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Virtual Tours of the Jewish World
Jewish Barbados
with Neal Rechtman
Thursday, September 18
8:30 PM
The restored Nidhe Israel synagogue in Bridgetown is the oldest in the Western hemisphere. A contingent of 285 Sephardic Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil arrived in Barbados in 1654 under the protection of Oliver Cromwell, the Protestant leader of England at the time. Some of the wealthiest people in the world at the time — sugar tycoons — are buried in the adjacent cemeteries, along with Jewish pirates and the most traveled rabbi in history up until the invention of railroads, a Sephardic Ha-Ham named Rafael Hayyim Isaac Carigal. This community thrived for 200 years but then vanished in the 19th century when the sugar cane economy collapsed. In the 1930’s a group of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing the Nazi Inquisition arrived (if it’s not one Inquisition, it’s another), and their descendants are the core of our current community of 50 souls.
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