Uncategorized
The Dominican Republic was a haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis. A museum project could tell that story.
SOSUA, Dominican Republic (JTA) — Sitting inside a small wood-frame shul just around the corner from Playa Alicia, where tourists sip rum punch while watching catamarans glide by, Joe Benjamin recounted one of the most uplifting but often forgotten stories of Jewish survival during the Holocaust.
“I was bar mitzvahed right here,” he said, pointing to a podium at the front of the sanctuary in La Sinagoga de Sosua. It was built in the early 1940s to meet the spiritual needs of about 750 German and Austrian Jews.
At the time, the Dominican Republic was the only country in the world that offered asylum to large numbers of Jewish refugees, earning the moniker “tropical Zion.”
Benjamin, 82, is president of the Jewish community of Sosua and one of only four surviving second-generation Jews remaining in this touristy beach town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. His parents were part of the unconventional colony of Jewish immigrants who established an agricultural settlement between 1940-47 on an abandoned banana plantation overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
“When I talk about that, I get goosebumps,” Benjamin said. “This is a distinction that the Dominican Republic has. It was the only country that opened its doors to Jews.”
Joe Benjamin, president of the Jewish Community of Sosua, inside the sanctuary of La Sinagoga. (Dan Fellner)
At the 1938 Evian Conference in France, attended by representatives of 32 countries to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wanting to flee Nazi persecution, the Dominican Republic announced it would accept up to 100,000 Jewish refugees. About 5,000 visas were issued but fewer than 1,000 Jews ultimately were able to reach the country, which is located on the same island as Haiti, about 800 miles southeast of Miami.
Benjamin was born in 1941 in Shanghai, the only other place besides the Dominican Republic that accepted large numbers of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Shanghai, then a divided city not under the control of a single government, did not require a visa to enter. About 20,000 Jewish refugees immigrated there, including Benjamin’s parents, who fled Nazi Germany in 1939.
In 1947, with a civil war raging in China, Benjamin’s father realized the country “was getting a little difficult” and looked for another place to raise his two children.
“I think my father read it in a newspaper – there was a Jewish refugee colony in the Dominican Republic,” he says. “My father had no idea where that was, but he said, ‘I’m going there.’”
Benjamin’s family took a ship from China to San Francisco, a train to Miami, and then flew into Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital city. At that time, the city was officially called Ciudad Trujillo after the country’s dictator, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.
Photos of some of the 750 Jewish refugees who settled in Sosua in the 1940s on display at the Gregorio Luperon International Airport in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. (Dan Fellner)
Historians suggest the Dominican dictator’s motives in accepting large numbers of Jewish refugees at a time when so many other countries — including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom — turned their backs were fueled more by opportunism than altruism. It’s believed that Trujillo wanted to improve his reputation on the world stage following the 1937 massacre of an estimated 20,000 Black Haitians by Dominican troops. Furthermore, Trujillo liked the idea of allowing a crop of mostly educated immigrants who would “whiten” the country’s population.
“He was a cruel dictator,” Benjamin said of Trujillo. “But it’s not for me to judge. Because for us, he saved our lives. If you’re drowning and someone throws you a rope, you hold on to it. You don’t start asking his motive. You just hold on.”
In 1947, Benjamin was among the last group of Jewish refugees to arrive in Sosua, one of about 10 families known by the other colonists as the “Shanghai group.” The Sosua settlement was run by an organization called the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) that was funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York.
“DORSA would give you 10 cows, a mule, a horse and a cart,” said Benjamin. “My father by profession was a cabinet-maker. He thought he was going to do that here. But there was no market for that. So he dedicated himself to farming.”
Benjamin said conditions in Sosua were “primitive” and a difficult transition for many settlers who had been city-dwellers in Europe. Still, he spoke fondly of a childhood in which he was relatively insulated from the horrors that befell so many other Jewish children his age.
“We had enough to eat,” he says. “We enjoyed the beach. And I went to a Jewish school.”
