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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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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.
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Michigan Democrats await Senate winner in party’s biggest test yet on Israel
The Democratic primary for the open Senate seat in Michigan appeared too close to call Tuesday night, with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens locked in a tight race that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and a referendum on Israel supporters’ influence in Democratic politics.
According to unofficial results, El-Sayed, a physician and the son of Egyptian immigrants, held a narrow lead over opponent Rep. Haley Stevens, the establishment favorite — 49.9% vs. 46.3% — with 65% of the vote counted for the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters.
The Michigan contest is AIPAC’s largest investment this election cycle. Its super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million on ads attacking El-Sayed and promoting Stevens, according to recent FEC filings. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens’ own campaign through its donors’ portal.
If El-Sayed prevails, it would deliver a blow to the establishment and to the U.S.-Israel fundraising group, AIPAC, its biggest setback since it started its direct political spending in 2021 and after years of helping defeat progressive critics of Israel who challenged congressional incumbents. The brand has become increasingly controversial among Democratic voters in the wake of the Gaza war. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC.
Supporters of El-Sayed remained optimistic that the candidate’s upset victory would be proof positive that the future of the Democratic Party lies in candidates who support cutting off U.S. aid to Israel and characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the progressive insurgent’s most prominent backer, said on CNN the race reflected a broader shift in Democratic politics. “What we are seeing, no matter what happens tonight in Michigan — and I hope very much that El-Sayed wins — is: you’re seeing the transformation of the Democratic Party, and what the debate within the Democratic Party is about,” he said. Sanders added that the campaign showed that progressive candidates are challenging the party establishment not only on ideology, but also on how campaigns are run.
Winning the primary may be the easier test. Michigan remains one of the nation’s top battleground states, and a close finish would suggest ongoing divisions within the Democratic coalition. El-Sayed will have to carry moderate Democrats who backed Stevens, while taking on former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in a race that could help determine control of the Senate. Recent polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
How we got here
The Michigan race became a culmination of several political currents that have been building for years.
It reflected lingering anger among Americans over the Gaza war, Democratic criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, frustration among progressives over AIPAC’s support for some Republicans who challenged the 2020 election results, and the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America, accelerated by the political rise of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race last year.
Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab-American communities and the birthplace of the “uncommitted” movement to protest the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war in the 2024 presidential primary, made it a natural testing ground for progressive forces.
El-Sayed highlighted the Gaza war and AIPAC’s involvement in Democratic primaries when he launched his campaign in April 2025 — months before AIPAC spent a dollar. He advocated for ending unconditional military aid to Israel and framed his candidacy as a fight against outside influence. Notably, El-Sayed supported the “uncommitted” movement, though he later endorsed Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out.
According to data compiled by Milan Singh, a fellow at The Argument, a liberal opinion-focused media publication, insurgent progressive candidates for Congress mentioned Israel in 48% of their fundraising emails.
With most major primaries already decided, this race became the biggest Democratic showdown yet over Israel.
Jewish divide
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race — with Jews both in fierce opposition to El-Sayed and fiery support.
For many Jews, 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, were cause for alarm. El-Sayed also came under fire for calling the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas.
Rep. Hillary Scholten, a second-term Michigan Democrat, said on CNN Tuesday night that El-Sayed reinforced concerns some voters had about him by campaigning again with Piker in the final days before the primary. “Elections are about choices,” she said. “What is the message that you want to send to your voters?”
At the same time, El-Sayed courted Jewish voters. He attended a Passover seder at Congregation T’chiyah, a progressive Reconstructionist synagogue outside Detroit. Many of its congregants volunteered for El-Sayed’s campaign with a group dubbed “Jews for Abdul.”
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin — who lost his House election against Stevens in 2022 after AIPAC poured millions into defeating him — endorsed El-Sayed.
In the final days of the campaign, Stevens had sharpened her concerns about El-Sayed, accusing him of blaming “all of your problems on Jewish Americans.”
El-Sayed rejected accusations of antisemitism and argued that his critics conflate the Israeli government with the Jewish people.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
The post Michigan Democrats await Senate winner in party’s biggest test yet on Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco
For all of us who don’t know much about geography, international political crises are always welcome. Since the start of Trump 2.0, we have been discovering places we never knew existed, but now present existential threats. From straits — think Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab — to islands — whether Greenland or Heard and McDonald — we now have, along with higher gas and food prices, a better appreciation of our world.
Late last week, yet another obscure part of the globe was suddenly brought, this time without our president’s assistance, to the attention of western media: Ceuta. A city of approximately 83,000 inhabitants, Ceuta is ensconced on a peninsula which, though attached to the Moroccan coastline, is nevertheless under Spanish rule, even while it enjoys a significant amount of autonomy.
As we now know, Ceuta was also the magnet that, starting on July 30, drew about 72,000 young Moroccans who sought, mostly by swimming, to reach its beaches and, from there, perhaps reach Europe. That nearly 100 young men and women drowned in the effort — one that moreover proved naught for those who reached Ceuta as nearly all of them were obliged to return to Morocco — adds a heartrending chapter to the complex history of a city where tragedy has long mixed with comity.
