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Meet the 2 Jews of Guyana, a South American nation with a tradition of religious tolerance
(JTA) — When Janet Jagan, an immigrant from the United States, made history by becoming Guyana’s prime minister in 1997, she was thought to be the country’s only Jew.
In fact, another Jew had recently purchased an island off the coast of Guyana, and 25 years later, there are at least two Jews living in the tiny South American nation. One is a Guyanese-British-Israeli guesthouse operator who has been working in Guyana since the 1970s. The other is a former Madison Avenue marketing executive from Chicago who until recently ran the country’s largest tour operator.
Both offer a window into three dynamics that define Guyana: a government that embraces all faiths, an economy based on extractive industries and an expansive rainforest the country hopes will be a draw for its growing ecotourism industry.
Guyana, an English-speaking country of roughly 800,000, came to international prominence in 1978 as the site of the Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones were killed, either by suicide or murder.
These days, though, the country is drawing attention for the recent discovery of oil off its coast. ExxonMobil announced the discovery in 2015 and promptly began developing Guyana’s oil resources. With over 11 billion barrels of reserves and producing over 350,000 barrels per day, Guyana is on track to produce more than 1 million daily barrels by 2030, potentially transforming one of South America’s poorest countries.
It was an earlier extractive industry that first brought Raphael Ades to Guyana. Born in Tel Aviv in 1951 to an Italian-Jewish mother and a Syrian-Jewish father, Ades had a peripatetic childhood. The family moved first to Milan when Ades, who goes by Rafi, was 11, after his father Meyer entered the diamond trade, then two years later to southwestern Germany. They landed in Pforzheim, known at the time as Goldstadt because of the prominence of jewelry and precious stone trading locally.
But the family was not yet settled: In 1967, Meyer took the family to London, where Ades finished high school and took his university entrance exams, excelling in all of the languages he had picked up — English, French, Italian, German and Hebrew. As a psychology student at the University of London, Ades began helping his father, who maintained an office in London’s diamond district, at work. His father contracted out the polishing, and one of the polishers was Indo-Guyanese.
“That day, my dad took out the atlas and started to read up on Guyana,” Ades recalled. “‘This is somewhere I want to go,’ he told me.”
During a trip to visit an Israeli friend in Venezuela, Meyer went on a prospecting trip to Guyana, and registered the Guyana Diamond Export company. When he suffered a heart attack, Ades and his mother flew to Georgetown to be with him. Barely 21, Ades stepped in to take a larger role in the business. He flew with other diamond buyers into the rural mining areas, and learned the operations were producing thousands of carats of diamonds.
“I stayed in Guyana through the second half of 1972 and fell in love with the place,” Ades recalled. “I went to the [main] Stabroek market in Georgetown, seeing all of the iguanas and macaws. When my dad recuperated, I started going back to Guyana myself.”
His mining business thrived. In 1997, he bought Sloth Island, a 160-acre outpost about a two-hour journey from Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, requiring an hour-long car ride through the small villages that dot the Atlantic coast, and then an hour’s boat ride down the widening Essequibo River, passing pristine forests lined with mangroves and Indigenous villages.
When Ades bought the property, it was mostly underwater. He brought in workers from neighboring villages to pump out the water, build up the sand and retaining walls and add structures. Sloths were already there, but he brought ocelots and monkeys from neighboring islands, as well as other birds. (The ocelots, he said, used to eat the electrical wires and open the fridge.)
Now anchoring Sloth Island is a blue and white guesthouse, a series of covered huts for dining and hammock relaxation and a wooden walkway for nature walks through partially cleared forest. Indigenous guides identify the numerous species of plants and birds. The pandemic has receded as a threat to business, and the island hosts tourists every weekend — though climate change is presenting new issues.
“There are many times that the river floods part of the island and I lose sand and soil,” Ades said. “We have to keep on pumping out water and repairing damage to the buildings when that happens.”
