Curaçao synagogue

Step through a quiet courtyard in the old merchant quarter of Willemstad and the floor of the prayer hall turns out to be covered not in stone or wood but in loose white sand. The Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue, known on the island simply as the Snoa, was completed in 1732 and is the oldest synagogue in the Americas still standing, as well as home to one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the Western Hemisphere.

The community dates from 1651, when Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent arrived from Amsterdam and from Dutch Brazil to settle on what was then a Dutch West India Company colony. They bought their first synagogue building in 1674; the present one went up in 1730, its date recorded in the Hebrew year 5490 above the entrance, and was dedicated two years later. Its building was directed by Pieter Roggenburg together with the Amsterdam master carpenter Hendrik Schielagh, and the model was unmistakably the great Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam: three tall vaulted ceilings, upper galleries, a carved mahogany Torah ark and raised reader's platform, chandeliers and windows of deep blue glass. Tradition gives several readings of the sand floor: a memory of the forty years in the Sinai desert, an echo of the divine promise to make Abraham's descendants as numerous as the sand, and a reminder of the conversos of Iberia, who are said to have spread sand to muffle their footsteps during secret prayer. In the nineteenth century a Reform group broke away to form its own congregation, Emanu-El; the two reunited in 1964, giving the synagogue its double name. A Jewish historical museum occupies the buildings beside it, with material linked to the Beth Haim cemetery at Blenheim, the oldest Jewish burial ground in the Western Hemisphere still in use.

Willemstad grew from a fortified settlement founded by the Dutch in 1634 at the mouth of a deep natural harbour. Its old core, split by the narrow channel of Sint Anna Bay into Punda on one side and Otrobanda on the other, is lined with gabled merchant houses painted in strong colours, and the historic city and harbour were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997. The synagogue stands on Hanchi di Snoa in Punda, a few streets back from the waterfront.

Getting there

The synagogue is in Punda, the historic centre of Willemstad, the capital of Curaçao. Curaçao International Airport (CUR) at Hato is about 10 km away by straight line.