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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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Why The 36 Award
Antisemitism is, unfortunately, a fact of life in the United States and around the world. Jewish people continue to experience harassment, discrimination, and violence. Antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories exacerbate the problem.
Antisemitism does not exist in isolation; it both reflects and accelerates the erosion of democratic norms, institutions, and trust, emerging alongside other forms of hate and prejudice that collectively weaken the social fabric and the shared commitments on which all communities depend.
And while naming antisemitism and its impact is necessary, what truly matters is our shared responsibility to confront it.
This is a moment to push back collectively, within and beyond the Jewish community. No single organization, community, or ideology can meet this challenge alone. The pursuit of solutions requires acknowledging what we do not yet know, remaining open to learning, and committing to the collective effort.
Nathan Cummings Foundation (NCF) approaches this work as part of a broader justice journey and our commitment to Racial, Economic, and Environmental Justice (REEJ). As an institution rooted in the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, repairing the world, our commitment to social justice and Jewish values has long guided our work across our focus areas, which includes being in partnership with leaders across REEJ.
We believe that our pursuit of justice is incomplete if it does not also address antisemitism. Antisemitism is oppression and is inseparable from broader struggles against bigotry, exclusion, and threats to democratic life. Addressing it strengthens movements, deepens solidarity, and reinforces the conditions necessary for collective progress.
Recognizing and engaging this challenge is essential to building a more just, inclusive, and democratic society and advancing our pursuit of REEJ.
With all of this in mind, NCF, in collaboration with the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable and supported by a growing coalition of partners across the country, created The 36 Award. The award takes its name from a powerful concept in Jewish tradition: the belief that in every generation there are 36 righteous individuals whose actions help sustain the world.
Across the country, there are people confronting antisemitism in ways that do not always attract headlines. They are building relationships across lines of race, faith, geography, and ideology. They are helping communities navigate difficult conversations. They are creating new models, narratives, and pathways toward understanding. In many cases, they are demonstrating that combating antisemitism and advancing broader justice are not competing goals but mutually reinforcing ones. The 36 Award is designed to find those individuals and elevate and support their work.
The challenges before us are significant. Yet history reminds us that lasting progress often begins with people willing to see possibilities others overlook. The search for those people is what The 36 Award truly represents.
We believe that new ideas matter and that solidarity can be built through courageous leadership, which often emerges where few are looking. We are excited to announce the inaugural winners of The 36 Award. Please visit 36award.us to learn about these inspiring individuals.
Sincerely,
Rey Ramsey, President & CEO
Amy Sorensen Ben-Dov, Chair, Board of Trustees
Nathan Cummings Foundation
The post Why The 36 Award appeared first on The Forward.
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The 36 Award Winner: Building a Public Health Response to Antisemitism
Myrieme Churchill, Executive Director of Parents for Peace (P4P), has been named an inaugural recipient of The 36 Award, honoring a decade of work building what may be the first confidential intervention program in the world focused specifically on antisemitism.
Churchill leads P4P, a national public health organization serving families, schools, and communities across the United States and Canada. Through its Antisemitism Intervention and Recovery (AIR) Program, P4P brings together licensed psychologists, peer interventionists, and a team that includes former neo-Nazis and former jihadists. Its central argument once sounded unlikely to many in the field: extremism is not just a security issue, but a public health crisis that demands early intervention, education, and community-based support. The need has grown sharply. P4P says it saw a steep rise in anti-Jewish hatred after October 7, 2023, both in its own caseload and across society. In 2025, 70 percent of its helpline cases involved antisemitism, spanning far-right white nationalism, jihadist networks, and far-left movements.
Churchill’s path to this work began in Morocco. The daughter of a Black Moroccan Muslim father and a white French Christian mother, she grew up biracial and rarely felt she belonged anywhere. As a child, she was excluded and targeted by other children who misidentified her as Jewish and often used the word “Jew” to insult her.
“That history gives me a deep appreciation for how identity, exclusion, and belonging shape people’s lives,” Churchill said.
Those early experiences left her with questions that have stayed with her ever since: Why do people hurt one another? Where does hate come from? Why have Jews so often been made the scapegoat? The questions led her to a career as a therapist. Her early work took her to the streets of Marseille, where she worked with young immigrants targeted by traffickers, and later to Boston, where she treated people with mental illness and addiction. Both jobs, she said, taught her how vulnerable people are at risk for abuse, self-destruction, and harming others.
Over years of clinical work in addressing addiction, Churchill began to notice a pattern. For some people, extremism seemed to work the way a drug does, offering relief from pain along with a sense of identity and purpose. People could get hooked on hate the way others get hooked on substances.
That insight became the foundation of the P4P model. Rather than treating extremism of any kind, including antisemitism, as a set of beliefs to argue with, the organization treats it as a maladaptive way of coping with grievance, isolation, and trauma. In P4P’s framing, extremism works like a psychological addiction, offering belonging at the cost of truth, safety, and humanity. Instead of relying on shame, public condemnation, or debate, P4P helps families recognize warning signs and assess escalating behavior, and helps their loved ones build healthier sources of identity, belonging, and purpose, while working with public safety resources when necessary. The goal is to replace hate with resilience, education, and genuine connection.
