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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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Jewish Americans Shouldn’t Be Shocked by Scott Wiener’s Genocide Lie
California State Sen. Scott Wiener. Photo: Screenshot
At first glance, California State Sen. and Democratic candidate for US Congress Scott Wiener is representative of what many consider a genuine American Jewish success story: a Jewish boy from New Jersey whose childhood memories were shaped by parents who helped build a local Conservative synagogue.
Wiener possesses the boy-next-door charm and familiarity of a Jewish American who came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, was academically gifted, and later graduated from Harvard Law School.
The budding lawmaker soon found his footing in politics and eventually rose to become a state senator in the nation’s most populous state.
The youthful-looking Wiener, who calls himself “one of the strongest LGBTQ civil rights champions in the nation,” also co-chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
The one critical wrinkle to Wiener’s path to Jewish political prominence is that the 55-year-old politician recently promoted the disgusting blood libel that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
After enduring jeers from left-wing attendees at last week’s candidate debate featuring Wiener and two other Democrats vying to succeed retiring Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Wiener pivoted from his initial refusal to characterize Israel’s actions as genocide and made the decision, days later, to turn against the Jewish state in a 90-second cringe-inducing video unveiled Sunday on the social media platform X.
For those following evolving attitudes toward Israel within liberal Jewish spaces, where Zionism is increasingly disassociated from Judaism, Wiener’s comments condemning Israel are perhaps the least shocking development in the progressive Democrat’s political career.
Jewish communities across America have spent decades nurturing ideological identities that focused on cultivating loyal liberals rather than strong Jews.
Moreover, when support for Israel is passed down from one generation to the next, with little explanation of the moral, legal, and historical rights undergirding the Jewish people’s right for self-determination, Zionism is treated as another dispensable political movement.
It’s a phenomenon that leaves people like Wiener susceptible to the anti-Israel animus entrapping a rising cohort of Jewish Democrats. It’s why anti-Zionists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be quick to denounce a swastika plastered at a Jewish school in Brooklyn but grant a pass to violent pro-Hamas mobs descending on New York City synagogues that aim to disrupt Israel-related events.
Absent a firm framework explaining why it is a Jewish imperative to advance a pro-Israel narrative, the strategy to widen the wedge between Zionism and one’s Jewish identity will yield more Jews like Wiener who cave to the whims of keffiyeh-wearing voters.
Wiener is not alone.
In New York, 25-year-old Jewish progressive Cameron Kasky was, until this week, running for Congress in the state’s 12th district and recently returned from a Palestinian-led trip to Israel.
In a nod to his deep hatred of the Jewish state, Kasky, who grew up in South Florida attending Hebrew School, lists “Stop Funding Genocide” as his first policy priority on his website.
It was only 10 years ago when such overt antisemitic positions would have earned a candidate a place on the political sidelines.
Since then, the landscape has changed dramatically. A Washington Post Jewish Americans poll conducted in September revealed that the distorted views espoused by Israel’s detractors in the diaspora align with a significant portion of American Jewry.
In the study, 61 percent of American Jews responded that they believe Israel is committing war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, with nearly 40 percent accusing the Jewish state of “genocide.”
The troubling spike in anti-Israel attitudes among American Jews became more conspicuous over the last several years, as social justice movements surrounding climate change, the women’s march movement, and George Floyd gave Jews who harbor little interest in following the traditional tenets of Judaism an avenue through which to wield their cultural Judaism.
In an effort to keep sanctuaries full and congregants satisfied, non-orthodox institutions coalesced around cultural issues that accelerated a liberal and increasingly secularized world order.
Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, has repeatedly demanded that Jewish leaders meet the “historical demands of our time” and is among several leaders calling for a course correction within the Reform movement.
Still, since Wiener has now planted himself on the side of the Democrats’ anti-Israel faction, the Jewish organizations Wiener was so eager to frequent as a guest speaker in the past released a joint statement that was charitable in their repudiation of the candidate’s use of the term “genocide.”
The truth is that Wiener has long fashioned himself a progressive who rarely shies from admonishing Israel.
