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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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UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament
(JTA) — The new British government plans to announce in the coming weeks a comprehensive package of economic sanctions and other measures designed to prevent the Israeli expansion of West Bank settlements.
Overall the U.K. needs “a comprehensive reset of our policy” when it comes to the West Bank, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday. He spoke during his first question and answer session with lawmakers since he and the government he represents were sworn into office in July.
Miliband added that the new measures would include a ban on goods produced in the settlements and targeted sanctions on British institutions and individuals.
“We are looking, indeed, at our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories, and the different tools we have to tackle it,” Miliband explained. “We do not want British companies financing, constructing, or advertising new settlements. The work we are now undertaking is how we can stop that.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned Tuesday that if the U.K. acted against his country, the Jewish state would take retaliatory steps against Great Britain.
“We are prepared and I hope they will not make the mistake of doing this. If they do, there will be a reaction,” Sa’ar said in a podcast interview with the Hebrew news website Ynet.
Tensions between Israel and the U.K. have been escalating in light of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
The U.K.’s decision under the last government to recognize Palestinian statehood in 2025 inflamed the situation, which is expected to get worse should Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu win the October 27 election in Israel.
Any government that Netanyahu forms is expected to be right-wing and to continue the policies of the existing government, just as the U.K. under Miliband and the new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, are more willing than their predecessors to go head-to-head with Israel on the issue
Miliband already floated the idea of targeted sanctions after Israel’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in August, a move that he said would undermine any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Miliband went further on Tuesday when fielding a number of questions from lawmakers frustrated about the lack of U.K. response to Israeli actions in the West Bank, such as terror activity by Israelis against Palestinian civilians and continued settler building. This includes the opening of E1 bids last month.
The foreign secretary explained that his words reflected the policies Burnham had considered even before he entered Downing Street in July, such as a ban on trade for goods produced in the settlements. “We are obviously working across government and with our allies on these measures,” Miliband said.
Israel has said that it has a right to build settler homes in Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli military and civilian control and where all the settlements are located. Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three areas, with sections A and B, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
The International Court of Justice in 2024 issued an advisory opinion explaining that such construction in Area C is illegal, affirming a long-held stance of the U.N. and many nations, including the U.K.
Concern has been particularly high with regard to the E1 project, which would add 3,400 homes to the municipal boundaries of the city of Ma’aleh Adumim by building on an underdeveloped hilltop. The Palestinian Authority and the international community, including past U.S. administrations, have warned that the project would block contiguous Palestinian development in that area and thus make a Palestinian state untenable.
Miliband referenced that viewpoint when speaking to the House of Commons on Tuesday, explaining that E1 development had long been considered a “red line,” because the project “cuts through the heart of the West Bank and risks making a Palestinian state unviable.”
He affirmed the U.K.’s commitment to a two-state resolution, explaining that his government would not stand idly by while that vision was being destroyed by Israeli actions on the ground in the West Bank.
In a harshly worded attack on the U.K. and Miliband in August, Sa’ar on X warned that UK’s statements on Israel were fueling antisemitism in Great Britain and emphasized that the Jewish people had a right to build anywhere in their ancestral homeland.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament appeared first on The Forward.
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How the Yiddish project took root in the U.S. after the Holocaust
How did the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research find a new home in the United States after the Holocaust? Kalman Weiser (York University, Toronto) narrates this dramatic story in a new book, Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America.
Initially, YIVO’s success wasn’t a sure thing. It was “hardly clear to YIVO’s staff and supporters in the 1940s that an organization dedicated to serving the intellectual and cultural needs of a global, Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation could take root in the radically different circumstances of postwar America,” Weiser writes.
Before the war, YIVO already had an American branch in New York but its main goal was raising money for the institute in Vilna. Several YIVO activists also focused on researching Yiddish culture and history — but again, mainly in Eastern Europe.
The truth was, most American Jews had little interest in Yiddish and didn’t think highly of Jewish studies at all.
After the Holocaust, YIVO stood at a crossroads: It could either become an archive dedicated to Yiddish life destroyed in Eastern Europe, or it could further develop Yiddish scholarship to give Yiddish a new lease on life in America.
