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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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Mahmoud Khalil’s book reiterates his anti-Zionist stance
From the beginning, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil denied claims that the protests at Columbia University after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel were antisemitic.
In his book, No Land to Stand On, released Tuesday, he stands by that.
Khalil, who became the face of the anti-Israel campus movement after he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2025, reiterates his anti-Zionist stance in the book while detailing “a life of exile, refuge, and resistance.”
Recounting the endless interviews with journalists that made him the face of a campus movement, he writes that the question of whether the protests were antisemitic kept coming up.
“I explained, repeatedly, that the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a strategy to stifle righteous criticism of Israel,” writes Khalil, who added that many Jewish students were involved in the protests. “Such weaponization of antisemitism was designed to place a state and its crimes beyond criticism by wrapping them in the protections owed to a faith and its people.”
The memoir weaves Khalil’s beliefs and frustrations through stories from his life, from where he was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and fled to Lebanon at age 18, to the protests at Columbia, his detention and finally his release. He uses the book as an opportunity to say his detention was unjust, and to critique the government’s case against him.
He notes a memo from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that states his detention was a result of “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States,” adding those activities were “otherwise lawful.”
“Otherwise lawful,” writes Khalil. “They had written it themselves. My beliefs were lawful, and they wanted to deport me for them.”
Khalil argued that the administration was disingenuous in deporting him for alleged antisemitism, pointing to Trump’s personal visit with the openly antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes. He also accused the administration of platforming “white supremacist rhetoric and symbolism.”
Further, Khalil claimed pro-Palestinian protesters were peaceful, while “it was the pro-Israel students and Zionist groups that had provoked confrontations, harassed Palestinian students, and in some cases physically attacked them.”
Despite his status as a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, the federal government apprehended him on March 8, 2025. Khalil spent 104 days in ICE detention, famously missing the birth of his first child.
His imprisonment sparked a fierce debate over free speech, along with a debate over what his beliefs were to begin with. Khalil clarified his stances in an April interview with the Forward saying he acknowledged “a Jewish connection” to Israel, but that “rejecting the self-determination of the Jewish people on the Palestinian land in itself is not antisemitism.”
He reiterates in the book that he does not “endorse” Hamas, though he told the Forward he was unsure if Hamas targeted civilians on Oct. 7, something that has been widely documented and substantiated.
While he expressed disdain for the way the university handled the protests and its messaging after Oct. 7, Khalil said the university was failing its Palestinian students long before 2023. He pointed to the school’s Tel Aviv Global Center, which opened this past summer despite protest.
“Columbia wanted to open an institutional outpost, funded in part by our tuition, in a place that had a policy of refusing entry to people like me, and call it a center for global learning,” he wrote.
He also took aim at Columbia’s dual degree program with Tel Aviv University.
“The dual-degree stream was largely built around Jewish Israeli students who had served in the Israeli army,” writes Khalil. “I couldn’t stop thinking that if I were in Palestine, some of these students would be stopping me at checkpoints, raiding my university, piloting the drones surveilling my community, killing my neighbors.”
Returning home to New York from the ICE detention center in Louisiana, he wrote that he was met with praise — and harassment.
When people approached him asking if he was the Khalil they’d seen in the news, he was unsure: “Whether they wanted to shake my hand or spit in my face, say ‘Thank you for what you’re doing’ or follow me through Midtown yelling ‘Am Yisrael Chai.’”
He saw all of those reactions and more, he wrote.
The 208-page book is dedicated to Khalil’s wife, to the Columbia students who participated in the protests, to ICE detainees and “Palestine, until you are free.” He will launch a book tour on Tuesday at a shop just two blocks from Columbia’s campus.
The post Mahmoud Khalil’s book reiterates his anti-Zionist stance appeared first on The Forward.
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Sydney Sweeney went to shul. But did she choose the right occasion?
Jewish internet spaces are alight this week with reports that actress, model and political lightning rod Sydney Sweeney was spotted in the pews on Rosh Hashanah.
According to GreenwichTime and The Free Press, Sweeney — who is not Jewish — attended services at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her boyfriend, music mogul Scooter Braun (who grew up there). Gossip rag DeuxMoi has since claimed that Sweeney, who has been linked with Braun since at least June 2025, is also contemplating conversion.
One can speculate on whether the most in-demand actress on the planet might be leaning a bit too hard into her Marilyn Monroe character arc. At the Forward, though, we’re wondering whether Sweeney’s Jewish beau picked the right holiday to bring her to shul.
