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Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Holland's Jews Developing a Jewish Haven, Curacao

Tuesday, July 23, 2019


Nadene Goldfoot                                       

Anne Frank b: June 12, 1929, a very young German-born  Jewish Dutch diarist
who died after being hidden by the Dutch from the Germans
in a concentration camp.  She wrote about her experience in her diary.

She was Ashkenazi, but many of her Jewish friends were Sephardis being Marranos (Anusim) as well as practicing Sephardim.
and it is they that had ancestors involved in Curacao.  Holland
had both lines of Jews living both in Holland and in Curacao.
Like Anne Frank, the majority of Dutch Jews perished.  Westerbork, the main transit-camp for extermination, was the place of death.  She
died from Typhus.  Had there been an Israel already established,
this would not have happened.

 "From July 1942 until September 3, 1944, the Germans deported 97,776 Jews from Westerbork: 54,930 to Auschwitz in 68 transports, 34,313 to Sobibor in 19 transports, 4,771 to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 7 transports, and 3,762 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 9 transports. Most of those deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor were killed upon arrival.Communities wiped out were from Amsterdam, the Hague and Rotterdam.  "
The area now known as the Netherlands was once part of the Spanish Empire but in 1581, the northern Dutch provinces declared independence. A principal motive was the wish to practice Protestant Christianity.  

                                                                     

In 1492, in an Alhambra castle in Granada of Moorish splendor, two Jewish men of the highest rank,  pleaded in vain before King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to end their edict decreeing that all Jews of Spain had to choose between baptism or face expulsion from Spain.  They were Don Isaac Abravanel and Don Abraham, Sr.They were trusted counsellors (advisors of the laws-like a lawyer of today) of the royal court of Spain. 

These royal rulers were not of that mind.  They were prodded by the cruel Inquisitors and elated by their recent final victory over the remaining Moorish king of southern Spain.  Visions of gold and riches from the newly discovered continent by Christopher Columbus, himself possibly a Jew, danced in their heads.  So the exodus of many Jews of Spain began, those that were young enough and possibly with small children were willing to leave their homeland instead of their older parents and grandparents who were too old and had too many investments and reasons to remain.
                                                  

All they had to do was to cross the border and seek refuge in Portugal.  The dastardly Inquisition followed them there, and they had to emigrate again.  The majority fled to the countries of the Mediterranean, with a large number found a friendly and safe haven in far away Amsterdam, Holland.  There, under the enlightened rule of the Princes of Orange-Nassau, religious liberty was guaranteed to all faiths.
                                                         

 Holland, and its once glorious Sephardic Spanish-Portuguese community ofAmsterdam,  was able to grow and develop.   From that great center of Jewish life and learning, the Jewish community of Curacao was colonized and developed.  Curacao was colonized, guided, counseled and provided with rabbis.  It was an island  in  theDutch West Indies. 
                                                     
Mikve Israel

David Nassy received the charter for it and encouraged Jewish settlement there.  Refugees from Brazil arrived in 1654.  A Jewish congregation was organized.  A Sephardi synagogue was built in 1732, the oldest in the Western Hemisphere.  A Reform was established in 1863.  They were united in 1964. There is a 2nd synagogue on the island.  In 1990 there were 600 Jews living here.  

The first to come was a Dutch Jew with the Portuguese name of Joao d-Ilhan.  He brought with him a charter from the Dutch West India Company to establish a Jewish agricultural settlement on Curacao.  50 Jewish colonists, most likely young and eager to start a new life on this lovely island, established a congregation and called it Mikve Israel (the Hope of Israel), in the year of 1651.  
                                                     
"The Dutch government instated the explorer Peter Stuyvesant as governor of the island in 1642. Stuyvesant soon began establishing plantations on the island with the famous landhuizen structures, which were the popular plantation houses of the 18th and 19th centuries. 
                                                
Amsterdam's House of West India Company

Curaçao became involved in the slave trade in 1639 when the Dutch West India Company requested to import slaves from Africa. " Chartered West India Company) was a chartered company (known as the "WIC") of Dutch merchants as well as foreign investors.."In 1732, the Dutch West India Company granted private merchants the right to participate in the slave trade. During the slave trade, the Papiamentu language took form. This dialect is a mixture of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and African languages, and was the primary means of communication between slaves and slave owners.