The year after he bought the island, his widowed mother, then living in Belgium, broke her hip. When she was well enough to travel she moved to Guyana to be with her son, dividing her time between Georgetown and Sloth Island. When she died in 2009, Ades was at a loss given the lack of a Jewish cemetery, synagogue, and minyan required to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. He was interested in burying her across from Sloth Island, on a hill in the mining town of Bartica just across the river. But a Jewish friend from France facilitated a connection with the Surinamese Jewish community, who prepared the body for burial in the cemetery adjacent to Paramaribo’s main synagogue.
“That’s the last time I was in a synagogue, in 2010, after my mother passed,” Ades recalled.
A view of Raphael Ades’ resort on Sloth Island. (Seth Wikas)
The absence of Jews in Guyana is a notable lacuna in a country that otherwise boasts a broad range of religions. History records a colony of Dutch Jews who settled in northwestern Guyana in the 17th century to produce sugarcane, but the English destroyed that colony in 1666, dispersing the Jewish residents. Jews from Arab lands moved to Guyana in the late 19th and 20th centuries to escape persecution but then migrated elsewhere; Jews fleeing Europe came in 1939 but did not settle long enough to establish a sustained community.
Janet Jagan was an anomaly: Born Janet Rosenberg in Chicago, she married a Guyanese man in the United States and moved with him to Guyana in 1947. Her father Cheddi Jagan was trained as a dentist but entered politics as Guyana gained independence from Great Britain, serving as the first premier of the semi-independent colonial government in the early 1960s and then as the country’s fourth president in the 1990s. When he died in 1997, Janet Jagan was sworn in as his replacement and then won a term of her own later that year. She died in 2009.
According to the 2012 census, Guyana is about two-thirds Christian, a quarter Hindu, and less than 10% Muslim, with smaller populations of Rastafarians and Baha’is. Guyana’s cities and towns are dotted with churches, mandirs and mosques, and the country has enshrined freedom of religion in its constitution. Christian, Hindu and Muslim holy days are national holidays.
“We embrace all faiths and are always looking to build bridges across communities,” Mansoor Baksh, a leader within the country’s Islamic Ahmadiyya movement, told JTA. Omkaar Sharma, a member of the country’s Hindu Pandit Council, said something similar: “We have a long tradition of co-existence and celebrating each other’s holidays. It’s what makes Guyana special.”
On the occasion of the Hindu festival of Diwali last month, President Mohamed Irfaan Ali, South America’s only Muslim head of government, emphasized the country’s inclusivity when he told the nation: “Under the One Guyana banner, our people are coming together, rejecting the forces of division and hatred, and uniting in the pursuit of peace, progress and prosperity.”
The sentiments have had practical implications for the country’s two Jews. In 2017, when a Guyana Tourism Authority group was slated to travel to Suriname for a conference on travel catering to Muslim tourists, the Mauritanian organizer of the event protested the presence of Jewish participants. There were supposed to be two: Ades, and Andrea de Caires, then head of the country’s largest private tour operator, Wilderness Explorers.
“I got a call from the Guyanese Tourism Minister at 1 a.m., who asked me if I was Jewish, and he explained the situation. And I thought, this [antisemitism] is still going on in the world?” de Caires remembered.
The Guyanese tourism minister refused to abide by the ban, de Caires proudly said, and told the Surinamese hosts and conference organizers: “If Jews aren’t allowed, then none of us are going.” The Surinamese, long known for their religious tolerance, also refused to accept the prohibition, and said that all participants were welcome (in Suriname’s capital Paramaribo, a mosque stands next to a synagogue and they share a parking lot). Both de Caires and Ades attended the event.
“When I arrived at the conference, the Surinamese minister of tourism welcomed me, and the director general of Guyana’s tourism ministry gave me the microphone to open the conference. We [Rafi and I] went in with our heads held high,” de Caires said.
De Caires has lived in Guyana since 2010 but her path to Guyana took a different route from Ades’. Born Andrea Levine in Chicago as the granddaughter of a rabbi, she traveled extensively as a child with her physician father, who taught her the importance of creating a Jewish home.
“Judaism was always a part of my life — we celebrated the holidays, lit candles on Friday night, but my father would often say, ‘Going to temple doesn’t make you Jewish,’” Caires said.
