TRAVEL WITH US — Jewish Barbados

with Neal Rechtman, via Zoom

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.

Neal Rechtman is an American writer and historian who has lived in Barbados since 2016. He is the author of two novels, numerous essays and short stories, and has written and lectured extensively about Louis Brandeis, the twentieth century US Supreme Court Justice. He holds a degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University, and is a volunteer docent at the historic Nidhe Israel synagogue in Bridgetown. His most recent novel The Ashwander Rules (2019) is about a secret Israeli Mossad operation in Washington DC that works to save the Jewish Chief Justice from assassination at the hands of domestic terrorists. His current non-fiction is a short book Fear of Dying, which documents his wife’s relatively stress-free acceptance of a terminal diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Neal is an active member of the tiny 50-person Barbados Jewish Community, giving him the distinction of being 2% of the entire Jewish population of the island. He is also an avid bridge player who competes internationally as a member of the Barbados National Bridge team.

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