Sosúa: Hundreds of Jews fleeing the Holocaust found a home in D.R.

Elissa Strauss

Thursday, February 14th 2008, 1:10 PM

Stahl for News

Ruth Kohn arrived on the shores of the Dominican Republic from Berlin on Dec. 7, 1941.

A settler in Sosúa, Dominican Republic, part of new exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

When Ruth Kohn arrived on the shores of the Dominican Republic from Berlin on Dec. 7, 1941, she didn’t mind the blistering Caribbean heat.

“My first impression when we got there was ‘We are saved!’” says Kohn, 80, one of hundreds of European Jews fleeing the Holocaust who were welcomed in the D.R. in the early 1940s.

“And then, of course, it seemed strange, the climate, the language,” she adds. “But the feeling of being saved overwhelmed us.”

A new bilingual exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan looks back at the experience of over 500 urban German and Austrian Jews who found a home in Sosúa, a rural area on the north coast of the island.

“Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic” opens Sunday, and features photographs, artifacts, documents and videos culled from here and the Caribbean nation.

This out-of-the-ordinary story begins in 1938, when President Roosevelt organized a 32-nation conference to address the resettlement of refugees whose lives were increasingly at risk.

Only the Dominican Republic said it would be willing to open its doors.

The refugees, some with their families, some without, were sent to resettle an abandoned banana plantation, although most of them had no farming skills.

“We learned by trial and error with the agricultural products, mostly with the help of the natives,” says Kurt Teller, 89, who came from Vienna.

They eventually opened a successful dairy and meat factory. The dairy cooperative Productos Sosúa still exists today.

Unlike farming, socializing was not too difficult.

“I learned Spanish very fast because I had a few years of Latin when I was younger. I became the emissary for all,” says Teller, who lives in Los Angeles.

“I liked it from the minute I got there, but there were a few new things,” he says. “If you invite [A GIRL]to the movies you have to pay for six tickets, because all the family is coming along.”

Over time the settlers integrated with their neighbors. They worked together, went to the same schools, and sometimes even married one another. The settlers even took a liking to merengue dancing and rice and beans.

And overall, the settlers say they didn’t experience the anti-Semitism present in other Catholic countries. “There was none. Dominicans don’t have that in their blood,” says Teller.

But the treatment they received was surprising, considering the Dominican Republic was then ruled with an iron fist by dictator Rafael Trujillo, who showed no value for human rights in 31 years in power.

According to the exhibit’s introduction, Trujillo welcomed the settlers to curry favor with Roosevelt after he was dubbed “the butcher” in the U.S. for ordering the massacre of thousands of Haitians living in the D.R. in 1937.

Trujillo also thought the German and Austrian Jews would “whiten” up the dark-skinned population of his country.

“People would ask me how it felt to move from one dictator to another,” says Kohn. “It was hard. One dictator wanted to kill us and thought we were inferior, and the other one wanted us and thought we were superior.”

The idea for the exhibit originally came from State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan/Bronx) in 2005, who eventually teamed with the American Jewish Congress, the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, and a museum in Sosúa.

Many of the settlers eventually moved to the U.S. But even after decades in the states, they are still tied to the island that likely saved their lives.

“I remember Sosúa and the Dominican Republic as a really pleasant place,” says Kohn, who lives in Passaic, N.J. “It is my home.”