His regurgitation of the genocide lie reflects less of a shift and more of a sharpening of previous statements where he publicly charged Israel’s government with deliberately starving Palestin
Wiener also has a history of treating Hamas and Israel as “moral equivalents” and has gone on record saying that he will not accept donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Put simply, it was obvious long ago that Wiener would not emerge as the Democrats’ next John Fetterman, a US senator from Pennsylvania who, amid criticism from his own party, has remained a steadfast supporter of Israel.
The seeds of Wiener’s disgraceful break with the Jewish state were planted long ago.
Raised with a scant appreciation or understanding on the importance of a Jewish homeland, the state senator fell under a secularized umbrella of “universal human rights.”
Sadly, his views on Israel are symbolic of what constitutes the path to political success in today’s Jewish Democratic Party orbit.
Irit Tratt is a writer, an American and pro-Israel advocate. Follow her on X @Irit_Tratt.
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Iranian Regime’s Deadly Crackdown Quells Protests, Residents and Rights Group Say
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iran‘s deadly crackdown appears to have broadly quelled protests for now, according to a rights group and residents, as state media reported more arrests on Friday in the shadow of repeated US threats to intervene if the killing continues.
The prospect of a US attack has retreated since Wednesday, when President Donald Trump said he’d been told killings in Iran were easing, but more US military assets were expected to arrive in the region, showing the continued tensions.
US allies, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, conducted intense diplomacy with Washington this week to prevent a US strike, warning of repercussions for the wider region that would ultimately impact the United States, a Gulf official said.
Israel’s intelligence chief David Barnea was also in the US on Friday for talks on Iran, according to a source familiar with the matter, and an Israeli military official said the country’s forces were on “peak readiness.”
The White House said on Thursday that Trump and his team have warned Tehran there would be “grave consequences” if there was further bloodshed and added that the president was keeping “all of his options on the table.”
The protests erupted on Dec. 28 over economic hardship and swelled into widespread demonstrations calling for the end of clerical rule, which culminated in three days of mass violence at the end of last week.
According to opposition groups and an Iranian official, more than 2,000 people were killed in the worst domestic unrest since Iran‘s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Some media reports have said the death toll was as high as 12,000-20,000, with thousands of additional demonstrators arrested.
But several residents of Tehran reached by Reuters said the capital had now been comparatively quiet for four days. Drones were flying over the city, but there had been no sign of major protests on Thursday or Friday. Another resident in a northern city on the Caspian Sea said the streets there also appeared calm. The residents declined to be identified for their safety.
As an internet blackout eased this week, more accounts of the violence have trickled out.
One woman in Tehran told Reuters by phone that her daughter was killed a week ago after joining a demonstration near their home.
“She was 15 years old. She was not a terrorist, not a rioter. Basij forces followed her as she was trying to return home,” she said, referring to a branch of the security forces often used to quell unrest.
The US is expected to send additional offensive and defensive capabilities to the region, but the exact makeup of those forces and the timing of their arrival was still unclear, a US official said speaking on condition of anonymity.
The US military’s Central Command declined to comment, saying it does not discuss ship movements.
PAHLAVI CALLS FOR INCREASED PRESSURE
Reza Pahlavi, the US-based son of Iran‘s last shah who has gained increasing prominence as an opposition figure, on Friday urged the international community to ramp up pressure on Tehran to help protesters overthrow clerical rule.
“The Iranian people are taking decisive action on the ground. It is now time for the international community to join them fully,” said Pahlavi, whose level of support inside Iran is hard to gauge.
Trump this week appeared to downplay the idea of US backing for Pahlavi, voicing uncertainty that the exiled royal heir who has courted support among Western countries could muster significant backing inside Iran. Pahlavi met US envoy Steve Witkoff last weekend, Axios reported.
Iranian-Kurdish rights group Hengaw said that there had been no protest gatherings since Sunday, but “the security environment remains highly restrictive.”
“Our independent sources confirm a heavy military and security presence in cities and towns where protests previously took place, as well as in several locations that did not experience major demonstrations,” Norway-based Hengaw said in comments to Reuters.