De Caires moved to New Jersey and trained as a jeweler, working with clients that included Tiffany’s. She transitioned to working at Bloomingdale’s in sales and then management, and then she moved on to the cosmetic company Borghese, where she became vice president of sales and marketing.
“I got caught up in Madison Avenue, a single mom of three kids, and then I met Salvador,” she recalled. “And I knew there was no point in pursuing a relationship if I wouldn’t move to Guyana.”
Salvador is Salvador de Caires, her Guyanese husband whom she met through her sister. Visiting Guyana for the first time in 2008, she fondly recalled her first visit to the Karanambu Lodge in the country’s south, a former cattle ranch that is now a conservation hub sitting at the center of Guyana’s forests, rivers, and savannahs. The most accessible route is via airplane from Georgetown and then four-by-four vehicle. While based at the lodge, de Caires continued to take conference calls for her New York-based career, while learning more about Guyana and the business of running a tourist destination off the beaten path. She and Salvador moved permanently to Guyana in 2010 to take over the day-to-day management of the lodge.
“When we moved to Guyana, it never occurred to me there would never be a Jewish community here. There’s a Jewish community everywhere,” de Caires remembered thinking. “That was pretty startling.”
Andrea de Caires is shown with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali. (Courtesy of de Caires)
So when they moved from Karanambu in 2016 to work at (and eventually lead) Wilderness Explorers in Georgetown, de Caires was committed to opening her home to Guyanese friends and neighbors with Hanukkah parties and Passover seders.
“The first year we had a Hanukkah party, our invitation went out for latkes and black cake (a traditional Guyanese dish), and we had government ministers, ambassadors and local friends over,” she recalled. “I told the story of the holiday and we lit the candles.”
It wasn’t the first time de Caires had been single handedly responsible for the fostering Jewish traditions in Guyana. She recalled an incident in 2012 when a Colombian-Jewish tourist came to Karanambu Lodge during Passover and asked her to make matzah brei. Under a thatched roof, she was able to make the holiday delicacy for her visitor.
For Ades, too, it is hosting that makes him most appreciate his chosen home in Guyana.
“I will always remember Feb. 1, 1963, the day we left Israel. We had always planned to return,” he said. “But I’m still here. Between then and now I have lived in so many places, and Guyana has been my home for a very long time. One of the best parts of my week is meeting new people who come to Sloth Island — people of different backgrounds from around the world. It is wonderful to welcome them all.”
De Caires plans to share her Jewish traditions once again next month, hosting another Hanukkah party for her Guyanese friends and neighbors. And with the worst of the pandemic in the rearview mirror, both Ades and de Caires are looking forward to booming tourist seasons. De Caires and her husband are also ready to begin a new professional chapter: They recently accepted new positions with a Guyanese conglomerate to develop its tourism operations at a riverine resort.
Does de Caires feel like she has lost something by establishing roots in a place without an established Jewish community?
“If I left here, that would mean there’s one less person to support others [including Jews],” de Caires replied. “I think it’s interesting Rafi and I are both in tourism — you need to have a lot of tenacity, but it’s important that we welcome others to this beautiful country.”
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‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
Perhaps you, like me, have had a very specific earworm for the last week. It’s not a song, though there is a sing-song-y element to it. It’s a chant: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish. My Christian Dior — Knicks in four!”
If you hadn’t heard, the New York Knickerbockers are in the finals for the first time since 1999, on a 13-game streak and looking good to win a championship NBA title they haven’t gotten since 1973. The city is going nuts. I am not a big sports fan, but even I have been caught up in the fever, watching the first two games of the best-of-seven finals pitting the Knicks against the San Antonio Spurs at sports bars where fire codes are being flagrantly broken and attendees have brought drums to assist in leading chants.
The newest chant was born from the mouth of a rabid fan featured in a surreal supercut of fan reactions that went viral. (The video also features a dancing robot wearing a jersey emblazoned with the Kalshi logo, the online predictions market that lets users bet on the NBA, sure, but also on what day the U.S. will bomb Iran.)
It pretty much instantly caught fire; my city councilman Chi Ossé posted a video with the slogan, while watching the second game’s nail-biter of a win. Shekar Krishnan, a city councilman from Queens, walked onto the main stage at Gov Ball to lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of the chant.