AIR, which P4P bills as the world’s first antisemitism helpline, builds on the organization’s existing public health approach and helpline model. It offers free, confidential support from trained interventionists to worried families, educators, and community members, as well as to people who are trying to step away from anti-Jewish beliefs themselves. P4P is also developing trainings for families, schools, and religious organizations on recognizing early warning signs, navigating online risks, and responding with evidence-based intervention.
The model was tested on the very first call to the AIR helpline in 2016. A mother had found several rifles under her son’s bed, along with a manifesto describing his plan to attack a synagogue. She was terrified and reluctant to contact law enforcement. Churchill stayed on the line and worked to earn the mother’s trust enough that she would call 911. The FBI later confirmed that the guns had been confiscated and that the young man had been hospitalized for treatment of psychosis.
“Courage sometimes means entering the worst moment of someone’s life and not looking away,” Churchill said.
P4P says its early intervention work has since helped prevent potential attacks on synagogues and violence against Jews, and has helped hundreds of people repair relationships, return to school or work, and rebuild lives no longer governed by extremist ideology.
Sagit Sade Attia, a member of the P4P board, described that work as a deliberate moral choice. “Rather than writing off people consumed by hate as beyond redemption, Myrieme has chosen the far more difficult path of engaging directly with individuals and families affected by radicalization, while never losing sight of the needs and safety of those targeted by hate,” she said.
The choice has not always been easy to explain. When Churchill first began describing extremism as an addiction, she recalled, people looked at her as if she had three heads. Public health framing has since moved closer to the mainstream, but an approach that begins with compassion for people who hold antisemitic views can still invite skepticism at a moment when Jewish communities feel under threat. Churchill answers by pointing to outcomes like the hundreds of families supported.
P4P doesn’t do this work alone. It has partnered with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the ADL, the American Muslim and Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council, and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as Bangladeshi and other immigrant communities. It has worked with the Harvard School of Public Health and Georgia State University to evaluate its work and to train former extremists as interventionists. Churchill has spoken at Eradicate Hate following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, briefed Congress as part of a bipartisan effort, and testified before the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, where she urged antisemitism trainings in schools. Churchill puts it simply: “Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem alone; it is an all-of-us problem, and everyone pays the price when it spreads.”
The post The 36 Award Winner: Building a Public Health Response to Antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Building the Legal Case Against White Nationalism
David Brody, founder of the Alliance of Jewish Americans, has been named an honorable mention for The 36 Award in its inaugural year. Brody has spent his career in courtrooms and coalitions confronting hate, and he believes Jewish safety in the United States depends on standing with every community that white nationalism targets.
Brody traces his commitment to his family and to the South. “As a Jew from Georgia, my Jewish identity was defined against the backdrop of the Black-Jewish shared struggle in the South,” he said. His great-grandmother fled pogroms, arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor with no English or education, and became a union organizer. His father registered voters for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and spent four decades researching how poverty and discrimination affect the health of rural Black families. “My family taught that being Jewish in America means fighting for social justice,” Brody said.
Before launching the Alliance in 2026, Brody founded and led the Digital Justice Initiative at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the first tech policy program at a legacy racial justice organization. There, he built the first case applying public accommodations law to online harassment, representing Taylor Dumpson, the first Black woman to serve as student government president at American University, against a neo-Nazi website’s publisher who targeted her. Brody co-led the team representing Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C., in its case against the Proud Boys after the group vandalized the church. He helped draft and championed what became the AI Civil Rights Act of 2025, which more than 80 civil rights, privacy, consumer, and labor groups have endorsed. His nominator, Erin Simpson of the Ford Foundation, said Brody coined the phrase “privacy rights are civil rights” at a time when many did not yet see the connection. She described him as “the engine that powered an entire community of racial justice and technology policy organizations.”
Brody said Jewish civil society is robust but has lacked a dedicated national legal organization, similar to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or Lambda Legal. The Alliance is meant to fill that gap. It uses open-source investigative techniques to collect and preserve evidence of civil and human rights violations and white nationalist threats, with the goal of making that evidence admissible in court.
From his years litigating against white supremacists, Brody saw that few organizations take on litigation against white nationalism systematically, and that most investigative work in the field produces research reports rather than evidence that can stand up in a legal proceeding. He argues that white nationalism, which has motivated deadly attacks ranging from Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 to a Buffalo grocery store in 2022, poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety in the United States in generations.
The Alliance’s work includes both near-term and longer-term legal investigations. Part of this work involves leveraging AI tools responsibly, such as using them to accelerate needle-in-a-haystack investigations of white nationalist activity or other threats that would not be cost-effective for human researchers. Other work is meant to provide evidentiary foundations for long-term efforts to research, document, and seek accountability for rights violations in the U.S. Brody said he is focused on what the field needs now and what it will need in five years.
Brody’s approach to coalitions is grounded in patience. He spent six years drafting model bills, persuading allies with different priorities, and testifying twice before Congress in support of privacy protections. In 2024, when a bipartisan privacy bill in Congress was stripped of its civil rights protections, Brody gathered signatures from more than 50 organizations on an opposition letter in under 24 hours, and the bill died. “Those groups did not sign because I told them what to do,” he said. “They signed because I spent years working with them, earning their trust, and advocating for their interests.”
Brody credits the courage of his clients for putting their names and faces on high-profile cases against violent white supremacists. He arranges his work so that, by the time a moment of risk arrives, “we have friends at our side.” He resists the idea that this takes a special method. “Building bridges does not require a special approach,” he said. “One should show up for everyone, listen with empathy, and do the work.”
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