The slaves endured harsh treatment and inhumane living conditions on Curaçao. From 1750 to 1751, the slaves at Hato Plantation established an uprising against their masters, but the slave population on Curaçao peaked at 12,804 in 1789. By 1795, the island saw the largest slave revolt at the Kenepa Plantation."
                                                        
Hotel Hilton on Curacao Island 

Jump ahead 322 years and you will see the present members of this same congregation, some being direct descendants of the 1st pioneers there who had kepat with pride at their same family names, giving thanks for the choice their forebears made when they chose Curacao to live.  

"Sailors during the 16th and 17th centuries on long voyages would often come down with scurvy. Legend has it that the island which was to become Curaço became a sanctuary for ill sailors, and when their ships returned, as a result no doubt from the Vitamin C-rich fruit found on the island, they had fully recovered from their scurvy. From then on the Portuguese referred to the island as Ilha da Curação (Island of Healing)."

Today, this paradise has a population of 163,468 happy people.  It's its own country within the Netherlands.  " It is classified as a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands," an interesting concept.  

 Besides the continuous Jewish community established there, they also have " About 73% of people in Curaçao are Roman Catholic but other major religions include Pentecostal (6.6%), Protestant (3.2%), Adventist (3%), Jehovah's Witness (2%), and Evangelical (1.9%).  The people are made up of The racial and ethnic composition of Salinas is estimated as:
  • 75.4% Curaçaoan
  • 6% Dutch
  • 3.6% Dominican
  • 3% Colombian
  • 1.2% Surinamese
  • 1.2% Haitian
  • 1.1% Aruban
  • 1.1% Venezuelan
  • 0.9% Unspecified
  • 5% Others                                  
The people who live here today are quite a mixture, with prostitution being rampant and allowed for foreigneers only.  They are much more open about it like Holland.  "Prostitution in Curaçao is legal only for foreign women who get a temporary permit to work in the large open-air brothel called "Le Mirage" or "Campo Alegre."  

 "Owing to the island's history of slavery, most Curaçaoans are of Black African descent. There are also sizable minorities of Dutch, Latin Americans, French, South Asians, East Asians, Javanese, Portuguese and  Arabs from the Middle East. Additionally, there are both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish communities."

To think that an island first populated by the freedom of religion for Jews has turned into a miniature Holland is not far-fetched, I suppose.  It took a calm and non-judgmental Dutchman to hide the Jewish family of Anne Frank in WWII.  

They had anti-Semitism in 1798.  A 2- page letter has been found written by Victor Hughes, the French Colonial Representative in the Caribbean, calling the Jews "the scum of the entire people and universally despised".   It was written to Jewish Community leaders David Cohen Henriquez and Jacob de Castro.  The letter was auctioned off in New York.  This was contrary to political changes since France in 1791 was the 1st country in the world to give Jews equal rights.  Old prejudices hang on for a long time as this shows.  

As it turns out, Jews were also complicit along with Gentiles in the slave trade.  Everyone wanted to make money from  them.  "“Money was earned by Jewish communities in South America, partly through slavery, and went to Holland, where Jewish bankers handled it,  Non-Jews were also complicit, but so were we," said some Dutch Jews.   Need readers be reminded that people then had different views and had  not developed the realization of what they were doing like people of today, but Jews should have, for the Torah speaks about slavery and how slaves are to be treated.  These money-makers just hadn't paid attention to laws of their own religion.  

I see people haven't really changed much.  Failing to be aware of their own religious rules, they neglected to learn that the Torah lays down such facts as "Okay, they're not really slaves. Slaves are people owned by other people. In Torah law, you never have complete ownership over anything. These slaves of Jews rest on the seventh day and Jewish holidays, cannot be physically or sexually abused and are obligated in many mitzvot. So they are really more like indentured servants".  This was the difference between Jewish slaves and slaves of others way back in biblical days.
                                                             
Visitors Zalman Notic and Moshe Lifshitz with  the Prime Minister of Curacao
in what resulted as a bar mitzvah 

Curacao, begun by Jews wanting to live by the laws of Moses, though it has changed much by others' morality and what that has brought into their lives, still remains a home to some of the children of the original pioneers.  

Resource:
Jewish Digest, January 1976, The New World's First Jewish Congregation by Charles Gomes Casseres, from bulletin of Congregation Mikve Israel-Emanuel. 
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

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