Was there ever a Portuguese Jewish community on Bonaire? The honest answer is that there is no evidence of one.
Bonaire is a small Dutch island off the coast of Venezuela, close to both Curaçao and St Eustatius. Today it is one of the three BES islands, with St Eustatius and Saba. Given how near it lies to Curaçao, the great Sephardi centre of the Caribbean, it is not impossible that individual Portuguese Jews lived or traded there. But nothing in the record establishes an organised community, and the one claim of an early Jewish presence does not stand up.
The island
The Spanish reached Bonaire around 1499 and appointed a governor for the area in 1526. The Dutch took the island in 1636 and built Fort Oranje in 1639.
Unlike Curaçao, which became a hub of the slave trade, Bonaire was run chiefly as a plantation island with a small population. That is part of why no substantial merchant-Jewish community of the kind Curaçao developed ever took root here.
Is the 1563 Jewish cemetery date correct?
Almost certainly not.
There is a widely repeated claim, drawn from a 1984 travel guide and reported since, that Bonaire has an old Jewish cemetery with vaults dating from 1563. That would be almost a century before the first Jewish settlement on Curaçao.
This should be treated as a mistake. A Jewish burial ground on Bonaire in 1563 would predate any documented Jewish presence anywhere in the Dutch Caribbean by the better part of a century. There is no community, no synagogue and no supporting record to make it plausible.
The date is most likely a misreading for 1663 or 1763. Even then, the same source concedes that regular use did not begin until 1837. Any Jews connected with Bonaire were, on this evidence, buried in Curaçao. That is exactly what one would expect if there was no community here but occasional individuals linked to the Curaçao congregation.
Treat the 1563 date as unverified and probably wrong, unless and until a stone or a record confirms it.
The real Jewish connection: Curaçao families
Where Bonaire does touch Sephardi history is through Curaçao, and through two families in particular.
During the Second World War, after the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, Bonaire held an internment camp. It was at Playa Pariba, and earlier in school buildings, and it housed up to several hundred people with German and Austrian passports.
The camp did not distinguish between Nazis and the German and Austrian Jews who had fled Nazism. They were held together under Dutch police authority in difficult conditions, families separated by barbed wire.
In September 1942 two Curaçao Sephardi notables, of the Maduro and Cohen Henriques families, petitioned the Dutch government-in-exile. They asked to exchange German internees on Bonaire for their sons, George and Ernest, who were in danger in the occupied Netherlands. The exchange was refused, and further attempts in 1943 also failed.
Both are old and well-documented Curaçao Sephardi families. The Maduros above all are one of the pillars of the Curaçao community, recorded across its marriage and cemetery registers over centuries. Their appearance in the Bonaire story is the clearest illustration of the island’s actual place in this history: not a community of its own, but a place at the edge of the Curaçao Sephardi world, touched by its families.
What has and hasn’t been researched
There is little to research on the Sephardi side, because there is little there. No congregation, no synagogue, no register.
The genuine questions are two. Whether the reported old cemetery contains any genuinely early Jewish burials or has simply been misdated. And whether any individual Portuguese Jews from Curaçao held property or traded on Bonaire, which would show up in Curaçao and Dutch colonial records rather than on the island itself. Both are worth a careful look; neither has been done.
Anyone with a family tradition of Bonaire should begin in the Curaçao records, where the connection, if there is one, will lie.
Records
There are no known Jewish congregational records for Bonaire. Research runs through three places.
- Archivo Boneiru, the Bonaire Archive, holding the island’s general historical records
- The Curaçao Sephardi records — congregational registers and the Beth Haim cemetery — where any Bonaire-linked individuals would appear
- The Nationaal Archief, The Hague, for the Dutch West Indies colonial administration and the wartime internment records
Further reading
J. E. Sint Jago, Wuiven vanaf de waranda: de interneringskampen op Bonaire en Curaçao tijdens WO II, on the wartime internment camps, in Dutch.
Warren Freedman, World Guide for the Jewish Traveler (1984), the source of the disputed cemetery claim, cited here for reference rather than endorsement.
For the community this island’s story really belongs to, see our page on Curaçao. For the nearest genuine small-island community, see St Eustatius.
Organisations and repositories
Archivo Boneiru, the Bonaire Archive.
Nationaal Archief, The Hague, for Dutch West Indies and wartime records.
Mongui Maduro Library and the Jewish community of Curaçao, for the Curaçao families connected to Bonaire.
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Any documentary evidence of Portuguese Jews living, trading or holding property on Bonaire
- A proper reading of the reported old Jewish cemetery: the true date of its earliest stones, and whose they are
- Curaçao or Dutch colonial records naming individuals connected with Bonaire
- Any material on the Jewish internees held on Bonaire during the Second World War
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
Bonaire is, on present evidence, a place at the margin of the Curaçao Sephardi world rather than a community in its own right. Research means working the Curaçao and Dutch records rather than anything on the island. If you have a family connection to Bonaire and want to test it, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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