The Jews of Santo Domingo

SOSÚA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The way Benny Katz tells it, like Saul on the road to Damascus, he had a vision on the road to Sosúa.

One perilous night, Katz, who was at the time a mechanic and motorcycle racer, was driving on the twisting mountain roads which lead to the D.R.’s north coast. These roads are totally unlit with many hairpin turns, and there are no barriers to prevent a driver from dropping off the edge to crash burning hundreds of feet into the pitch-dark valleys below.

Katz started hearing strange voices telling him he would never make it back to Sosúa.

Instead of stopping the car and collecting himself, which is what a boring norteamericano would do, he followed his Dominican instincts, kept driving, and called upon Jesus to get him through. “Jesus,” he prayed, “if you get me home safely, I will serve you for the rest of my life!”

At least, that’s the way he tells it.

Katz, who is now an insurance broker and candidate in the country’s congressional elections, might be excused for the use of a little hyperbole to fire up his campaign speeches. But that doesn’t lessen in any way his commitment to Jesus.

But he is also a Jew. “We are as Jewish as anybody else who believes in the Torah,” he says, referring to his Catholic wife and their children. “We just believe Christ is our savior.” The concept of wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl and blowing a shofar as his kids bang on tambourines and his niece jams out a meringue tune on the keyboard while they sing about Jesus does not strike him as the least bit incongruous.

Katz’s father, Martin, was one of 645 German Jews who in 1940 accepted an invitation by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo to escape the Nazis and settle in Sosúa. Trujillo had originally intended to accept 100,000 Jews but found few takers, much to the detriment of those who probably later regretted not taking up his offer. />
Trujillo himself was just as much of a nut job as anybody else at that time. Three years prior to receiving the Jews, he had practiced a little ethnic cleansing of his own and ordered the massacre of 30,000 Haitians living on Dominican national territory, out of concern that they were polluting the gene pool. His concept for inviting the Jews in was that they would marry Dominican women and their children would lighten up the country’s racial composition. His embassies in Europe issued 5,000 visas to Jews but most of those jumped ship in the U.S. or Buenos Aires, and only a few hundred made it to Sosúa, which was at the time an isolated jungle on the north coast.

Those who arrived were awarded eighty acres of land, ten cows, a mule and a horse, paid for by American Jewish charities. They quickly figured out agriculture and became wealthy, forming a cooperative, Los Productos de Sosúa, which became the country’s main supplier of meat and dairy products.

Trujillo, who was himself assassinated in 1965, was right when he calculated that the Jewish men would marry local women and produce light-skinned children. The town of Sosúa was 100% Jewish until 1980, when the Puerto Plata airport was opened a short distance away and Sosúa was converted from agriculture to a resort destination. Those Jews who held real estate in what is now the chic, downtown quarter have gotten very rich.

As for their descendants, like Benny Katz, they are assimilating into the population. And like most people in this fervently devoted Catholic country, they are totally comfortable with Jesus.

But in the mind of this writer, there is one question that no amount of research has satisfactorily resolved.

On one hand you have Jews melting into the Catholic population. On the other you have the native Catholic population infused with the Santeria animist traditions that find their origins in the Yoruba people of West Africa. What will be the result of all of this cultural fusion?

Is it possible that somewhere in the mountains of Santo Domingo you will be likely to come across some freaked-out native rabbi waving a snake?

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Posted on 11/30/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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