After all, there’s a wide range of experiences when it comes to prayer services, and you want to make a positive first impression. You’d want their day in shul to be accessible, fun and not too long. That’s a Sydney Sweeney movie, though, not Rosh Hashanah services. So without further ado, here’s the official undisputed rankings of Jewish calendar days on which to bring your non-Jewish partner to shul.
Going from least to most desirable:
Erev Tisha B’av
I would have to respect the audacity of someone bringing their partner to synagogue for the first time on Tisha B’av, the day Jewish people grieve the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. It’s an intentionally unpleasant time to be in shul — you’re sitting on the floor, reading Lamentations. Also, you’re not supposed to greet people at all, which would almost certainly be awkward for a first-timer, considering how uncomfortable it is for regulars. On the flip side, if you’re Sydney Sweeney, that rule means no one can bother you for a selfie, either.
Shemini Atzeret
We pray for rain, which is an ancient word that means sustenance, but at this point everyone’s running on fumes for the High Holiday season, so you probably won’t get your senior rabbi delivering the sermon. Some years (including this one), your synagogue might be reading Ecclesiastes, which is both melancholy and long. Hard sell.
Passover
Passover isn’t known for its prayer services — the main event is, of course, the seder. If you’re taking a non-Jewish partner to services for the first time on Passover, it usually means one of two things: 1) You don’t want anyone to meet this person, because nobody goes to shul on Passover or 2) You didn’t have enough fun at the seder, because if you did, you’d be sleeping in with the rest of us.
One Passover plus: On the Shabbat that falls during the holiday, services also include the reading of the Song of Songs, the most risqué text in the Jewish canon.
Shavuot
In the height of summer, we read the story of Ruth — Judaism’s great conversion story. (Hint hint.) We also celebrate the receiving of the Ten Commandments, which your partner may already be familiar with from the movies, if not public school.
Shavuot morning is also a good service to go to because — at least in synagogues that observe two days of the holiday — the first day’s early services are led at a breakneck pace so that people who stayed up all night studying Torah the night before can go straight to sleep. No sermon! You’ll be out of there faster than you can say Na’aseh V’nishmah.
Simchat Torah
Like Sukkot, but swap out the lulav and etrog for Torah scrolls, which don’t smell as good or shake as well. Many synagogues (over-)serve alcohol on this holiday, which is a double-edged sword for a day you’d prefer everyone to be on their best behavior.
Yom Kippur
I’m gonna call this one underrated. There are surprisingly some things going for the Jewish day of repentance. The themes of atonement and forgiveness have universal appeal, and Jewish people do them well. You’ll probably get one of the rabbi’s strongest sermons of the calendar cycle. There’s a strange ecstasy that comes from being trapped in a room with hundreds of fasting people; the story of Jonah and the whale is one of our highlights. (This is also the only holiday I can attest to: My parents had their first date — ever! — on Yom Kippur services, and they’re still together.)
At the same time, Yom Kippur tends to have the longest prayer services of the year. It’s a fast day, so there’s no free food at the end of afternoon services (though you might get bagels at the break-fast). You usually have to pay to get in, plus there’s often a fundraising appeal woven into the service. And due to the prohibition on wearing leather shoes, you’d also be surrounding your partner with people wearing Crocs with dress clothes, which may scare them away from Judaism even if you try to explain it.
Sukkot
People like to call this our most pagan holiday, but marching around in circles with a giant asparagus and lemon is objectively fun, and the Four Species can represent basically anything you want. Let’s just hope your partner isn’t a willow.
Rosh Hashanah
Scooter Braun isn’t the first person to drag their partner to shul on Rosh Hashanah, and for good reason. Everyone wears their finest clothing, the shul will be beautifully decorated and the prayers are musically extravagant. The rabbi’s sermon will emphasize renewal and the commitment to doing better. There’s a decent chance apples dipped in honey will be served in the lobby. And above all else, the shofar blowing — done right — is arguably the highlight of the year in shul.
Plus, everyone’s there, so you can introduce your partner to everyone they need to know in one fell swoop. The only downside is you usually have to buy a ticket. (And on behalf of synagogue offices everywhere, if you’re the Jewish partner in the relationship, don’t try to arrange this over email 24 hours before the holiday.)
Purim
This is one thing Nobody Wants This got right: Purim is the ideal holiday for introducing a non-Jewish partner to the community. What better way to show up than in costume? You learn a foundational story of Jewish survival, a tradition that transforms our vulnerability into comedy. It’s also a family-oriented holiday — kids in face-paint, everyone with their graggers — which makes it a perfect picture-this set piece.
