It seems an unlikely place for a synagogue, least of all for the oldest one of its kind in the western hemisphere. Yet Barbados is home to a fascinating Jewish history and community that, though small and dwindling in numbers, is keeping its annals alive and gradually introducing the rest of the Jewish world to its rich past.
Former glory. The Nidhei Israel synagogue, established in 1883, was completely restored in 1987 at the cost of $1 million.
It started in 1627, when Portuguese Jews fleeing from Recife, Brazil, found refuge on the small, sparsely populated Caribbean island. Alongside the British, who had colonized Barbados around the same time, many became merchants, cultivating coffee and sugar, which they brought with them from Brazil.
They established businesses on an island where they enjoyed religious freedom, building a magnificent orthodox synagogue, Nidhei Israel, on a street appropriately named Synagogue Lane, in 1654.
Their names were DaCosta, Nehamyas, Mendes and DeMercado, among others, and many of those Jewish names remain inscribed on the country's older buildings, and on the ancient tombstones scattered around the synagogue. Some are even found in the telephone directory, although their descendents, alas, are no longer Jewish.
The Sephardic Jews of Barbados grew in numbers in the 1700s, especially after 1667, when the British colony of Suriname was taken over by the Dutch, and many Jews moved to Barbados to retain their British citizenship. By the end of that century, the small island was home to nearly 800 Jews, with two Jewish communities in the towns of Bridgetown and Speighstown.
The community continued to thrive through the first half of the 1800s, even after a devastating hurricane destroyed Nidhei Israel synagogue in 1831. Undeterred, the Jewish families banded together, coming up with 4,000 to rebuild a stronger structure that, they were certain, would withstand the next hurricane and the next century.
When Nidhei Israel's doors reopened for services in 1833, the event was attended by "the most respectable inhabitants and ladies of grace, fashion and beauty," according to a report published in the local newspaper. "It was the day that would ever stand eminently distinguished in the annals of the Hebrew community of the town," mused the paper's editor.
Sadly, his words were not to ring true over the years that followed. Only 15 years later, the Jewish community of Barbados had declined to 70, as a deteriorating economy led many to the United States. Those that remained died and were interred in the cemetery surrounding Nidhei Israel.
In 1925, the last surviving Jew on the island sold the synagogue to a local family in the community for alternate use. Artifacts landed in museums and private homes, and it seemed the heyday of Barbados's Jews was gone for good.
In fact, its revival was only six years away.
IT WAS 1931 when Moses Altman arrived from Lublin, Poland, fleeing the anti-Semitism that rendered him an outcast in Eastern Europe.
"He was actually on his way to Venezuela, but the ship docked at Barbados, and when he disembarked, he liked what he saw and applied for permission to stay," recalls his son, Henry, 93, who joined him a year later.
Henry arrived at the age of 19 and remembers receiving a warm welcome from Barbadians who were happy to have Jews in their midst once again. Other family members, escaping the threat of Nazism in Europe, followed their Ashkenazi relatives to Barbados, until the Jewish community grew to 30 families. They established a synagogue in Altman's home, later purchasing a house in 1969 and converting it into a new synagogue to serve the community.
Harold Saunders lived on the island between 1949 and 1963, and remembers it as an idyllic time.
"We weren't very religious, but we were very Jewish," says Saunders, who lives in Vancouver, Canada today. "I attended cheder on Sundays and learned my bar mitzva haftora from a record my parents bought in the US. The Jewish families formed a close-knit group and we'd celebrate birthdays, Seders and holidays together."
Spurred by his father, Saunders left the island at the age of 17, and though he considered moving back to Barbados over the years that followed, his father was adamantly against it.
"He didn't want my kids to grow up there and face the possibility of marrying out of the faith, and he thought they'd have a better chance of a Jewish life in North America," he says.
Since there was no university in Barbados at the time, the majority of Saunders's Jewish contemporaries completed tertiary education in the United States before settling in various parts of North America to raise their families.
One exception was Altman's son, Paul, who returned to the island after studying in Miami, married a Jewish woman from Trinidad and established a business in real estate.
"My dad encouraged me to come back to Barbados, and I feel very strongly that he did the right thing," Paul reflects. "I can't imagine living a more wonderful life than I do right here."
Barbados is a safe place relative to the acts of terrorism that occur in other parts of the world, he added. And with the growth of tourism on the island, access to Europe and North America is quick and easy, and the island caters to a growing number of international dignitaries, visitors and investors.
Throughout this time, while the Jewish cemetery surrounding Nidhei Israel was still used by the community, the synagogue itself had been sold to the Barbadian government. By 1983, when the government was scouting the city center for a venue for its new Supreme Court, the old Jewish synagogue seemed like a prime location.
One thing they underestimated, however, was the Jews' attachment to the synagogue, and their determination to regain control over it.
"I told Tom Adams, the prime minister at the time, that you can't destroy a national treasure, and you'll have to shoot me before you do," says Henry Altman, who was instrumental in helping to save Nidhei Israel from its impending demise.
Fortunately, some members of Barbados's Jewish community had friends in high places, and within a short time, the government passed a resolution whereby Nidhei Israel was returned to the community. At that point, the considerable task of restoring it and reinstating originals or replicas of the synagogue's artifacts began in earnest.