Beyond the rhyme scheme — which, if we’re being honest, is a little bit difficult to nail — what made this chant catch on so fast is its ability to capture a certain ineffable quality of New Yorkiness. There’s diversity, there’s humor — I’m sorry but it is very funny to name two of the major Abrahamic religions with pride and then ignore the one practiced by the majority of Americans in favor of a fashion designer — and there’s a sense of unity as the city rallies behind its long-losing sports team.
And, at a time of rising antisemitism and just generally bad PR for the Jews, I am heartened to see the city embrace its Jewishness.
Bagels have long been a metonym for the city, and a source of great pride and snobbery for its residents, a food not incidentally rooted in Jewish history. Jews run some of the city’s most beloved neighborhood institutions. They have represented New York on the page and the screen — think Nora Ephron, Fran Drescher, Leonard Bernstein and Woody Allen (for better or for worse). Jews have imparted a Jewish humor, sensibility and even accent that have so shaped the city that they are now basically synonymous. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve met who are not Jewish, but feel as though they are by virtue of growing up in the city.
This hasn’t always been a positive thing. Sometimes equating New York with Jewishness has been used as a sort of racist dogwhistle; Mitch McConnell, for example, asked voters whether they really wanted “somebody from New York” to “set the agenda” as a way of signalling that Chuck Schumer is too Jewish, too liberal, too out of touch with real Americans — in short, the same antisemitic “rootless cosmopolitan” stereotype that has long motivated hatred against Jews.
Of course, the chant isn’t magical, and many of the now-familiar political dynamics came into play. Some communities of Jews are at odds with the way the city is shifting, particularly with the election of Zohran Mamdani, and some posts of the chant have comments from Jews annoyed at being lumped into the same cultural moment as a mayor they see as their enemy. (“Hi, we’re actually humans, not baked goods,” wrote one user. “We’re currently experiencing the highest rate of hate crime in the city. This isn’t cute.”) And, on the flip side of the political spectrum, other commenters accused those spreading the chant of doing “full on genocide rehab,” seemingly for merely mentioning Jews in a positive context.
But however online commentators want to spin the chant, the reality on the street is pure hype. As the rapper Fat Joe put it when interviewed at Madison Square Garden after the game: “I seen Hasidic Jews break dancing with Black kids. This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.” (Video proof bears this out.) Somehow, even the local Hare Krishna gathering got in on the Knicks mania.
That’s the true beauty of the city’s diversity — everyone lives together regardless of their political disagreements. And they can still unite in a common cause: the Knicks.
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West Point graduated more Jewish cadets this year than ever before, official says
The very first class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1802 consisted of two graduates, one of whom was a Jew named Simon Levy who served briefly in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before passing away at the age of 33. Levy was accepted into the academy based on his skill in mathematics and the strength of his ”good conduct” at the Battle of Maumee Rapids, one of the last skirmishes in the Indian War in Ohio in 1794.
This year on May 23, according to Col. Benjamin Wallen, a lay Jewish leader involved in the West Point Hillel chapter and the academy’s Jewish choir, 30 Jewish cadets graduated from the academy. Though West Point’s Public Affairs Office said it couldn’t confirm the number of Jewish cadets because the military academy “does not track or maintain official data on cadets’ religious affiliations, Col. Wallen said the Class of 2026 had the most Jews in West Point’s 224-year history.
Asked what accounted for the upsurge in Jews at West Point, Wallen said the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the rise in antisemitism are likely factors.
“This is one place that none of that has reared its ugly head,” Wallen said of the ubiquitous campus demonstrations against Israel. “Not a hint of it. Because that’s just not who we are. There’s no place for hate of any kind at West Point.”
Wallen, a Jewish officer with 30 years in the Army, is a civil and environmental engineering professor at West Point and also serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Development. He called West Point “a wonderful place to be Jewish and to serve your country.”
Two of the grads in the Class of ’26 are twin sisters from Millburn, NJ. Catherine Brodsky is headed to Duke Medical School to become an Army surgeon. Her sister Claudia is bound for Anchorage, Alaska, where she’ll serve as a logistics officer.
