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Brazil's historic first synagogue is restored
Jayme Brener
The first synagogue in the Americas - opened in Recife, Brazil, in 1640, but abandoned 14 years later - has been reopened as a center of Jewish studies.
The large yellow house at 197 Bom Jesus (Good Jesus) Street has been completely rebuilt. A plaque indicates that the street used to be named Rua dos Judeus (Jews' Street).
The synagogue was built by Portuguese Jews who fled to Amsterdam to escape the Inquisition, then migrated to Brazil with the Dutch invasion of rich northeastern Brazil, a world center at the time for sugar and tobacco production.
In 1642, the Jews of Recife brought the first rabbi to the Americas, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca. The community flourished under Dutch government and grew to be 1,000 strong (in a total population of 10,000). A second synagogue was then built in nearby Olinda.
Fonseca wrote the first Hebrew text in the hemisphere, a description of the difficulties of the Jews during the Portuguese reconquest of Recife in 1654. When the Portuguese expelled the Dutch that year, the Jews set up a new congregation in Curacao, where they opened what is today the oldest functioning synagogue in the hemisphere.
After the expulsion there was no Jewish life in Brazil until the 19th century. Fonseca went back to Amsterdam, took part in the excommunication of agnostic philosopher Baruch Spinoza and supported the self-proclaimed messiah, Shabbtai Tzvi.
Recife received a new wave of Eastern European Jews after 1910 and there is now a very active 2,000-member community in the city of two million.
The restored synagogue will now house a collection of over 50,000 documents on the first community of the Americas, researched by historian Maria do Amparo Ferraz.
1999
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© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2000 |  |