Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post The Dominican Republic was a haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis. A museum project could tell that story. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits
The most important traffic reports these days usually come from the Strait of Hormuz.
“Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz dropped significantly over the weekend, The New York Times reported, “as a four-day exchange of attacks between Iran and the United States left some shipowners deciding it was too risky to transit.”
What’s going on with the Strait of Hormuz affects gas prices, stock prices, Americans’ moods — and the world economy.
But what does “strait” mean, anyway?
The word has been with us for a long time, and intriguingly, it appears in many famous translations of the Torah. It also pops up in translations of the New Testament.
“Strait” comes from the Latin for “strict.” It first appeared in English in the 14th century, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to clothing — “a garment, etc.: Tight-fitting, narrow.”
Over time, the meaning changed a bit, but it always had something to do with narrowness. From 1561 to 1725, it meant: “Of bonds, a knot: Tightly drawn.”
As the centuries passed, it attracted the attention of poets.
”It matters not how strait the gate,” wrote William Ernest Henley in his poem “Invictus.” “How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
It turns out that Henley was kind of into the subject of what words meant.
“The poet, who was one of the leading slang lexicographers of his day, saw the gates of heaven as strait — tight, narrow, difficult to get through,” the late great language columnist William Safire observed in 1984, when he wrote a column on “strait” and “straits.”
Maybe Henley had the New Testament in mind, too.
Matthew 7:13 in The King James Bible advises: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”
Today, according to Merriam-Webster, “strait” means “a comparatively narrow passageway connecting two large bodies of water — often used in plural but singular in construction.”
Henley, the poet, was using an archaic meaning — a narrow passage, without water.
In contemporary English, “strait” also has a secondary meaning — “a situation of perplexity or distress — often used in plural,” according to Merriam-Webster, but also according to anyone who has used the phrase “dire straits,” including, one would presume, the band Dire Straits.
Both physical and emotional space
“Strait” describes both a physical space — for example, a body of water — and an emotional space, like “dire straits.”
Perhaps that dual meaning is why the word “strait” appears in translations of the Torah. In the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, the Hebrew word tzar, or “narrow,” is translated as “strait.”
Consider 1 Samuel, 13:6, in the JPS translation from 1917:
“When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait — for the people were distressed — then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in holds, and in pits.”
Tzar has both a literal descriptive meaning and a figurative emotional meaning. Sure, as an adjective, it means narrow, such as in the famous song about the entire world being “a narrow bridge” — gesher tzar me’od.
But as ki tzar lo in Samuel 1 6:13 demonstrates, it can also refer to a tough circumstance, a strait. Similarly, perhaps, in contemporary Hebrew, someone might say, tzar li, or “I am saddened.”
These multiple meanings might lead a person to the hazardous question of whether one should say the “Strait of Hormuz” in the singular, or “Straits of Hormuz” in the plural.
That was what fascinated Safire in 1984. Today, his take feels like a postcard from another time — but it’s also soothing in this moment of, well, dire straits:
“My advice,”Safire wrote. “Go with the familiar; follow your ear. If you’re happy with the Straits of Gibraltar or Magellan, use the final s; if the place name is new to you, let the gazetteer crowd have its way.”
“Hormuz is unfamiliar to most Americans, and the Strait of Hormuz is therefore the name I would use, going along with Gary Hart and the stylebooks,” Safire continued. “But retain the singular sense: ‘The Straits of Gibraltar’ is a passage.’ ‘’The Strait of Hormuz’ is the next Quemoy and Matsu.”
I liked being distracted for a moment from Iran and Trump with the mention of “Gary Hart.”
That nostalgia reminded me that today’s Strait of Hormuz news cycle, about a traffic jam for the fuel and food we need to live, is about both a location and a feeling.
Sure, the waterway may be physically open, or, at least of this writing, effectively closed because of fear, but its status has other meanings too — like whether the Iranian regime actually won this war, and whether that narrow space is also a symbol of future peril.
And in those multiple meanings, strait echoes the Biblical tzar —narrow, yes, but also dangerous.
In Hebrew and in English, narrowness, perilousness and sadness frequently go together, indicating a world or a situation that must be navigated carefully. Perhaps a word like strait — a little bit singular, a little bit plural — captures it all.
The post As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Mamdani says ‘I can’t tell you I support’ Israel as a Jewish state
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he could not endorse states that privilege one religion over another, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, during a one-on-one interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.
“Democratic Socialists of America now says they no longer favor a two-state solution. “Is that the way you see it as well? Karl asked in the interview, which came days after Mamdani’s endorsed Democratic socialist candidates for Congress swept their New York Democratic primaries.
Among them, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier campaigned on platforms that included opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and support for Palestinian rights.
