#1452: Jews in Haiti : Dreyfuss replies to Chamberlain

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From: Joel Dreyfuss <jdreyfuss@ibm.net>

The only articles I know of about Jews in Haiti were done by the former
Israeli ambassador to Haiti, who got interested in the topic and wrote them
in Conjonction, the magazine of the Institut Français in Haiti. He focused
primarily on those in the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th century.
My grandfather was part of the wave of European immigrants to Haiti in the
late 1800s; most were Christian (Germans, French, a few Italians (Seppe is
one family name found in Haiti). They married Haitians and were quickly
assimilated. At that time, the Catholic church required non-Catholics to
sign an agreement to raise their children as Catholics, hence the paucity of
Jewish descendants in Haiti.
I'm told there was a synagogue in downtown Port-au-Prince until the 1930s...