La Sinagoga de Sosua in the Dominican Republic served the spiritual needs of the Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in Sosua during the Holocaust. It’s now open only for the high holidays. (Dan Fellner)
The school, originally called Escuela Cristobal Colon, opened in 1940 in a barracks and was attended by Jewish children as well as the children of Dominican farm workers. The school still exists and is now called the Colegio Luis Hess, named after Luis Hess, one of the Jewish settlers. Hess taught at the school for 33 years and lived in Sosua until his death in 2010 at the age of 101.
While the children attended school, men worked on farms and women cooked dinner for their families, who ate communal style. Beds were lined with mosquito netting to prevent malaria. As men greatly outnumbered women — Trujillo did not allow single Jewish women to enter the country — intermarriage was common.
Over time, the agriculture venture failed and DORSA instead decided to promote a beef and dairy cooperative, Productos Sosua, which ultimately proved successful.
After finishing high school, Benjamin moved to Pittsburgh to attend college (he’s an engineer who once built and flew his own airplane), got married and started a family. After 17 years in the United States, he decided in 1976 to return to the Dominican Republic, where he became an executive with Productos Sosua. He worked there until he retired in 2004, when the firm was sold to a Mexican company.
“All my life I talked about Sosua as my home,” he said. “I like it here. Everybody knows me.”
A street mural recognizes Sosua’s Jewish history on the main road connecting Sosua with Puerto Plata on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. (Dan Fellner)
Today, Sosua is vastly changed from the sleepy town in which Benjamin was raised. In 1979, an international airport opened in Puerto Plata, just a 15-minute drive to the west. Sosua morphed into a congested tourist destination known for its golden-sand beaches and water sports. It also became a hub of the Dominican sex tourism industry.
Most of Sosua’s Jewish population immigrated to the United States by the early 1980s. Benjamin estimates that only 30-40 Jews remain in Sosua, most of whom are not religiously observant. As a result, the synagogue hasn’t been able to financially sustain a permanent rabbi for more than 20 years. Services are held only on the high holidays, when a rabbi is flown in from Miami.
Benjamin says a group of seven Jews chips in about $2,500 a month to pay for security and other operating expenses.
“It’s very hard to get the Jews here to pay,” he said. “When we bring in the rabbi, we try to charge something. But we don’t get any people if we charge.”
Next to the synagogue is a small museum called the Museo Judio de Sosua, which offers a window into the town’s Jewish roots. Five years ago, the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo donated $80,000 to the museum to preserve and digitize its archives. However, the museum, which is badly in need of repairs, has been closed for the past year.
The Museo Judio de Sosua, which tells the story of the Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in the Dominican Republic during the Holocaust. The museum is closed while the community waits for funding to reopen it. (Dan Fellner)
Benjamin has been in discussions with the Dominican government in hopes it will soon finance a major renovation of the museum that would include an exhibition hall big enough to accommodate 100 people for events. Benjamin says he is optimistic the project, which has a price-tag approaching $1 million, will be green-lighted by the government.
“They are very positive about it because it could become a tourist attraction,” he says, noting that Puerto Plata and nearby Amber Cove have become popular port-stops on Caribbean cruises originating in Florida. “If it comes to fruition, it will be in the next year. Because if they don’t do it by then, the government changes. And the next government never continues what the previous government started.”
Otherwise, there are only a few remnants of Jewish life in Sosua for visitors to see. In Parque Mirador overlooking the Atlantic, there is a white cement-block star of David, built to honor the Jewish refugees. About 70 Jews, including Benjamin’s parents, are buried in a Jewish cemetery about a five-minute drive south of the synagogue.
The main street connecting Sosua with Puerto Plata has a street mural depicting the town’s history that features a large star of David right above a scuba-diver. And two of the most prominent streets in Sosua — Dr. Rosen and David Stern — still bear the names of two of the colony’s Jewish founders.
Dr. Rosen Street in downtown Sosua is named after Joseph Rosen, one of the founders of the Dominican Republic Settlement Association. (Dan Fellner)
There had been an exhibition about Sosua’s Jewish colony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York but it closed several years ago. All the more reason, Benjamin says, that the Sosua museum reopens as soon as possible so that the story of the Jews who found a Caribbean cocoon to ride out the Holocaust isn’t forgotten.
