Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands

8. Struggle: 1914 –1946

c h a p t e r 8 Struggle 1914–1946 I wish I could see some future for the congregation. But trade is dead here. And as you know, nearly all the old families have moved away. I am afraid it is the same story on other islands. They need a regular Hazan, Teacher and Mohel but they really cannot afford to pay anything like enough to support a man. They pay a nominal amount to Mr. Sasso, but he is in business . He is an amateur Hazan, quite untrained, cannot read sefer, but a more sincere man I never met. He loves his religion. He is also rather deaf. What can be done under the circumstances? It is a problem. I wish I could see a solution. Can you?. . . —Rev. Dr. Henry Pereira Mendes to Rev. David de Sola Pool, April 19, 1925. On August 15, 1914, the completed Panama Canal finally opened its locks to the world. For St. Thomas, this opening ended forty-four years of anticipation and breath-holding. From Ferdinand de Lesseps’s announcement to build the canal in 1870, the St. Thomas shipping community had seen a panacea for its flagging trade. Articles had appeared in local papers hailing the project, and predicting vast increases in business within sev164 eral years; all took heart. And then the island, as well as the rest of the world, had waited for decades. When the great opening finally came—at the hands of the Americans, far later and at far greater expense than anyone had expected—the world was not there to celebrate. A month and a half earlier, on June 28, a young, radical student named Gavrilo Princip had jumped onto the running board of a convoy in Sarajevo and assassinated Austro-Hungarian Archduke Francis Ferdinand . By August 3, Europe was at war. Mercantile concerns in the Americas immediately lost their urgency, and the mighty passage between the oceans garnered comparatively little notice. For all practical purposes, St. Thomas was not there to celebrate either. Although its strategic location en route to the canal was no less important than in 1870, the island’s economic base had imploded. As the “Great Ditch” awaited completion, increasingly efficient generations of steam ships took to the oceans, causing St. Thomas’s coal refueling industry to fade. Many of the younger merchants, searching for greener pastures, moved stateside or decided to try their luck in Panama. Those who remained faced greater financial dependence on the Danish government; and Denmark, seeing these islands more as a remnant of the past than as a viable investment, actively sought to pawn them off to the highest bidder. When World War I began, St. Thomas’s reputation as a “Little Paris” was but a memory, its industry in shambles, and its future uncertain. The island’s patient wait for prosperity had proven a bitter disappointment.1 On Crystal Gade, the synagogue still stood prominently, looking out over a quiet and often empty harbor. Its walls echoed with the sounds of prayer each Sabbath, but to an aging and dwindling population. Elias Robles, the new reader, and his young assistant Moses De Castro Sasso were not learned men; rather, they were leaders by necessity whose desire to keep the congregation alive brought them to the pulpit. During the week, both worked at stores in the town; Robles also served on the board of trustees of the St. Thomas Savings Bank, following in the tradition of previous religious leaders . On weekends, they made sure services proceeded smoothly and with decorum, reciting the traditional prayers and chanting the traditional hymns. Yet conditions did not bode well for the island’s community. To those individuals not yet established in the island’s mercantile fabric, there was little practical reason to stay; and many of the women, who lacked the same mobility as the men, resigned themselves to spinsterhood for lack of available husbands. Some fostered hope that the United States would finally purchase the Danish Colonies and return St. Thomas to better times. As conditions Struggle: 1914–1946 | 165 stood, however, the congregation could at best maintain its numbers for a few years. In April, 1916, Reader Robles apparently recognized this, and, at age fifty, announced his plans to leave the island as well. Perhaps the congregation found the twenty-two-year-old Sasso too young and inexperienced to ascend the pulpit. Perhaps they...