How the Jews of Barbados Rescued the Western Hemisphere’s Oldest Synagogue

June 26 2019

In 1654, the Portuguese crown reclaimed an area of northeastern Brazil from Dutch rule, causing local Jews—many of whom were descendants of conversos who had come from Portugal as Christians—to flee. A number of them settled on the British-ruled island of Barbados, where they established a synagogue a full 78 years before a similar group of Jews built one in nearby Curaçao. Named Nidḥey Israel, meaning “the dispersed of Israel,” the synagogue has recently been restored. Noah Lederman writes:

For 300 years, Sephardi Jews prospered on the island. They held monopolies in the sugar trade. In the 1700s, the Jewish population peaked at 800—8 percent of the island’s population. And two years before civil and political freedoms were granted to Jews in the Britain, they were given to Barbadian Jews.

Of course, even for a bunch of Jews in the Caribbean, life was no permanent vacation: anti-Semitism rose in tandem with Jewish success in the sugar industry; a second synagogue on the island was mysteriously burned to the ground after a conflict with an uninvited Gentile erupted at a Jewish wedding; and in 1831, a hurricane destroyed Nidḥey Israel. With the storm wrecking both the synagogue and business opportunities on the island, Jews dispersed, leaving few worshippers on Barbados. However, by 1833, those Sephardi Jews who had remained rebuilt Nidḥey Israel, and for nearly a century, they conducted services in the capital city, Bridgetown, until the last Jew on the island died in 1929.

For two years, there wasn’t a single Bajan Jew. But in 1931, an Ashkenazi Jew—Moses Altman, who had seen the writing on the wall in Europe—fled to Barbados. Friends and family followed. The second Barbadian Jewish community had begun. Yet these new arrivals didn’t have a synagogue, for the last Sephardi Jew had sold off Nidḥey Israel, and the building had been converted into commercial offices and a law library. . .

But then, in 1979, the government announced plans to raze the historic Nidḥey Israel structure to build a new Supreme Court. [Fortunately], Paul Altlman [the president of the Barbados National Trust and Moses’ grandson] took decisive action to prevent the demolition of Nidḥey Israel, six years after plans to raze it had first been announced.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Barbados, Sephardim, Synagogues

 

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023