“Look at what’s happening in the world — there is a rise in antisemitism,” he said. “It’s very important that our history is documented. It will also be a place where Dominican schoolchildren can come and learn about Judaism.”
With the museum closed, the only place in the area to see photos of the Jewish settlers on public display is the departure lounge in Puerto Plata’s airport. Next to a Dominican band serenading travelers with meringue music, there is a display of pictures showing the colonists riding horses, tilling the fields, attending school and praying in La Sinagoga.
“When they came here, the Jews found no antisemitism at all in this country,” said Benjamin. “They were as free as anybody. They had a wonderful life.”
—
The post The Dominican Republic was a haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis. A museum project could tell that story. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Israeli Security Cabinet to Discuss Possible Lebanon Ceasefire, Senior Official Says
Smoke rises after an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, following an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, Lebanon. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
Israel’s security cabinet will convene on Wednesday to discuss a possible Lebanon ceasefire, a senior Israeli official said, more than five weeks into a war with Hezbollah that spiraled out of the US-Israeli conflict with Iran.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet will meet at 8 pm (1700 GMT), the official said.
Senior Hezbollah official Ibrahim al-Moussawi told Reuters that diplomatic efforts by Iran and other regional states could produce a ceasefire soon, saying Tehran had used its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as leverage.
Two other senior Lebanese officials said they had been briefed that efforts were underway for a ceasefire. One of them said the US had been pressuring Israel to work toward a ceasefire in Lebanon, including during rare talks between Israeli and Lebanese government envoys in Washington on Tuesday.
Israel’s offensive in Lebanon began on March 2 after the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah opened fire at Israel in support of Tehran. It has killed more than 2,000 people and forced 1.2 million from their homes, according to Lebanese authorities. Most of those killed have been Hezbollah terrorists, according to Israeli tallies.
US President Donald Trump earlier said the war with Iran could end soon, telling the world to watch out for an “amazing two days,” while US forces imposing a blockade turned back vessels leaving Iranian ports.
On Tuesday, the United States hosted the first direct talks between Israel and Lebanon in decades. Israel had ruled out discussion of a ceasefire with Lebanon during those talks.
Trump has urged Israel to scale back attacks in Lebanon, apparently to avoid undermining the ceasefire with Iran.
Iran has said Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon must be included in any agreement to end the wider war in the Middle East. Washington has pushed back, saying there is no link between the two sets of talks.
The two Lebanese officials did not have details on when any ceasefire would begin or how long it would last. They said the duration would likely be linked to how long a truce between the United States and Iran holds.
Uncategorized
Trump Says Iran War ‘Close to Over’; Army Chief of Mediator Pakistan Arrives in Tehran
US President Donald Trump takes questions from reporters while Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio look on, as they attend a meeting with oil industry executives, at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Jan. 9, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
US President Donald Trump said the war with Iran was close to over, telling the world to brace for an “amazing two days,” as the army chief of mediator Pakistan arrived in Tehran in a bid to prevent a renewed conflict.
The diplomatic push came as US and Iranian officials weighed a return to Pakistan for further talks after negotiations there ended on Sunday without a breakthrough.
Pakistan‘s military confirmed Field Marshal Asim Munir had arrived in Tehran. A senior Iranian source told Reuters that Munir, who had mediated the last round of talks, was heading to Iran “to narrow gaps” between the two sides.
“I think you’re going to be watching an amazing two days ahead,” Trump told ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, according to a post by the reporter on X, adding he did not think it would be necessary to extend a two-week ceasefire that expires next week.
“I think it’s close to over, yeah. I mean I view it as very close to over,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business Network conducted Tuesday and broadcast Wednesday. “We’ll see what happens. I think they want to make a deal very badly.”
Officials from Pakistan, Iran, and Gulf states also said both sides could return to Islamabad in coming days.
The talks last weekend broke down without an agreement to end the war, which Trump launched alongside Israel on Feb. 28, triggering Iranian attacks on Iran‘s Gulf neighbors and reigniting a conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Trump‘s optimism lifted global stocks towards record highs. Oil prices – having fallen on Tuesday and in early Wednesday trade – were slightly up at around $95 per barrel, after the US said its blockade of Iranian ports had halted seaborne trade in and out of Iran.
