Sosua - Refugee Haven in the Caribbean.

(HOLOCAUST).

(New York

1941)

Photographic illustrations throughout. Issued by the Dominican Republic Settlement Association, New York.

In July 1938 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt convened in Evian, France, a meeting to discuss ‘The Organization of the Emigration and Resettlement of Political Refugees and Those Persecuted by Reason of Race or Religion.’ Despite the grand title, the conference achieved very little. While every other country in the world, including the United States, closed its borders to Jewish refugees, Rafael Trujillo, the totalitarian ruler of the Dominican Republic, invited 100,000 Jews to come to his island. His motives may have been politically driven - he wanted a “whiter” population and a more economically successful and prosperous country - but he offered life to concentration-camp-bound Jews, an offer they would certainly not refuse, whatever the ulterior motives. However bureaucratic difficulties in the countries from which the Jews were to leave, both in their countries of origin and the countries of passage, and the slow pace adopted by the institutions responsible for the implementation of the project, its success was less than satisfactory and ultimately only one thousand visas were issued, and just 650 Jews actually made it to the Island. The refugees were settled in the tiny seacoast town of Sosua, then mostly jungle land, located in the Puerto Plata province that Trujillo had established with funding provided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Today, only some 20 of the original Jewish families remain in Sosua. See A. Wells, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa (2009); and M. A. Kaplan, Museum of Jewish Heritage Catalogue, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua (2008).