Mamdani replied to Karl: “The way I see it is equal rights for all people. And I think that that’s the truth for Israel. It’s the truth for any country in the world.”
When pressed by Karl that Israel is in fact a Jewish state and “that’s in the charter, that’s the way it is now,” Mamdani said he has consistently stated he supports “the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”
However, he added, “I believe that any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”
The backlash to Mamdani’s comments was quick. In a statement Sunday, Ambassador Ofir Akunis, Consul General of Israel in New York, said, “Mamdani, we do not need your recognition of the Jewish state. If you knew a little history, instead of spending all day inciting and spreading hatred, you would know that Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed full equality for all its citizens. That has been the reality since the day our state was established.”
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, posted on X, “Mamdani is either willfully ignorant or maliciously mendacious,” adding that “Israel has no official state religion.”
He also stated that there are multiple countries for which Islam is the state religion, with additional Muslim-majority countries declaring Islam as the state religion in their constitutions.
Karl also asked Mamdani about his broader views on Israel, which became a prominent issue during the New York Democratic primaries, particularly among candidates who support Israel and continued U.S. military aid.
Mamdani said voters made it clear that “they were tired of tens of billions of dollars being spent in our taxpayer dollars to violate international law to kill thousands of civilians.”
He added that currently “Palestine is described as if there is a ceasefire,” but more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during it. He said New Yorkers want to “follow international law, to believe in the humanity for all.”
Karl also pressed the mayor on the Poetica coffee shop incident in Brooklyn last week, where staff refused to take New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman’s money for a coffee purchase, calling him a “genocide enabler” because he supports Israel.
Mamdani said while he has “political disagreements” with Goldman (who lost his seat to Mamdani-backed Brad Lander), “I do believe that that’s a response that goes beyond that.”
And when asked about rising antisemitism in New York City, the mayor said that while Jews are a minority of the city’s population, they constitute a majority of victims of the hate crimes committed in the city. ”That’s something that’s unacceptable,” he said.
Akunis said, however, that “The surge in antisemitism across the United States, and particularly in New York, is the result of ignorance and a lack of knowledge, combined with a fundamental hatred of the Jewish people.”
He added, “I once again warn that Mamdani’s inflammatory rhetoric will end in very serious and violent acts against Jewish and Israeli communities throughout the city.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Mamdani says ‘I can’t tell you I support’ Israel as a Jewish state appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims
(JTA) — Two people lean down from an abstract version of a rail car. Their outstretched hands reach towards a family gathered around the car’s opening. The adults on the ground reach back, either to get help stepping into the car or to say good-bye.
That’s one side of the artist rendering of what will be a Holocaust monument. On the other side, train tracks lead to the entrance of the Nazis’ largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. A message across the top reads, “They were here. We remember.”
The sculpture by artists David Wilson and Stephen Hayes, called “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” is emotional on its own. But what makes the project planned for Charlotte, North Carolina, especially noteworthy is what will be alongside it.
Charlotte is the planned home for what its organizers believe is the first memorial plaza in the United States to both honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and remember the Holocaust in the same space. The Circle of Humanity: Monuments for Unity and Remembrance in Marshall Park will feature the 8-foot bronze statue of King currently in the park plus the new Holocaust monument.
Linking the two will be paved walkways, educational reflections and digital resources on the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement and the combined history of African Americans and Jews in the U.S. School and tour groups will take part in interactive educational experiences.
To those who might wonder why these monuments belong together, Rabbi Ya’aqov Walker points to a common inheritance. “You could just describe it plainly: white supremacy in continental Europe and white supremacy in the southeastern United States,” said Walker, who is Black and serves on the project’s education committee.
The groups also share deep resilience and desire for change, he said, which led to a significant Jewish presence in the civil rights movement in the United States 20 years after the Holocaust.
“It was very prescient in their minds, from King to any major civil rights leader who was committed to nonviolence, to study and learn what the Jewish experience was, and to build relationships with rabbis as fellow spiritual leaders,” said Walker, who co-leads the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance.
The new monument will replace a small one dedicated in 1979 that’s hidden in overgrown foliage. Project partners include the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance, Mecklenburg County, Queens University of Charlotte, the Stan Greenspon Holocaust Education Center, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg branch of the NAACP.
After a national search for artists that yielded 57 design proposals, a review committee narrowed the choices to eight finalists. Wilson and Hayes, who are Black and live in Durham, North Carolina, were one of two teams asked to submit their concepts. Though they had never designed a sculpture based on a Jewish theme, they were compelled by its juxtaposition to the King monument, “creating a broader dialogue about injustice, courage and the consequences of hatred,” Wilson told county commissioners during a recent public meeting.