TANKERS INTERCEPTED
The US military said it was turning back more vessels, including the US-sanctioned, Chinese-owned tanker Rich Starry which was seen heading back through the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday.
A US destroyer stopped two oil tankers attempting to leave the Iranian port of Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman on Tuesday, a US official said.
An Iranian supertanker subject to US sanctions crossed the strait towards Iran‘s Imam Khomeini port despite the blockade, Iran‘s Fars News agency said on Wednesday. Fars did not identify the tanker or give further details of its voyage.
While Iran and the United States appear so far to have avoided a major confrontation at sea since the United States began its blockade on Monday, Tehran has said it would retaliate against military action.
Iran‘s joint military command warned it would halt trade flows in the Gulf, the Sea of Oman, and the Red Sea – which connects to the Suez Canal – if the US blockade continued.
Trump has also threatened to escalate if the war resumes. He told Fox Business Network: “We could take out every one of their bridges in one hour. We could take out every one of their power plants, electric power plants, in one hour. We don’t want to do that … so we’ll see what happens.”
RETURN TO ISLAMABAD
Trump told the New York Post on Tuesday that his negotiators were likely to return to Pakistan, thanks largely to the “great job” army chief Munir was doing to moderate the talks.
Speaking later at an event in Georgia, Vice President JD Vance, who led the US delegation at last weekend’s talks, said Trump wanted to make a “grand bargain” with Iran but there was a lot of mistrust between the two countries.
Iran‘s nuclear ambitions were a key sticking point at last weekend’s talks. The US had proposed a 20-year suspension of all nuclear activity by Iran – an apparent concession from longstanding demands for a permanent ban – while Tehran had suggested a halt of 3 to 5 years, according to people familiar with the proposals.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said the length of any moratorium on Iranian uranium enrichment was a political decision and suggested Iran might accept a compromise as a confidence-building measure.
Washington has also pressed for any enriched nuclear material to be removed from Iran, while Tehran has demanded that international sanctions against it be lifted.
One source involved in the talks said back-channel talks had made progress in narrowing gaps, bringing the two sides closer to a deal that could be put forward at a new round of talks.
Complicating peace efforts, Israel has continued to attack Lebanon as it targets Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. Israel and the US say that campaign is not covered by the ceasefire, while Iran insists it is.
Israel’s security cabinet will convene late on Wednesday to discuss a possible Lebanon ceasefire, a senior Israeli official told Reuters, after Israeli and Lebanese officials held rare talks in Washington a day earlier.
FALLOUT OF THE WAR
The war has prompted Iran to effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz – a vital artery for global crude and gas shipments – to ships other than its own, sharply reducing exports from the Gulf, particularly to Asia and Europe, and leaving energy importers scrambling for alternative supplies.
The oil market also faces further tightening, as the US does not plan to renew a 30-day waiver of sanctions on Iranian oil at sea that expires this week, according to US officials.
An estimated 5,000 people, civilians and combatants, have been killed in the fighting, including about 3,000 in Iran and 2,000 in Lebanon.
Uncategorized
A farewell to Hampshire College, site of my Yiddish awakening
Zay gezunt Hampshire College. That’s where as an undergrad student worker, I first studied Yiddish at the OG Yiddish Book Center of Amherst, Massachusetts, down the road from the genteel Lord Jeffrey Inn, across the street from uber-sensitive poet lady Emily Dickinson’s alte heym.
In nearby Holyoke, in an old mill turned Yiddish book storage loft, away from the genius of Dickinson’s dybbuk, I earned my way shelving the Book Center’s staggering amounts of the collected works of Sholem Aleichem — most likely purchased as a subscriber premium by turn of the century Forverts readers — and only surpassed by the unspeakable numbers of Yiddish volumes of Guy De Maupassant. I hoisted those onto shelves as well while getting educated about Nico and the Velvet Underground which blared from speakers. Back in the 1980’s that was multitasking.
