid out their requirements for any candidate seeking their support: a commitment to Jewish safety, “including for Zionist Jews,” and supporting Jewish statehood in Israel, among other positions.
“Zionism is a legitimate part of the Democratic coalition, and a lot of us are feeling less represented by the Democratic Party,” Kashan told the Forward.
The students are part of a broader “Nonnegotiable” movement in Michigan, a coalition of Jewish Democrats who are spelling out their dealbreakers for candidates ahead of the Senate election between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
The movement has attracted national attention, with hundreds of rabbis across 34 states signing on to the “Nonnegotiable” demands. Meanwhile, about 20 students at the University of Michigan have publicly signed, while hundreds more offered support anonymously, according to Reich.
The “Nonnegotiable” supporters aren’t saying whom they’ll vote for if their concerns aren’t addressed — or whether they’ll vote at all. But they are pushing back against the assumption that Jewish voters will, as the saying goes, “vote blue no matter who,” urging El-Sayed to engage with their demands if he hopes to earn their support.
That’s in contrast with two other Jewish political camps, including a group called Michigan Jews for Democracy that endorsed El-Sayed. Their petition, which has garnered almost 1,000 signatures, notes that some signatories hold reservations about El-Sayed but are voting for him nonetheless as a check on President Trump.
“We understand that a vote is not a valentine; it’s a strategic chess move,” the petition reads.
A competing petition, dubbed “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” has drawn hundreds of signatures from Michigan Jews who plan to vote for Rogers. That petition similarly emphasizes that Rogers voters may still have reservations about the candidate: “Our vote for Mike Rogers does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump,” it reads.
“Nonnegotiable,” meanwhile, rejects the idea that Jewish voters would have to choose between Zionist and Democratic values. Some have criticized the nonnegotiable movement for ignoring the reality of the electoral choice at hand. Others have called it “a veiled attempt to excuse the actions of Jewish Democrats who want to feel validated about voting for Mike Rogers.”
But Kashan and Reich, who met at Hillel and plan to major in political science, said the “Nonnegotiable” movement was the only way they could see themselves engaging in the election, as they felt increasingly pulled between their identities as Democrats and as Jews.
Some Michigan Jews have expressed alarm at El-Sayed’s questioning of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state and his decision to campaign alongside controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric. Rogers, who Trump has endorsed, earlier this week called El-Sayed “anti-Jew.”
In a letter to Michigan Jews, El-Sayed has vowed to “stand up against antisemitism and take the threat of violence against our Jewish community incredibly seriously.” He has also hired a Jewish liaison in the final weeks leading up to the election.
This will be the first election when Kashan, who just turned 18, is eligible to vote, and Reich’s first national election after voting in a local primary in his hometown of Palo Alto, California. For both, voting Democratic in their first major election had once seemed like a given.
“I’m a Jewish Democrat, and I want Democrats to take the Senate,” Reich said. “I want to vote for a Democrat in my own state.”
They’re still holding out hope that will happen — and that, with less than two weeks until the Nov. 3 election, El-Sayed will sign on to their petition.
And if he doesn’t? Neither student is ready to say.
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