David Wilson, left, and Stephen Hayes are the designers of “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” the winning design for the Circle of Humanity memorial in Charlotte’s Marshall Park. (Courtesy Circle of Humanity)
Their presentation moved Commissioner Leigh Altman, who is white, to reveal that her great-grandparents and many of their children were murdered in the Holocaust. About 25 to 30 Holocaust survivors live in the Charlotte area today.
“This shared partnership for me is a reminder across one of history’s worst genocides and the worst legacy of what America has done wrong, and brought it together to find a commonality, which was a failed obligation to recognize the humanity of others and to fight for it,” she said.
The second finalist team, Miriam Gusevich and Sal Pirrone from Washington, D.C., envisioned an abstract sculpture with thousands of silver circles to represent those killed by the Nazis. The proposed structure opened to a skylight in the shape of a Star of David. Members of Gusevich’s family died in the Holocaust.
“Circle of Humanity” organizers held 12 community feedback sessions, including at synagogues, a Black church and Johnson C. Smith University, a historically Black university. About 850 community members participated. More than 100 completed written surveys on their preferences. Ultimately, a majority favored the rail car image. At one session, participants audibly gasped when “In Transit” was revealed.
It’s yet to be determined which materials will be used to render the piece. Options range from cast and fabricated metal to large-scale 3-D printing. What likely won’t change is the sculpture’s bronze hue and structure.
“The skin tones can be interpreted in many ways, and it looks very similar to an auction block” used in the trafficking of enslaved people, Walker noted. He recalled that during a feedback session at a Black church, some church members teared up to see the reminder of family separation.
Urban Design Partners in collaboration with Groundworks Studio will develop the plaza, in a design called “Woven Histories.” Potential elements include a stone walkway with a plaid design. The plaid pays tribute to the dress that civil rights pioneer Dorothy Counts-Scoggins wore on the day in 1957 when she faced down an angry white mob to become the first Black student to attend a segregated high school in Charlotte.
The plaza will include benches and may incorporate decorative stone books. Like the monument design, the concept is still open to changes based on additional community feedback. The planned budget is just under $1 million, including a $100,000 endowment for programming and maintenance. If fundraising efforts are successful and the timeline stays on track, the plaza is scheduled to open in May 2027.
Marshall Park has particular resonance as the setting. It is part of the former Brooklyn, a Black neighborhood razed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal. More recently, Marshall Park has been a familiar site for protests and political demonstrations.
The idea for the innovative combination began with a discussion between Rev. Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NACCP, and Rabbi Judy Schindler, Sklut professor of Jewish studies at Queens University of Charlotte and executive director of Spill the Honey, a national non-profit which produces arts and educational materials intended to empower the Black-Jewish alliance to combat racism and antisemitism.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial statue in Charlotte’s Marshall Park, created by renowned sculptor Selma Burke, was dedicated on April 5, 1980. (Courtesy Arrowmount School of Arts and Crafts)
“It all came out of the same conversation, looking at the Civil Rights movement, looking at the rise in racial slurs and antisemitism, and just really understanding that we have to do something to elevate the importance of not only our cultures, but what love would look like in this country,” Mack said. “I thought it was important that we went back to the root of the civil rights movement, which was us collaborating.”
She acknowledges a few phone calls from members of Charlotte’s Black community who expressed concern about the collaboration in light of the war and political divides opened after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Others were unclear about the benefits of bringing the two histories together. But no vocal opposition has emerged to the project. Organizers say on-site education about the history of Black-Jewish ties in America is essential.
Charlotte has its own claims to this history. Humorist and social critic Harry Golden lived in the city and published his commentaries in The Carolina Israelite, a newspaper whose subscribers included Congressional members and well-known writers. In “The Vertical Negro Plan” in 1956, he pointedly noted that whites seemed to have no trouble standing next to Black Americans. It was only when Black people wanted to sit “that the fur begins to fly.” His tongue-in-cheek solution? Remove the seats at schools and lunch counters.
In 1971, attorney Adam Stein, father of N.C. Gov. Josh Stein, was part of the legal team who argued Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education before the Supreme Court. The case began the era of busing for school integration nationwide. Busing for that purpose officially ended in Charlotte in 2002, when the Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to lower-court ruling recognizing local schools as adequately desegregated .
Now, supporters hope the Circle of Humanity will be a catalyst for Black-Jewish collaborations in other cities. Schindler, named after a great-aunt who was killed during the Holocaust, wants the gathering spot to be a place not only for remembrance, but for inspiration and beginnings.
“It’s really important to me that we bring joy to this work,” she said, envisioning the opening ceremony filled with klezmer music as well as both soul food and Jewish noshes. She cautions against “letting those to seek to harm us control our thoughts and our struggles and our fears. We need to celebrate our culture and who we are with pride and joy, so I pray that this will be a centerpiece for cultural celebration of all sorts.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims appeared first on The Forward.