“I had the most amazing time at West Point,” Brodsky told me over the phone from Budapest, where she and her sister are visiting. “I’m very grateful for it. I think it was really instrumental in challenging me and making me grow as a person and as a leader.”
The newly minted second lieutenant said the Jewish cadets had a deep sense of community.
“We had a lot of events that kept us close-knit, like choir and various trips,” she said. “Celebrating the holidays together was really important.”
Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff, a professor of Judaic Studies at Stern College for Women in Manhattan who conducts extra-curricular classes at West Point, hosted the Jewish cadets at his home in nearby Monsey during Jewish holidays and Shabbat.
“They really are the most remarkable bunch of men and women,” Hajioff said. “From my talking to the students, I’d say there’s definitely been a shift of young men and women wanting to protect this country.”
Rabbi Hajioff posted photos on Instagram of the baccalaureate service for Jewish cadets at which the Jewish choir performed. One photo showed him standing next to Ron Chajmovic of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in his dress whites.
Lt. Chajmovic, who attended Georgia Military College before arriving at West Point, is headed to helicopter flight school, Hajioff said. His older brother Yoni is in the Israel Defense Forces and is currently stationed in Gaza according to their grandfather, Paul Chajmovic. The elder Chajmovic, who is about to turn 80, served in the Israeli air force during the Six-Day War.
“I miss it, believe it or not,” he told me. “I would volunteer again but I’m too old.”
Chajmovic’s other grandfather came from Israel to West Point for the graduation ceremony.
West Point’s Class of ‘27 and Class of ‘28 both have 27 Jewish cadets, according to Col. Wallen, though he said that Jewish representation is down in the Class of ’29, which he said has 17 or 18 Jews.
The Class of ‘30 will include an 18-year-old graduate of a Jewish day school in Nevada. Yonah Mowery arrives at West Point on June 29 to start six weeks of basic training. Mowery is a graduate of the Adelson School in Las Vegas, which was started by the late Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish casino billionaire and Netanyahu supporter. Mowery ran cross country, played basketball and swam on his school team. He took 10 advanced placement classes and participated in Moot Beit Din, a student competition based on rabbinical court.
“I know that by being in the American military, I will be defending not just Jews in Israel but Jews around the world because the United States is a major world power,” Mowery told me in a telephone interview.
The Mowery family has a long history of military service. His paternal grandfather served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. His grandfather’s uncle, Mowery said, was among the American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau. And there were 13 Mowery men who fought for the Union and perished at Gettysburg.
“The more Jews we have in the American military, the less alone we all feel,” Mowery said. “It’s an honor to be in the United States military as a Jewish kid, especially since this country is founded on Jewish and Christian values.”
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The visionary Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust but not its aftermath
Paul Celan: A Life
By Anna Arno
Translated by Soren Gauger
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $35
During a 1969 poetry reading in Israel, Paul Celan’s audience requested “Deathfugue,” his most famous poem. With its hypnotic images of death as “a master from Deutschland,” prisoners drinking the “black milk of dawn” and smoke rising to “a grave in the clouds,” it remains one of the most powerful artifacts of the Holocaust.
But like a rock star weary of endlessly repeating his greatest hits, Celan declined. Instead, he offered other poems, scorned by some commentators as “hermetic, esoteric, divorced from reality.”
So we learn from Anna Arno’s intelligent, intricate biography, Paul Celan: A Life, ably translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger. Interweaving literary criticism with Celan’s life story, Arno quotes liberally from Pierre Joris’ English translations. Even so, she can’t quite do the work justice. In translation and wrenched from their poetic context, Celan’s innovative verses, credited with a radical remaking of the German language, come across as cryptic and impenetrable.
Arno covers Celan’s schooling, wartime experiences, work history, travels, friendships, psychiatric ordeals and overlapping romantic interests, at times departing from strict chronology. Though defensible, the narrative strategy renders the book somewhat convoluted.
One thread is Celan’s intermittent, decadeslong involvement with the accomplished Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann. That relationship, more passionate and enduring for Bachmann, preceded his mostly happy marriage to the French artist Gisèle Lestrange and continued during it. In an odd twist, Bachmann and Lestrange, bonded by both their love for Celan and their anxiety about his well-being, developed “a kind of impossible sisterly friendship.”