REPORTS OF SPORADIC UNREST
There were, however, still indications of unrest in some areas. Hengaw reported that a female nurse was killed by direct gunfire from government forces during protests in Karaj, west of Tehran. Reuters was not able to independently verify the report.
The state-affiliated Tasnim news outlet reported that rioters had set fire to a local education office in Falavarjan County, in central Isfahan Province, on Thursday.
An elderly resident of a town in Iran‘s northwestern region, where many Kurdish Iranians live and which has been the focus for many of the biggest flare-ups, said sporadic protests had continued, though not as intensely.
Describing violence earlier in the protests, she said: “I have not seen scenes like that before.”
Video circulating online, which Reuters was able to verify as having been recorded in a forensic medical center in Tehran, showed dozens of bodies lying on floors and stretchers, most in bags but some uncovered. Reuters could not verify the date of the video.
The state-owned Press TV cited Iran‘s police chief as saying calm had been restored across the country.
A death toll reported by US-based rights group HRANA has increased little since Wednesday, now at 2,677 people, including 2,478 protesters and 163 people identified as affiliated with the government.
Reuters has not been able to independently verify the HRANA death toll. An Iranian official told the news agency earlier this week that about 2,000 people had been killed.
The casualty numbers dwarf the death toll from previous bouts of unrest that have been suppressed by the state, including in 2009 and 2022.
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The Department of Labor told us to embrace ‘Americanism.’ What’s that?
“Embrace Americanism,” reads a graphic shared by the U.S. Department of Labor on X, featuring a photo of George Washington’s bust on Mt. Rushmore. “America is for Americans,” the accompanying post says.
What, exactly, is Americanism? Though it may sound like a made-up term that Donald Trump might sling in his speeches off the cuff, in fact it has been around for at least two centuries, since the early days of the U.S.
Yet its definition has never been clear. While the word connotes some ideology of adherence to American values, a unified culture or an idealized vision of the nation, the exact vision of what that set of values or culture is remains so vague that the term has been used by Theodore Roosevelt, the American Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
Early American figures, including John Adams, simply used Americanism to mean a belief in a new republic defined by Democratic ideals and freedom of religion, a commitment to the culture of America. But that culture had not yet been defined — was it white and Christian, or was it a diverse melting pot?
Since its first use, the term has been claimed most often by the KKK. A 1926 paper by Klan Imperial Emperor and Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, published in The North American Review, is titled “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” In it, Evans says that the KKK arose as an answer to an influx of “aliens and alien ideas” in the country — namely that of Jews, Catholics and Black people.
Evans does not define the Americanism he’s fighting for. But he’s clear about what it isn’t. He praises the Klan’s work fighting “radicalism, cosmopolitanism, and alienism of all kinds” — “rootless cosmopolitanism” being a pejorative regularly levied at Jews — and says that “racial instincts” are essential to preserving Americanism.
Those racial instincts are necessary, Evan writes, because anyone who is not an “old-stock American” of “Nordic blend” is fundamentally incapable of understanding or upholding Americanism. (The article largely avoids the term “white” to exclude groups like Eastern and Southern Europeans, as well as Jews and Catholics, who today we might consider white.)
The 1920s were a time of great debate over Americanism, but the term has largely fallen out of use in the modern day. So is this the Americanism the Department of Labor is telling people to embrace one that excludes Jews, Black people, Asians, Catholics and anyone who isn’t a white Protestant — is it a dog whistle for the nativist, KKK ideology that defined the term when it was last popular? The DOL did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication, so we can’t know how the government came to adopt the word. But without specifying which Americanism they mean, it will be easy for white nationalists to see a post from the government using a term with a long racist history, and feel emboldened.
Still, maybe the values of Americanism they meant are something new entirely, synonymous with the Trump administration’s fight against trans people and DEI, or perhaps a simple declaration of patriotism.
Or maybe the DOL used Americanism in the sense that Earl Browder, president of the American Communist party in the 1900s, did when he attempted to reclaim the term and proclaimed that “Communism is 20th century Americanism.”
Probably not, though.
The post The Department of Labor told us to embrace ‘Americanism.’ What’s that? appeared first on The Forward.