Jodensavanne

A Synagogue in the Rainforest

I had to read it twice when I first saw the name. Jodensavanne — Dutch for the Jews’ Savannah — is the site of a community founded in the 1650s by Sephardic Jews, many of them refugees from Portuguese persecution in Brazil and earlier from Iberia. By the 1680s they had built Beracha Ve Shalom, Blessing and Peace, one of the earliest synagogues in the Western Hemisphere, on a sandy ridge above the Suriname River. It is now a ruin of brick foundations and a few standing walls, swallowed by jungle, about fifty kilometers south of Paramaribo.

Getting there is part of it. The road turns to red laterite, then to something the rental company would not have approved of, and finally you arrive at a clearing that does not announce itself. Lia spotted the first of the old gravestones before I did — table-shaped slabs lying flat in the grass, carved in Hebrew and Portuguese, some of them tilted and cracked by three centuries of roots pushing up underneath. There is no gift shop. There is a caretaker, a small interpretive sign, and an enormous quantity of silence.

What the Stones Actually Say

This was a wealthy and complicated community. The Jews of the savannah ran sugar plantations, which means they owned enslaved people, and the full story of Jodensavanne sits squarely inside the brutal economy of colonial Suriname. The interpretive material does not tidy this away, which I respected. There is a separate burial ground, Cassipora, deeper in the forest, and the relationship between the Jewish community, the enslaved Africans who worked the land, and the Maroons who escaped into the interior is the actual history of this place — far more tangled than the romantic image of a lost jungle synagogue suggests.

The settlement declined through the 18th century as the plantation economy shifted toward the coast, and a fire in 1832 finished what economics had started. By then the community had largely moved to Paramaribo, where two historic synagogues still stand on the same street as a mosque, which is its own remarkable fact about this country.

Standing in the Footprint

You can walk the outline of the synagogue floor. The foundation traces a clear rectangle, and you can see where the four interior columns stood.

I stood roughly where the ark would have been, looking out through the trees toward the river, and tried to imagine the place full — candlelight, Portuguese prayer, the river traffic of a working colony. It was the closest I have come in a long time to feeling history as a physical pressure rather than an abstraction.

We had the site almost to ourselves. A UNESCO World Heritage listing came through in 2023, which will probably bring more visitors and more conservation money, both of which the ruins badly need. For now it remains one of the most quietly extraordinary places I have stood in the Americas, and almost nobody I have told about it had ever heard of it.

When to go: The drier seasons, roughly February to April and August to November, when the access road is passable. Bring water, insect repellent, and a guide or driver who knows the route, as signage is minimal and the turnoffs are easy to miss.