The Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is pleased to announce the publication of Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua 19401945 by Professor Marion Kaplan of New York University.
The publication marks the first major Englishlanguage scholarship on this fascinating topic and is the companion volume to the Museum's new bilingual exhibition Sosua: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic, opening February 17. The softcover text includes an introduction by Museum Director Dr. David G. Marwell and will retail for $19.95? review text is available upon request.
This important volume examines the experiences of European Jewish refugees who settled in Sosua between 1940 and 1945. It explores settlers' expectations, adjustments, successes, and, ultimately, why most left the Dominican Republic. It further highlights four essential players in this drama: the Dominican government that welcomed the refugees when other governments closed their doors? the American government that agreed to the refugees' haven in the Dominican Republic and then callously changed its mind? the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint) that supported and administered the settlement? and the Dominican workers who helped build Sosua. Dr. Kaplan has drawn from Sosuan community records, a variety of archives, and oral histories to produce an informative, accessible, and truly captivating account that explores the lives of Jewish refugees as well as the political agendas that inevitably guided their fate.
Dominican Haven illustrates the issues faced by refugees even today? Sosua serves as a microcosm that can help to illuminate the political difficulties that refugees face on local, national, and international levels and the utter necessity of governmental, intergovernmental, and private assistance to refugees. But, Dominican Haven goes well beyond politics to give readers an intimate look into the lives of individuals, from their oftenharrowing escapes from Europe to the ambivalence they felt toward Sosua. Brought to the settlement to work on farms, most of the new settlers were of urban, middleclass backgrounds with no agricultural experience.
The hardships of their new lives as well as the tenacity of their European culture compounded by their longing for loved ones trapped in Europe and the traumas they had recently faced complicated their relationship to their Dominican haven. Nevertheless, with the help of Dominican neighbors and the Joint, the European Jews transformed their settlement into a thriving community of hundreds of refugees, complete with a school, meat and dairy cooperative, shops, cultural activities, and a synagogue.
When World War II ended, many of these refugeesturnedsettlers began emigrating to countries whose cultures were more familiar to them? where they could engage in their prewar professions? where their children could pursue a greater variety of educational opportunities? and where they found surviving family members. While Martha Bauer, who worked as a nurse in Sosua "really loved it there," she "missed cultural life," and left for the United States with her husband. Whether they chose to stay or not, all settlers were thankful for the acceptance shown them by the Dominican Republic, where they encountered "not the slightest bit of antisemitism." In the words of settler Walter Baum, "It's an astonishing experience in contrast to other countries and to the antiSemitism… in other parts of the world." -- www.mjhnyc.org
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