Weiser guides the reader through the fierce debates among YIVO’s associates over the direction the institute should take. Yudel Mark maintained that YIVO should focus primarily on Holocaust research, while former Bundists argued that it should study the conditions of the Jewish masses in America.
Max Weinreich, YIVO’s intellectual godfather, had an altogether different vision. He believed that American Jewry could actually play the leading role in the Jewish world after the Holocaust. At the same time, though, he didn’t think they were ready to assume this responsibility. They needed the Yiddish-speaking refugees and immigrants, such as himself and other East European intellectuals, to guide them.
According to Weinreich, YIVO should concern itself not only with visnshaft (scholarship), but with visn vos shaft (“knowledge that creates”). In other words, Yiddish scholarship needed to enable American Jews to preserve their Jewishness and secure the continuity of Yiddish.
The success of this monumental undertaking depended on the Yiddish language itself. Yiddish needed to serve as a bridge between generations of Jews, a spiritual and intellectual connection between the old country and the new.
For this reason, Weinreich held that the American Jewish intellectual leaders needed to be “de-assimilated,” and the prestige of Yiddish needed to be raised in American academia.
But despite Weinreich’s efforts, YIVO remained on the margins of the Jewish mainstream and received limited support from major Jewish philanthropic organizations. Relations between YIVO and the American Yiddish literati were also strained.
The normative, standard Yiddish that YIVO wanted to promote drew criticism from some American Yiddish writers and journalists. They argued that “YIVO Yiddish” differed considerably from the authentic, natural Yiddish they were raised with.
In his articles in the Forward, Isaac Bashevis Singer ridiculed neologisms as kadmen-yidish (proto-Yiddish) and breyshes-yidish (old Yiddish), linguistic concepts that Weinreich had invented to describe different historical phases in the development of the Yiddish language.
At the heart of the conflict between YIVO and Yiddish writers, Weiser explains, was the question: “To whom does Yiddish belong?” YIVO’s goal was to create a normative language that could be taught like other foreign languages. In this way, the future of Yiddish could be secured even if a living community of Yiddish speakers no longer existed.
The tensest chapters in YIVO’s history revolved around the struggle to recover the materials that formerly belonged to the institute in Vilna.
The Nazis sent some of the books and documents to Germany for the archives of the museum the Nazis were planning, “Institute for Research on the Jewish Question.” After the war these materials fell into the hands of the American military administration in Germany.
Recovering these materials was an incredible feat on the part of Weinreich and his colleagues, among them Lucy Schildkret (better known by her married name, Dawidowicz), who later made her name as a Holocaust scholar. Legally, the American military administration was obligated to return the plundered materials to Poland or the Soviet Union. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem was a claimant as well.
Weinreich worked his contacts among the American elite, and in 1947, YIVO recovered the archives. He also succeeded in presenting YIVO as the heir to other cultural institutions in Vilna. As a result, YIVO received the collections of the renowned Strashun Library and the S. Ansky Historical and Ethnographic Society.
The second chapter of YIVO’s history occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. A significant collection of YIVO materials was discovered in Lithuania, thanks to a Lithuanian librarian who had hidden it in the warehouse of the national book chamber.
This time, YIVO had to negotiate with the government of the Lithuanian Republic, which had recently become independent. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and these materials can now be accessed digitally.
Weiser’s history of YIVO is an engaging, well-researched book. Max Weinreich was far from the only European Jewish refugee to find a new home in America and build a successful career there. But he may be the only one who single-handedly rebuilt an important European Jewish scholarly institute that remains active till the present day.
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A great Jewish sculptor gave a gift to America. The Trump administration is taking it away.
By the time Joel Shapiro’s Blue showed up in my morning feed Wednesday, it had already lost its legs. Shapiro’s 24-foot aluminum figure had spent seven years kicking at the sky outside the Kennedy Center in Washington. Now workers were taking it apart. In the photograph, the legs lay on the grass; the rest hung in straps, and a few guys in hard hats were standing underneath it, discussing something.
“Holy shit,” I said, then enlarged the picture, as if one of those men might explain what they were doing to the work of a man I had liked so much. Yes, I know they aren’t legs. That was Joel’s trick, to join a few rectangles and, without a face or a finger in sight, make you worry that some poor guy was about to fall.
