The Arrival of Jews in Honduras

Several of the inhabitants of Santa Barbara are descendants of Sephardic Jewish immigrants who began to arrive from the 16th century.

Sephardic Jews crossed the Atlantic Ocean on Spanish ships. They first became settlers, then Officials of the Crown, sailors, merchants, and other professionals. Their vision was to reach a piece of land to call home, first in Seville, then in the Spanish viceroyalties. The municipality of Trinidad in the Department of Santa Bárbara has deep Jewish historical roots and is related to Jewish society. There are many other municipalities that share these foundational roots, but they are more Christianized.

When the Province of Honduras was founded and the city of Comayagua was designated as its capital, several Jews settled there. They were distributed throughout the Honduran territory as it grew in commercial importance, as a policy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Honduras was under the conservative administration of Captain-General José María Medina when the National Congress issued an Immigration Law on February 26, 1866. This law gave all foreigners who wanted to reside in the country access. The Political Constitution of 1876 also reflected the importance of immigration in the national territory.^[3][4]

20th century

Between 1875 and 1915 (before World War I) 45 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic in search of better living conditions on the American continent. In total, 2,500,000 of these Europeans were Jews.

The First World War led many Jewish merchants and financiers to take their fortunes out of Europe, with some moving to the United States and Latin American countries (mainly the Southern Cone) and others to Russia.

Shevet Ajim Sinagoge, Tegucigalpa

In the case of Honduras, the arrival of European Jews began in full swing in 1920. Between 1920 and 1940, the majority of Jews who arrived in the country were Ashkenazis of German, Polish and Romanian origin fleeing Europe due to the onset of the Second World War. Many of these immigrated in 1939, when a total of 455 Germans were registered in Honduras, 95 of whom were Jewish. The following year, a decree was issued during the administration of Doctor Vicente Mejía Colindres in which the Immigration Office was created and attached to the Ministry of the Interior. Colindres also oversaw the passage of a law that authorized foreigners of Arab, Chinese, Turkish, Syrian, Armenian, Palestinian, and African ethnicity, as well as individuals called Colies, to immigrate to Honduras, provided that they bring 5,000 Silver Pesos and that they would make a deposit to the state coffers of 500 Silver Pesos per person within two months of arrival in the country. 25 Jewish citizens were naturalized between 1946 and 1956, 19 of which were Poles, which was equivalent to 76% of the naturalizations completed.

A group of Honduran orthodox jews reading the Torah.

The president of Honduras allowed the entry of Jews during World War II, with the influence of the local Jewish community. In 1950 there were 40 Jewish families in Honduras. After the Second World War there was a brief boom in the community thanks to the arrival of dozens of new immigrants, but at the beginning of the 1950s most of them would emigrate to the south of the continent to Argentina and Chile where their governments were more inclined to receive Jews.

At the end of the 20th century during the government of Rafael Leonardo Callejas, more than a third of the Jews living in Honduras would leave for Israel, the United States, or Argentina due to the financial crisis in the country, depriving the country's Jewish population of much of its youth community. On 3 August 1997, the community in San Pedro Sula dedicated the Maguen David Synagogue to serve as a community center for future generations.

In 2001, Honduras won its first Jewish president, who was the businessman Ricardo Maduro Joest, who was a candidate for the national party and served his term from 2002 to 2006. This victory was an extraordinary case given that the vast majority of presidents of Honduras as well as the rest of Latin America until then had been Roman Catholics, adding that the Hoduras community had always been very small, although this does not mean that it did not had weight in the social and political sphere.

Present day

Anti-semitic and anti-Arabic graffiti in San Pedro Sula. Antisemitism rose in Honduras during the 2009 coup.

With the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis, the local Jewish community became embroiled in the controversy.^[5] Rumors spread throughout the Honduran media of Jewish and Israeli involvement in the coup d'état.^[6] A commentator on Radio Globo, David Romero Ellner, suggested on the air that perhaps it would have been better if the Jews had been exterminated in the Holocaust.^[7] His comments drew ire from ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, and the Anti-Defamation League.^[8]

Juan Orlando Hernández has led a pro-Israel government since his election in 2014. Israel under the prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became one of his greatest allies and the first country to recognize him after the allegations of electoral fraud that involved Hernández's re-election led to protests and subsequent repression that caused 30 deaths.

In recent years, some Honduran Jews have made aliyah to Israel.^[9][10] In 2015, Rosenthals have been implicated with longstanding corruption and other crimes.^[11] Yankel Rosenthal, a former minister of investment, was arrested on 6 October 2015 after landing at Miami airport.

He, together with his cousin Yani and uncle Jaime Rolando, a newspaper owner and four-time presidential candidate, were also charged with money laundering and other services that support the international narcotics trafficking activities of multiple Central American drug traffickers and their criminal organizations.^[12] Seven of their businesses were labelled under the US Kingpin Act as "specially designated narcotics traffickers". They have been accused of transferring drug money between accounts in New York and Honduras between 2004 and 2015.^[13]

A Honduran Jewish home.

Despite this, the Jewish community of Honduras lives in a total social stability and mutual cooperation with the rest of the Honduran population, mainly Christians. Due to this, the construction of new synagogues has been carried out and the conversion of Hondurans to Judaism has been seen.^[14]

As previously mentioned, the second or third generation Jews who descend from those Azkhenazims who came to the country at the end of the 19th century they managed to adapt better to Honduran society, this added to the mixed marriages with the local population allowed them and their descendants to fully integrate into the Honduran identity, this also brought change and was the abandonment of their faith, becoming Secular Jews or conversion to Christianity of their descendants on Honduran soil.

Sephardic

Azhkhenazim

• Rosenthal
• Starkman
• Seidel
• Goldstein
• Danilov
• Silverstein.