An Unexpected Rosh Hashanah

A blog post by Adam. If you've ever found yourself at a High Holiday service, or perhaps any religious service, flipping through the prayer book trying to determine how much longer the service will drag on for, then this is the blog entry for you. It kind of goes on and on, unfortunately with no page numbers, but fortunately with a few pictures. You might just want to skip ahead to the pictures...I will not be offended.

The day after our 27 Waterfalls mishap, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, began. We found ourselves in Caberete on the Dominican Republic's north coast. Only a few miles down the road lies Sosua, where we hoped to spend Rosh Hashanah. Now well known as a sex tourism destination, it isn't exactly where you might expect to find one of the DR's two synagogues (the other synagogue is located in Santo Domingo).

Although a long time village, the town as it is known today was actually founded in the early 40s by Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.  At the Evian Conference in 1938, where the world discussed the fate of the Jews, the DR was the only country to officially accept Jewish refugees. While the Nazis wanted to get rid of the Jews because they weren't quite white enough, Trujillo hoped the Jews might help whiten up the DR. It wasn't exactly where Europe's Jews expected to settle but sometimes you gotta take what you can get. Trujillo had big plans to make the DR far less brown and he offered 100,000 visas to Jews. Incredibly, whereas Jews were stripped of citizenship in Europe, they became Dominican citizens as soon as they arrived in the DR. In the end, only about 350 Jewish families settled in Sosua, and Trujillo's dream of a white DR never quite materialized. Many of the Jews who did come moved on after the war, and of those who stayed, many have now died. Nevertheless, the synagogue still stands.

About a week and a half before Rosh Hashanah, I began calling Sosua's Jewish community to find out about their Rosh Hashanah service schedule. The woman I talked to said that they were still trying to decide what they might do. I called back a few more times and she said it was still unclear what might happen. With no word about services, and the holiday set to start in ten hours, we decided to show up at the museum and synagogue. The woman I had spoken to graciously greeted us, but still didn't know what was going to happen. She promised to call. We knew things are pretty laid back in the DR, but this seemed a bit excessive, even by Dominican standards.

As we anxiously awaited a call about services, we were getting many calls from an unexpected source - the staff at 27 Waterfalls. They called after we left the visitor's center, where Melissa had fallen, to make sure we made it to the hospital. As we were on our way to visit Sosua's Jewish Musuem, they called to see how she was doing, and to inform us that we could submit her hospital bills to their insurance. Later when they called to check-in once more they said they had arranged for free admission to the Cabarete caves to make up for the fact that we never experienced the waterfalls. It may have been the best customer service I have ever experienced. We arranged to visit the caves on Rosh Hashanah afternoon.

And then, just when I had given up on services we got the other call. It was 4:30 pm. Services would start at 6:30 pm that night. We made it to services about 45 minutes late, but as expected, they weren't close to starting. Services were quick, but far more interesting were the post service conversations with some of the founding members of the community and their descendants. One man who was a small child when his family fled Europe noted that it had been a difficult transition for his parents, but for him and other kids growing up on the undeveloped beaches of the DR's north coast was a tropical wonderland.

And a tropical wonderland it was. We had our Rosh Hashanah lunch outside next to the hotel pool. We then visited the caves, two of which had small pools where we could swim. 

Mina, floating in a cave.

We ended Rosh Hashanah at an empty beach where we did Tashlich, a symbolic casting away of our sins. 

Mina, Melissa, and I at the beach, enjoying a granola bar after Tashlich.

The DR's north coast had become an unexpected refuge for Jews fleeing the Nazis. And for us, who have been lucky to live in an era of relative Jewish safety, the north coast provided an unexpectedly rich Rosh Hashanah - from meeting Holocaust survivors, to benefiting from extreme Dominican customer service, to spending time reflecting on the year past with family.