Founded two millennia earlier by the Phoenicians, Ceuta was successively ruled by the Romans, Ottomans, Portuguese and Spaniards. In 1492, when the kingdom expelled its Jewish population, a few thousand crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, where they managed to avoid the bloody reach of the Inquisition. Yet they were not the first Jews to make their home on this tip of North Africa; as early as the 11th century, the Spanish-Jewish poet Abraham Ibn Ezra refers to the Jews of Ceuta in one of his poems. For the next few centuries, the small community lived in relative peace alongside its Christian and Muslim neighbors, a continuation, argues the historian Veronica Viviana Reyes, of the medieval “al-Andalus,” that brilliant and brief moment of cultural convergence between the three “peoples of the Book.”
Come the mid-20th century, the steadily dwindling Jewish community received reinforcements with the arrival of a few hundred Sephardic Jews who left their native Morocco in the wake of its independence from France. Earlier that century, several hundred Indians, mostly Sindhi, who were subjects under the British Raj also arrived in Ceuta, drawn by the city’s busy trading and commercial opportunities. Though the statistics are approximate — Spain does not require citizens to list their religion — about 58% of Ceuta’s population is Christian, 40% is Muslim, and the remaining couple of percentage points comprise its Jewish and Hindi communities. [ As a result, this ancient city attached by a thread of rock and soil to North Africa has accomplished a remarkable feat: the braiding of four distinct faith communities into what the locals call convivencia, or peaceful coexistence.
Yet, as last week’s event revealed, convivencia is a fragile thing. The influx of Moroccan youths on the beaches and streets of Ceuta, though over as quickly as it began, has become the gift that does not stop giving for the extreme-right media and politicians in countries bordering Spain. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ethno-nationalist party the National Rally, demanded that the French government “reinforce its border controls.”
Not to be outdone, her second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, warned that these “invaders will soon be on our streets.” Going a step further, the extreme-right prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called for Spain’s suspension from the Schengen Accord—the guarantee of free movement of citizens across the borders of European Union nations — and resurrected immigration controls for Spanish citizens, although Spain does not share a border with Italy. (This geographical fact did not deter Mette Fredricksen, the prime minister of distant Denmark, from voicing her support for Meloni.)
Inevitably, the old chestnut of a Jewish conspiracy has also been resurrected. Public figures, ranging from antisemitic fantasist Candace Owens, through the former director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, to the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, have posted or reposted wink-wink, nudge-nudge claims that Israel orchestrated the mad rush of Moroccans towards Ceuta. The reason cited for this nefarious feat is Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to embarrass the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, who has been one of the harshest European critics of the war in Gaza and a proponent of a more liberal immigration policy than his European peers. The Moroccan government’s irritation over Spain’s support of Algerian claims to the western Sahara makes this baseless claim seem more reasonable.
The political and rhetorical theatrics have little to do with reality. Europe is not being overrun by what Marion Maréchal, a politician to the right of her aunt Marine Le Pen, described as a “veritable invasion” by “hordes of young Moroccans.” Or, for that matter, what her Spanish homologue, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the extreme-right party Vox, insisted was “an act of war” against Spain and, by extension, Europe.
This frenzied response deliberately ignores the fact that not a single Moroccan migrant entered Spain — a strait, after all, runs between Spain and Ceuta — and have nearly all been returned by Spanish soldiers and police to Morocco. Tellingly, residents of Ceuta have also used the word “invasion,” but with greater nuance. As a journalist for Le Monde reported, none of the locals she interviewed described the Moroccans as enemies. Though frightened by the sudden and massive influx, they also understood the migrants were not seeking “to rob them,” but instead to find a better future. Besides, as one Ceutan, Rachel Gomes, observed, she has Muslim in-laws. “This does not make for problems. Four cultures exist here — Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian — that live together remarkably well.” If only a similar convivencia reigned among the members of the European Union.
The post The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco appeared first on The Forward.
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Ad for Republican Colorado governor candidate depicts Jewish opponent with horns
An attack ad on the Jewish Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado has depicted him with red horns, drawing condemnation from the state Democratic party — and the apparent approval of the Republican nominee.
Invoking an ancient antisemitic canard that Jews have horns, the ad, created in support of Republican nominee Victor Marx and circulating on various social media platforms, called the Democratic nominee and Colorado’s current Attorney General Phil Weiser “the next threat to Colorado.”
The Colorado Democratic Party said on Facebook that the graphic was “antisemitic and disgusting” and called on Marx to disavow it.
Instead, Marx engaged with a post on X accompanied by the image, calling on Republicans to stop attacking each other, “unite, stay focused, and win.”
Throughout his campaign, controversy has followed Marx, a minister and author who some have categorized as a Christian fundamentalist. Others have called him a fabulist. On the campaign trail, Marx has claimed to be the first American into Gaza during the war with Israel, boasted about performing exorcisms by phone and said his stepfather forced him to kill a man at the age of 7.
A fellow Republican party member also formally accused him of accepting unlimited campaign contributions through his online merchandise store.
The Marx campaign did not respond to an inquiry by the Forward.
Weiser, who attends a Conservative synagogue in Denver, defeated U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet for the Democratic nomination in July. He also did not respond to an inquiry.
Polls show Weiser with a sizable lead over Marx. The Colorado governor’s seat has been held by a Democrat since 2008, and term-limited incumbent Gov. Jared Polis is also Jewish.
The post Ad for Republican Colorado governor candidate depicts Jewish opponent with horns appeared first on The Forward.