The first — and only — time I met Joel Shapiro in 2024, he was eating a Mallomar. Same surname, no relation, though the speed with which he opened my box raised questions. Mallomars are a reporter’s trick of mine: I bring them to interviews during their brief season because they are Kryptonite to Jewish men of a certain age; even if nobody bites, the box gets a laugh. My father, who made it to 99 without losing interest in either nurses or cookies, taught me their power. Later, Julian Schnabel arrived in an all-white jumpsuit and wanted one too. I considered the theory proved.
We were at Pace, two days before his solo show Out of the Blue opened, standing in front of ARK — almost 12 feet of painted wood that looked as if it had thrown out an arm to stop a fall.
“Let’s do something we shouldn’t,” Joel said. “Touch the work.”
The guard didn’t move, so I put my hand on a Joel Shapiro.
I never understood how he did it. You’re looking at a few rectangular forms joined at unlikely angles, and then there it is, a person in trouble with gravity. No face, no hands, and still I worried about the poor thing falling—somehow it was precarious without looking afraid. Nine months later, he was dead.
Joel made Blue for that lawn of the Kennedy Center. It wasn’t on loan, and it didn’t wander in from a warehouse; he built it for the opening of the REACH in 2019 and gave it to the Kennedy Center as a permanent installation, which is to say he gave it to us. On Wednesday, it took a crane and a six-in-the-morning closure of the northbound lanes of Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway to get it off the grass.
The Kennedy Center thanked him, saying it was “deeply grateful” for the years Blue spent “animating our campus” and “honored to have been stewards” of his “enduring legacy.” It added, by the way, that institutions deinstall donated work all the time. I read the statement twice, sure I’d missed the reason. There isn’t one.
Once I might have shrugged and called it housekeeping. Then Trump took the place over, cleared out the leadership and got himself elected chairman by a board of his own appointees, and I stopped being charitable about coincidences.
Josef Palermo, a curator there until he was laid off in March, told Artnet that on Sept. 5 of last year he was called into the office of Richard Grenell, who was running the center then, and told to get rid of all the outdoor art because the president wanted all-new art for the reopening — the one that’s supposed to come after the two-year closure the board sanctioned last month. Palermo says he “delayed and obfuscated” as long as he could. He bought Blue almost another year on that lawn.
Ivy Shapiro, Joel’s daughter, runs the foundation that will now decide where it goes. I met her at Pace that afternoon; she stopped in before the show opened and shared a Mallomar with her father. She has declined to comment.
Joel had no patience for meanings he hadn’t put in the work himself. When I told him Wikipedia connected his blue to Judaism, he laughed.
“I don’t know about that. People love talking about Yves Klein Blue. This is just blue — like the ocean, the sky. It’s not mine, but it’s definitely sublime.”
So I’m not going to tell you Blue came down because Joel was Jewish. There’s no evidence for it, and the suggestion would have irritated him. But his Jewish life is not incidental, and it is not the part of him anyone is going to put in a statement.
He was born in 1941 and spent his first years at Camp Wolters in Texas, where his father was chief of medical services and treated German prisoners of war. The family came back to New York in 1945, and Joel and the other kids played a game they called “Burn the House of Hitler.” Children do that. They take whatever horror the adults have left lying around and turn it into something you can win.
A mile and a half from Blue’s empty patch of ground is his Loss and Regeneration, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: a small house tipped onto its roof and, some distance off, a figure that is also a tree. He made it for the murdered children. It imagines starting over.
Blue wasn’t about any of that and didn’t need to be. It was absurd and intimate and alive, out on the grass with its enormous kick — “a celebration of possibility,” he called it.
Near the end of the afternoon I asked why he was still working so hard when his legacy was long since safe.
“I’m still improving,” he said. Then he told me what he was after: “Work you cannot refute.”
If I could call him for a comment, I suspect he’d check the rigging before saying anything grand, and then say something that wouldn’t have occurred to me. The Kennedy Center thanked him for his enduring legacy after his sculpture’s legs were already on the ground. In the photograph, the straps are pulled tight around what my eyes still insist on calling its chest.
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