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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S I am immensely lucky to have had the support and interest of many people from the moment I first expressed interest in researching the history of the Jewish community of St. Thomas. Without them, this book would have been merely an experiment in futility. This project began as my undergraduate senior thesis at Yale. Funded by a Richter Summer Research Grant, and supported by Rabbi Bradd Boxman, who was then spiritual leader of the congregation, I conducted my first summer of research in 1994. David Brener and Katina Coulianos (and her family , husband Douglas and children Lane and Nathan) immediately took me under their respective wings in St. Thomas, providing me housing and board throughout this time and enlightening me with their deep dedication to preserving and cataloging the congregation’s history. Beverly Smith, librarian for the Von Scholten Collection at the Enid M. Baa Public Library, graciously provided me ready access to the books and microfilms I requested, and provided many valuable suggestions to guide me in my research. What I wrote as my senior thesis, created under the advisorship of Paula Hyman and read by Eli Lederhendler, would become an early draft of chapters 4, 5, and 6. I am grateful to all for their invaluable assistance in sending me on my way. After graduating, I spent a year researching in archives throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. Thank you to the librarians, archivists, and scholars (in many cases, these designations can be used interchangeably ) who provided me so much help as I tried to piece together a widely flung history: Jeanette Bastian, head librarian of the Enid M. Baa Public Library ; Carol Wakefield at the Whim Plantation Archive in St. Croix; Kevin Proffitt at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio; Michelle FellerKopman at the American Jewish Historical Society, then in Waltham, Massachusetts ; Susan Tobin, curator of the Archives at New York’s Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue Shearith Israel; Joseph Schwartz at the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland; Ellis Lopes at the St. Eustatius Historical Society ; and the staffs of the New York Public Library Jewish Division (New York City), the University College of London and Jewish Historical Society of England (London, England), the University of Southampton Archives and Manuscripts (Southampton, England), the Gemeendearchief Amsterdam, ix the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Copenhagen Rigsarkiv. Along the way, I received advice, encouragement, and friendship from numerous other scholars in the field, including Mordecai Arbell, Per Nielsen, and George Tyson. Arnold Highfield and Jonathan Sarna read parts (and in the latter’s case, all) of the manuscript, and gave me much well-needed feedback . I have benefitted enormously from their input, ideas, and conversation. I also have been blessed with the opportunity to meet many wonderful people along my journey, all of whom contributed to the project in their own ways. Thank you to Sita Likuski, whose Excel files of the St. Thomas birth, death, and marriage protocols were a tremendous help in finding and sorting out congregational data; Emita Levy, Sita’s mother, who lent me some of her family’s precious nineteenth-century documents; David Jacobs (and family ), whose hospitality and prodigious connections with the Jewish community in London helped streamline my research process significantly. I am also grateful to those who housed me throughout my travels: Kaj and Inge Rasmussen (Copenhagen), Anita and Richard Marcus (Washington, D.C.), and my cousins Jesse Levin (Amsterdam), Alexander Gottlieb, and Jennifer Goldstein (Northern California). I hope that this work reflects the great extent of your generosity. My parents, Richard and Treasure Cohen, were responsible for my interest in the Virgin Islands in the first place. At the end of the summer of 1975, they moved down to St. Thomas with their two-year-old son, intent upon spending the rest of their lives on a small, idyllic island. There, they found the synagogue and soon became instructors in the Hebrew school—with me as their mascot. Although they moved back up to the States after two years, I retained my fond memories of the congregation and its rabbi at the time, Stanley Relkin. Such memories (as well as my parents’ suggestion) led me back down to the island nearly seventeen years later. Thus, even as I was searching for the synagogue’s past, I was also exploring...

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