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JewishWikipedia.info
THE CARIBBEAN -
THE JEWS OF HAITI
_________________________________________________________
HAITI AND THE JEWS: FORGOTTEN HISTORY
Countervortex Ha'aretz, Nirit Ben-Ari,
Nirit Ben-Ari is a doctoral student in political science who teaches at Israel's Sapir College. This article first appeared in Hebrew in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz on Jan. 22 Translation: Pacha Dovinsky
A field hospital established by the Israeli mission to Haiti treats dozens of earthquake victims every day, and is the only hospital prepared to perform complex surgeries and treatments in field conditions. But this delegation, which landed in Haiti following the recent earthquake, is not the first time the Jewish presence has been felt in the island.
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola—where Haiti lies today—he was accompanied by Torres, a Jew from Spain who was forced to convert to Christianity, and served as an interpreter. Following European settlement in the New World, Jews who fled the terror of the Spanish Inquisition also found refuge in Haiti. Jews who came to Haiti were merchants, plantation owners and slave-owners, and settled all over the island. In the 17th century the French came, bringing with them African slaves, who took the place of the natives whose culture was largely annihilated by the Spanish conquest.
In 1685, King Louis XIV published the document known as "Code Noir", which set the rules of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies. Besides imposing draconian restrictions on the slaves and prohibiting the practice of all religions except the Catholic, the document ordered the expulsion of all Jews from French colonies in the islands. Most Jews left, but in Haiti, as well as other French colonies, local government facilitated softer interpretation to "Code Noir", and Jews involved in commerce with companies that France was interested in received the status of French citizens in Haiti.
Mordechai Arbel, a former Israeli ambassador to Haiti, wrote in his book The Jewish Nation in the Caribbean (Gefen, 2002), one of the Jewish families that came to the island was Mendès-France—of the same family as Pierre Mendès-France, prime minister of France from 1954-1955.
In 1804, after the slave rebellion, the former slaves slaughtered nearly all whites on the island, including Jews, and established a Free Republic. The government of freed slaves wrote in the constitution that a white person would never be a landowner in the country. Most of the remaining Jews left, the plantations closed and trade ceased. Only a very few Jews remained and were absorbed into the nation's elite; some of their descendants still live on the island.
From 1830, when the revolt against Russian occupation of Poland started, some Jewish families fled to Haiti, where they generally joined the upper classes. Toward the end of the 19th century, some 30 other Jewish families came from Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, and joined in the textile trade activity. During World War II, Haiti was one of the few countries in the world to open its doors to Jewish refugees, but most Jews emigrated after the war ended.
ANTI-SEMITISM AND SLAVERY: THE LINK
Haiti, like other Caribbean nations, is an island with a tradition of carnival celebrations. Dr. Elizabeth McAllister, a professor of religions at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, wrote in her article "The Jew in the Haitian Imagination: A Popular History of Anti-Judaism and Proto-Racism" (in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, Oxford, 2004) that "among the cast of characters during the Rara carnival in Haiti are the 'Jews'."
"Jews were Europe's original, the first object of demonization", reminds McAllister. "In Medieval Europe, Jews were associated with the devil, cannibalism, poisoning of the holy bread. When the Europeans came to the Caribbean, they brought these beliefs and applied them with little or no change on the native population and the Africans. So in fact, anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages was the basis for racism against blacks in the New World. "
In her investigation of the Rara carnival, held during Easter in Haiti, McAlister found a a ceremony called "Bwil Jif", in which carnival revelers make straw dolls called "Judas" or simply "the Jews ", dragging them in the march and finally setting them on fire. But at the same time, participants also see themselves as "Jews" celebrating the crucifixion of Jesus. According to McAllister, the participants adopted the negative representation of the Jews that the Spanish brought with them as an image of resistance and protest against their oppression under Catholic masters, and they burn the "Jewish" effigy as a mockery of to the racism and oppression against the slaves.
THE ISRAELI CONNECTION
Former ambassador Arbel says that when he lived in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, between 1972 and 1975, he insisted on uniting the 12 Jewish families who lived then in the city, organizing events on the occasion of Jewish holidays. As ambassador, he promoted agricultural development projects and invited Israeli farmers in Haiti to teach villagers how to develop agriculture. He says that two Israeli farmers lived in the Artibonite valley for four years, and helped local residents to grow vegetables for export. Arbel recalls a moving ceremony held in the village, in which all the residents exclaimed "Vive Israel!"
HAITI’S JEWISH REMNANT KEEPS THE FAITH AND LENDS A HAND AMID THE CRISIS
Forward, Gabrielle Birkner, January 20, 2010
Each year on Yom Kippur, Rudolph Dana locks himself in his Pétionville, Haiti, home — protected by guard dogs and security personnel — and passes the Day of Atonement fasting, praying and reciting the traditional liturgy of repentance and forgiveness.
Up until about 10 years ago, Haiti’s tiny Jewish community would gather in a home on Yom Kippur and pray alongside a video recording of a Yom Kippur service that Dana’s brother-in-law, a cantor at a New Jersey synagogue, had mailed to him. But in recent years, the community has become too small and disjointed to warrant even such modest holiday gatherings.
When the catastrophic, 7.0-magnitude earthquake shook Haiti on January 12, Dana happened to be in Miami on business. In the days since the quake — which leveled much of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas, including Pétionville — Dana, 61, who owns a propane-distribution company, has been on the phone and Internet around the clock, trying to make contact with friends and his nearly 500 employees.