Despite Celan’s devotion to his wife, “other women,” Arno writes, “were always drifting through his life.” A chapter toward the end of the biography details some of Celan’s most important romantic relationships. Other chapters focus on his inventiveness as a translator and his worsening mental illness.
Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania (officially Cernăuți, and now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) on the fringes of the recently defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The French-sounding Celan is a pen name, an anagram of Ancel, a Romanian version of Antschel.
Celan’s parents were German-speaking Jews, and German was Celan’s native language. But he was a polyglot, a talent that shaped his poetry and enabled his career as a translator. Along with Romanian, in which he wrote some early poems, and French, the language of his postwar life in Paris, he learned Russian (under Soviet occupation) and English. He had at least “a passive knowledge of Yiddish,” picked up enough Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah and studied Italian, Latin and Greek. “His intellectual ease gave him a sense of superiority,” Arno writes.
World War II interrupted Celan’s medical studies in France, and back home he enrolled in Romance language courses. The Soviet occupation was brutal but, for Jews, the Romanian fascist regime that succeeded it was worse. Celan’s parents were deported and died in a Nazi labor camp. Celan, separated from them, survived forced labor, but remained “wracked with grief” over his parents’ fate. He would describe “Deathfugue,” written in 1945, as his mother’s epitaph and grave. The poem may have influenced Theodor Adorno, who famously described poetry after Auschwitz as “barbaric,” to modify his views.
After leaving a ruined Czernowitz for Bucharest, where Celan translated, wrote poetry, flirted with Surrealism and “bounced from one relationship to the next,” he traveled to Vienna. “Young, dashing, full of charm,” he eventually settled in Paris and became a naturalized French citizen. But he chose German as his poetic language, despite the emotional dissonance that entailed.
Over the years, he traveled to Germany to read his work and accept prizes. In the process, he developed relationships with leading postwar German writers, including Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. But the 1950s were a tricky time. “He could have crossed paths with a murderer at every step,” Arno writes.
Celan recoiled viscerally at what he saw as persistent antisemitic currents in German culture, which hadn’t yet reckoned with the magnitude of Nazi crimes. He interpreted bad reviews as instances of antisemitism, and Arno suggests that he wasn’t always wrong.
Even more traumatic were accusations of plagiarism leveled against him by Claire Goll, the widow of Yvan Goll, whose poetry he had translated. Arno describes the charges as both malicious and baseless, and “probably an act of revenge for her spurned advances.”
They nevertheless affected Celan’s reputation and threatened his health. “Claire Goll’s smear campaign was to become the main cause of the poet’s mental breakdown,” Arno asserts. It’s a strong statement. Certainly, he had endured other losses: the murder of his parents, the death of his day-old infant son, François, after a botched delivery.
On the cusp of middle age, Arno reports, Celan experienced bursts of paranoia. “He could not always separate justified precautions from obsessive mistrust, vigilance from a fit of persecution mania,” she writes. “His deeply buried despair, moral severity, and tempestuous personality all caused sudden and violent fits.”
In 1962, he had what Arno calls “his first bout of psychosis,” which included hallucinations and violent episodes. He was hospitalized and medicated and underwent psychotherapy. Insulin injections, a since-discredited treatment, damaged his motor skills. Even during his hospitalizations, he continued to write poetry. (His productivity in the throes of mental health crises calls to mind Sylvia Plath.)
Arno, noting that Celan’s medical records remain sealed and his journals unavailable, doesn’t offer a diagnosis. The hallucinations and paranoia suggest schizophrenia, but Arno also mentions mania and depression, along with numerous suicide attempts. He tried his best to stay connected to his only child, Eric. But his instability cost him many friendships and ultimately his marriage.
In 1970, the 49-year-old poet drowned himself in the Seine, joining a sad company of writers who survived the Holocaust but not its emotional aftermath. What exactly triggered Celan’s suicide is impossible to know. Arno says only: “He was no longer capable of supporting the weight of the past as it flushed to the surface.”
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