TRAVEL
Four Jews are remnants of Dominica community

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 barmitzvah 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”.

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