But the best thing about Purim? Thanks to the tradition of drinking ‘til you drop — if the relationship doesn’t work out, no one will remember a year later.
The post Sydney Sweeney went to shul. But did she choose the right occasion? appeared first on The Forward.
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How Toronto Jews spread the Gospel of ‘Godspell’
To wander into a screening of You Had to Be There, Nick Davis’ documentary about the famed 1972 Toronto production of Godspell, is to have a Jewish come-to-Jesus moment.
The first thing you hear, after the voice of a 22-year-old Martin Short, testing a microphone in a furtive recording taken at the Royal Alexander Theatre, is a shofar sounding a tinny tekiah. It’s maybe not what you’d expect from a musical built around the Gospel of Matthew. But the film, which features interviews with original 1972 cast members Eugene Levy and Victor Garber, composer Stephen Schwartz and the production’s musical director Paul Shaffer, makes a strong case for Jewishness being the secret sauce that made the show take off.
Davis, who grew up in a secular Jewish home, began this project as a Godspell skeptic, trying to understand how so many subversive comedic talents broke out in a “hippie-dippy musical about Jesus.”
“I could imagine SCTV ripping Godspell apart with the Godspell that I knew,” Davis said in a video call from Chicago, where he was in town for a screening at the Music Box Theater. “Almost from the very beginning, they were like, ‘You don’t understand what Godspell was.’”
The show was picketed by Christians who took exception to the apostles, and Jesus himself, depicted as clowns clad in overalls. The key to the success of the Toronto Godspell, one of a number of regional productions that sprang up in the 1970s, was its invitation to performers to improvise within a sacred text.
“My feeling now is they were attracted to this material because this material encouraged them to be their biggest, best, most brilliant comic selves,” said Davis.
In the case of Hamilton, Ontario-native Eugene Levy or Gilda Radner, who came over from Detroit to audition, this meant introducing a Jewish sensibility to a work that was rooted in the writings of a First Century Jew. Whether they knew it or not, the cast was soon following a Jewish schedule of worship.
Perhaps more legendary than the show, composed by an early career Schwartz, later to write Wicked, with a book by his Carnegie Mellon classmate John-Michael Tebelak, were the after-parties, dubbed “Friday Night Services” and held at the shared home of Short and Levy.
It was here, with some chemical assistance — that the cast and their friends, among them John Candy, developed bits and worked on characters. (Thankfully, they had the presence of mind to record these confabs, which can be heard in the film and are animated in a style a la The Brady Kids.)
It wasn’t quite Bible study, but in his interviews, Eugene Levy briefly reflects on the significance of his turn as Jesus, following Victor Garber and Don Scardino, who later became a prolific comedy director for shows like 30 Rock and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
“I think I was the first Jewish-looking Jesus that any of the productions had,” Levy says in the documentary. “They went more Ronald McDonald with that look but I definitely was sporting my ethnicity and a little hair.”
Levy refused to manscape for the role of Jesus, who traditionally makes his entrance in just his boxers, and so he had to wear an undershirt. At one point the actor considers if, in the moment after Jesus is “crucified” on a chainlink fence, and lifted by the company in a sort of resurrection, he was doing something sacrilegious.
In the end, he concludes, it just felt like good theater.
The call of Godspell remains strong, Davis said. Not every member of the company — some of whom are related by marriage — still sees each other in person, but they’re all on an email chain. Davis embarked on the film thinking it would be a study on “the fickleness of fame,” with the cast of 10 about evenly divided between household names and ones who didn’t quite hit, but from the first interview he found people asking when he’d arrange a reunion.
The moment finally arrived in 2025, which, due to the exigencies of scheduling, happened to be the first night of Passover. There was a cake, but you can see Paul Shaffer electing to snack on matzo. (When cast member Valda Aviks asks him if he shouldn’t be at a Seder, he simply says “eh.”)
“I did bring a Seder plate that we had, a little fun thing for them to play with if they wanted,” said Davis. “All they wanted to do was sing by the piano.”
Davis considers Godspell, the Jesus musical written by a “nice Jewish boy from Long Island,” an example of the way Jews succeed through assimilation and entertainment. While he came in thinking the show was cornball, he now understands how it paved the way for the barrier-breaking comedy its alumni would produce
“There’s something Jewish fundamentally at the core of it,” Davis said. Like the Jewish teacher at its center, it is “radical.”
The post How Toronto Jews spread the Gospel of ‘Godspell’ appeared first on The Forward.