Most, but not all, of the people who work for him survived the quake, but many of them lost loved ones. Dana says hundreds of his friends and acquaintances died in the disaster. “Some were in the supermarket; some were in schools; some were in universities; some were in banks,” he said.
Those who survived are homeless. Their homes have been either reduced to rubble or, like Dana’s house, suffered major structural damage, rendering them unsafe. The more fortunate Haitians are living out of their cars, and the less fortunate ones are sleeping outside on tarps, Dana said. “All of the hotels and churches and places that people could gather have been destroyed,” he said. “It’s not like one is good, and the others are down; they’re all down or could collapse at any time. There is no more city.”
He has been in touch, via an Internet-enabled satellite phone that he kept in his Port-au-Prince office, with many of his employees, who have managed to set up a makeshift office, outside of the badly damaged building that housed his company. These days, they’re not dealing in propane, but in rice, beans and cooking oil. Dana said he managed, through his business connections, to get a shipment of food staples, and that his company has been distributing meals — cooked with firewood — to some 300 people camped out near the office park.
Dana said he is not sure when he will return to the country where his grandparents settled at the turn of the 20th century, and where he was born and has lived for most of his life.
Dana’s deep Haitian roots are part of the country’s long Jewish history.
Back in 1492, Luis de Torres, Christopher Columbus’s interpreter, was the first known Jew to step foot on what is now Haiti. Brazilian immigrants of Jewish ancestry settled there in the 17th century, though many perished in the slave revolts at the turn of the 19th century that ultimately established Haiti’s independence from France.
Then came a small wave of Jewish immigration to Haiti from Lebanon, Syria and Egypt — the influx that brought Dana’s grandparents — during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Many of these Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants made a living importing and selling textiles, and they sent their children to the local Catholic schools. The island’s Jews were joined during the 1930s by about 100 European Jews who came to Haiti fleeing the Nazis. The Haitian Jewish community peaked mid-century at about 300 members, many of whom left for larger, more established Jewish communities in the United States, Argentina and Panama.
Archaeologists have also found evidence of a Crypto-Jewish, or Marrano, community that once existed in the western Haitian city of Jérémie.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Jews who grew up in and around Port-au-Prince remember how the community would import matzah for Passover and would gather together, 50 to 60 people strong, for High Holy Day services. “Services were held in one of the largest homes; men sat in the front and women sat in the back,” said Vivianne Esses, 76, who lived with her family in Pétionville until she was 13, before moving to Bogotá, Colombia, and, later, to Brooklyn, N.Y.
In Jérémie, where Marie Mizrahi grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, hers was one of only a couple of Jewish families in town. Although she and her family weren’t particularly observant, they managed to observe Jewish traditions. “We ate chicken and beef, but never shrimp or pork,” she said. “I have five brothers, and they were all circumcised.”
Both Esses and Mizrahi fondly recalled the sweetness of Haiti’s mangos, the fruit that remains one of the country’s main exports.
Today, Haiti — a country of 9 million people, where the dominant religions are Catholicism and Vodou — has an estimated 25 Jews. Most of them live in Pétionville, a relatively affluent enclave situated in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Some of the country’s Jews are among the wealthiest residents of the island nation, where about 80% of people live in poverty.
Haiti has no rabbi and no synagogue. Dana can’t remember the last time local Jews were able to gather a minyan. There is a Torah, which is kept in the home of Dana’s cousin Gilbert Bigio, the Haitian business magnate with interests in the steel, telecommunications, banking, petroleum, and food sectors.
One of Haiti’s wealthiest citizens and the de facto leader of the island’s Jewish community, Bigio owns the land on which Israel recently set up its military field hospital, according to Amos Radian, Israel’s Dominican Republic-based ambassador to the nations of the eastern Caribbean.
Radian said he arrived in Haiti about 16 hours after the earthquake and, after meeting with Haitian President René Préval, began to look for Gilbert Bigio’s son Reuven Bigio. Gilbert Bigio, who is Israel’s honorary consul in Haiti, was in Florida at the time of the earthquake. The ambassador had received word that the Bigio family had survived the earthquake. But because nearly all forms of electronic communication were down, it took more than a day to locate him.
Radian, speaking with the Forward from the IDF field hospital, said that the Bigio family has been “the key for our success” in opening the hospital just hours after the Israeli army team’s January 15 arrival.
Haiti and Israel maintain full diplomatic relations. Radian said that, during the 1960s and 1970s, Israel’s international development organization, Mashav, was active in creating “special farms” in Haiti, and teaching locals about sustainable agricultural practices, such as the use of drip irrigation and greenhouses.
Kenneth Ades, 41, a Jew who resided in Haiti as a child, said his father, a writer and real estate investor who lived in Pétionville until his death in 2005, had his own plan for improving Haiti’s agriculture, legal system and general infrastructure. “He was very, very patriotic about Haiti,” said Ades, who lives in New York. “He had a blueprint to bring Haiti back; he said it was going to cost $6 billion.”
That was before the earthquake.
(As of 2010, the number of known Jews in Haiti is estimated at 25, residing in the relatively affluent suburb of Pétionville, outside Port-au-Prince.
Haiti and Israel maintain full diplomatic relations, but Israel's nearest permanent diplomat to the region is based in the neighboring Dominican Republic.)
COMMUNITY
LINKS
Haiti History 101: Haiti’s Role in Saving Jewish Families During the Holocaust
Haiti’s Few Jew s Hold on to History By Larry Luxner, Miami Herald, March 21, 2004
THE
INCREDIBLE
STORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE