Nadene Goldfoot
Jovenel Moïse was a Haitian entrepreneur and politician who served as the president of Haiti from 2017 until his assassination in 2021. Here are officers patroling the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, days after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. The police said several of the key figures under investigation had met up in the months before the killing. Credit... Federico Rios for The New York Times.
In 1492, the first Jew to ever set foot in Haiti was Luis de Torres, an interpreter for Christopher Columbus on his first expedition. He was the first to set foot in America and the first to have used tobacco. He was born Jewish but was baptized immediately before Columbus' expedition sailed. We knew there were a few sailors on his ship known to be Jewish and who needed to get out of Spain being the Spanish Inquisition said that all Jews who would not convert to Catholicism had to leave the country. Columbus may have had a priest on his voyage with him. It's thought that Columbus himself may have been a Marrano as he wrote to his son in Hebrew.
After Haiti was taken over and colonized by the French in 1633, many Dutch Jews (of whom many were Marrano- people who had gone through conversion but remained Jewish in private) emigrated from Brazil in 1634 and became employees of the French sugar plantations and further developed the trade. In 1683, the Jews were expelled from Haiti and all other French colonies, due to the Code Noir (Black Code), which both restricted the activities of free Negroes and forbade the exercise of any religion other than Roman Catholicism.
However, despite the Code Noir, a limited number of Jews remained in French trading companies as leading officials, including foreign citizens (Dutch Jews, Danish Jews, and English Jews) or holders of special residence permits (lettres patentes). These Jews tended to specialize in agricultural plantations, with Portuguese Jews from Bordeaux and Bayonne settling mainly in the southern part of Haiti (Jacmel, Jérémie, Léogâne, Les Cayes, Petit-Goâve, and Port-au-Prince) and Curaçaoan Jews settling in the northern part (Cap-Haitien and Saint Louis).
In the mid-1700s, many Jews returned to Haiti.
Due to a lack of Jewish community centers, many youth did not grow up with a Jewish education and had to hide their Judaism, as only Catholics were permitted to attend public school. Jews generally preferred to settle on the coastline in port cities, as many were involved in commerce and trade, establishing communities in major industry centers.
Recently, archaeologists uncovered an ancient synagogue of Crypto-Jews in the city of Jérémie, the only one found on the island; Jérémie was inhabited by many mixed-race families of Jewish descent. Several Jewish tombstones have also been found in port cities such as Cap-Haïtien and Jacmel.
By the end of the 19th century, approximately thirty mostly Sephardi Jewish families had arrived from Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt; many Jews from the Middle East felt secure emigrating to Haiti, as a law in France had been passed during this period that gave French citizenship to minorities in the Americas.
In 1915, during the United States occupation of Haiti, roughly 200 Jews lived in Haiti at the time. During the 20 years period of occupation, many Jews left Haiti for the United States and South America.
Haiti was hardly an obvious destination for Jews fleeing Europe in the late 1930s. But they went wherever they could, and Haiti deserves credit for saving the lives of approximately 300 Jews. One of them was Ernst Mohr. He was released from the Dachau concentration camp 83 years ago – on December 21, 1938 when this was taken .
In 1937, Haiti was responsible for saving about 70 Jewish families (an estimated total of up to 300 lives) during the Holocaust (according to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), by issuing passports and visas to Jews escaping Nazi persecution. Some were Austrian Jews, Polish Jews, German Jews, and a trickle of Romanian Jew and Czech Jewish descent. Haiti played a small, yet critical role in saving Jewish lives during the darkest chapter in the Jewish story.
Unfortunately, though, it seems that more Jews were unable to acquire visas to Haiti due to the cost. Professor David Bankier, of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that after 1938, “the cost [of a visa] was outrageous: If you wanted to go to Haiti, you had to pay $5,000.
” Haiti at the time, was still unfairly paying reparations on an exorbitant debt with interest fees to France after the Haitian Revolution that could have hindered their efforts to continue issuing these visas for free.
There were others apart from this bunch who never came to Haiti at all, but from Germany they were given Haitian passports by the Haitian government that allowed them to flee Germany and into other countries.
Grateful to the Haitian government, many of these European Jews stayed in Haiti until the late 1950s in which many Haitian Jews left, so that their children could marry other Jews and not assimilate, while finding better economic opportunities.
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, Yom Kippur, 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.
The 1957 Jewish population of Haiti was about 200. The mid-20th century was a time where a continued departure of Jews from Haiti for the United States and Panama because of the economic conditions and civil violence in the country.
Haiti–Israel relations refers to the bilateral and diplomatic ties between Haiti and Israel. Haiti recognized Israel's independence on 17 March 1949.[1] The Israeli ambassador in Panama represents Israeli interests in Haiti as Israel has an honorary consulate in its capital of Port-au-Prince.[2]
In 1947, Haiti voted in favour of the UN partition of Palestine that helped create the state of Israel.
Haiti had a terrible earthquake in 2010. In the wake of the devastating earthquake that destroyed much of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, killing more than 300,000 people and leaving nearly a million more homeless and without food, water or shelter, Israel was one of the first countries to send crews to assist in the devastated land.
The Israel Defense Forces sent both search and rescue teams that sought remaining survivors, among crumbled buildings and homes as well sending medical teams to help care for the survivors. The medical team succeeded in setting up the first fully functioning field hospital, inclusive of an excess amount of advanced equipment.
"During its time in Haiti, the delegation treated more than 1110 patients, conducted 319 successful surgeries, delivered 16 births including three by Cesarean sections and saved many from within the ruins."
On January 27, following the rescue team operations in Haiti, the Israeli government decided to continue its official assistance to Haiti coordinated through MASHAV, Israel's Agency for International Development Cooperation, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in part of a global effort to reconstruct the country. Local Jewish Israeli-Haitian businessman, Daniel Kedar, has become the de facto coordinator for Israeli forces in Haiti.
When the catastrophic, 7.0-magnitude earthquake shook Haiti on January 12, 2010, Rudolf Dana happened to be in Miami on business. In the days after 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, had been on the phone and Internet around the clock, trying to make contact with friends and his nearly 500 employees.
The president of Haiti has been assassinated. All have been identified by the Haitian authorities as prominent players in a sprawling plot to kill the president with the help of more than 20 former Colombian commandos. But the ties between them have been murky, at best, and until recently it was not clear how, or even if, they knew one another. The mystery surrounding the murder of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse deepened Monday as Haitian police arrested a U.S.-based evangelical pastor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, placing him at the center of a murky plot surrounding an assassination that has stunned Haitians and international observers.
Because of Haiti's location, Haiti has the potential to affect the stability of the Caribbean and Latin America and is therefore strategically important to the United States. Historically, the United States viewed Haiti as a counterbalance to Communist Cuba. Haiti's potential as a trading partner and an actor in the drug trade makes the nation strategically important to the United States. Moreover, both nations are tied by a large Haitian diaspora residing in the United States.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Haiti
https://forward.com/news/123890/haiti-s-jewish-remnant-keeps-the-faith-and-lends/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti%E2%80%93United_States_relations
https://time.com/6079924/christian-emmanuel-sanon-arrested-haiti-president-assassination/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/haiti-virtual-jewish-history-tour
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