A Synagogue's Exiles Became New York's First Jews

Kahal Zur Israel wasn't just the first synagogue in the Americas — its congregation set off a chain of events that founded another city's Jewish community entirely. When Portugal retook Recife in 1654, the peace terms gave the Dutch colonists, Jews included, three months to leave. Most of the congregation scattered back to Amsterdam or the Caribbean, but one small group of twenty-three refugees sailed north and landed at New Amsterdam — the Dutch outpost that would later become New York. That handful of families, fleeing a synagogue on the other side of the hemisphere, is now commemorated as the founding community of American Jewish history.

The Instituto Ricardo Brennand holds a collection that shouldn't really exist in Brazil at all. Frans Post, the first European painter to depict the New World landscape in oils, worked in Pernambuco during the brief Dutch occupation of the 1630s and 40s, then returned home and kept painting Brazilian scenes from memory for the rest of his career. Only seven of his paintings actually made while he stood on Brazilian soil survive today, and six of those ended up scattered across European collections — the Louvre included. The seventh, a 1640 view of the old Dutch fort in Recife, is the only one that made it back to a Brazilian collection, anchoring an institute that now holds more Post paintings than anywhere else on earth.