And dayge nisht, no worries — I got my klezmer awakening there too, via a Walkman and audio cassettes while laboring as a photo history slide librarian for my advisor and favorite professor, filmmaker Abraham Ravett, who is set to retire next month (can you retire if your workplace closes?).
Splayed out across acres of stunning apple orchards that once belonged to the Stiles family, Hampshire College had neither a Hillel chapter nor a Chabad nor any organized sports nor fraternities — but there was a coed sauna, plenty of rolfing on the snow outside said sauna, a successful student run food coop, an acclaimed ultimate frisbee team and a beloved outdoor program that led to my first heron sightings just like in the movie On Golden Pond.
It also had Len Glick, Elvis’ former induction physician who co-taught modern Jewish history, along with his younger historian colleague Aaron Berman, whose office door was anointed with a poster that offered a Marxist view of baseball. It was 1984 and I was hot off seeing Streisand’s film version of Yentl. I’d polished off most of Bashevis’ tomes back home, memorized my Bubby’s photo album of Eastern European Jewry as envisioned in Visniac’s A Vanished World, and collided into Marlene Booth’s documentary about the Yiddishists of Raananah who took up space in an audacious dream of a utopian summer community in Orange County, New York. Tayere Leyener, dear reader, that’s all it took.
I knew my final paper was going to be about women and Yiddish. Well, I recall Len saying, if you want to investigate Bashevis’ inspiration for his Yentl and research women writers and women’s lives in Yiddish, you’re going to have to learn Yiddish; there isn’t much about that available in translation. Why don’t you go over to the Yiddish Book Center, he continued, and talk to them. And just like that, I found myself on the top floor of an old elementary school in Amherst, spending evenings learning Yiddish and my days trying to grasp enough of it to complete my assignment.
I’d love to tell you that just like Yentl, I too spent hours bent over tomes, deep in study, but as previously disclosed, Hampshire had much to distract and much to offer. And besides, I had books to shelve, boxes to unpack and roads to travel, joining the center’s trips to pick up YET MORE Yiddish books. My mazel was that Hampshire hosted the Book Center’s first summer seminars. Once longtime staffer Frieda Howards and I finished inspecting attendees’ dorm rooms, making sure the beds had hospital corners, I was warmly invited to attend lectures.
Hampshire hosted artists and activists like Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman. When Hampshire alum and Yiddish Book Center founder Aron Lansky talked about him, he highlighted all the Yiddish influences in Hoffman’s Steal This Book, as well as the Yiddish-inflected tensions of the Chicago 7 trials. All this came to a head when I met Yiddish lesbian poet, child survivor and hero to Jewish feminists Irena Klepfisz. A Bundist descendant, keeper of the flame, she — vu den — called a hastily gathered group into action. If we wanted Yiddish women’s writing to be translated, we were the translating liberators we were waiting for, so to speak. It was on us.
Tayere leyner/dear reader, I could, like so many Yiddish authors, go on in depth without so much as a break for a comma or a paragraph, such was the depth of my mazel at Hampshire. Ok, a bisl more. There was the weekend trip with Lansky and local poet and Book Center staffer Gene Zeiger to the Newport Folk Festival to hear Joan Baez sing. There was the summer Yiddish genius Naomi Seidman was a fellow at the Book Center — thanks to Seidman, that was my summer of Nico, the Velvet Underground, of reading Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and much much more. That was the summer I interned for the filmmaker Marlene Booth who was making a film about that Yiddish newspaper everyone talked about, the one I recalled picking up for my bubby. I spent time in my cooperative household on campus, bent over an audio transcription machine, typing out interview after interview with Forverts readers, spellbound by their love for it and activism on its behalf as it fell on hard times.
And reader, though Hampshire will likely close for good, you and I now know that if not for Hampshire College, where now upon a nice parcel of that former apple orchard sits the Yiddish Book Center in all its well earned koved, I and many like me, would not spend our days bending over our morgue of Forverts photos, back issues and more, reaching back over time to keep remembering our past and making it available for future generations.
The post A farewell to Hampshire College, site of my Yiddish awakening appeared first on The Forward.