Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA)

An organization established by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the wake of the 1938 Evian Conference to facilitate immigration of Jewish refugees from Europe to the Caribbean island nation of the Dominican Republic.

The Evian Conference brought together representatives from 32 governments to discuss the growing numbers of Jewish refugees wanting to leave Europe to escape Nazi persecution. Only one country—the Dominican Republic—was willing to increase its quota for Jewish immigration. Dominican president General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina initially agreed to receive as many as 100,000 Jewish refugees; in total, some 5,000 visas were issued to European Jews between 1938 to 1945, and fewer than 800 Jewish refugees were admitted to the Dominican Republic during the same period.

DORSA worked with the government of General Trujillo’s government to identify a suitable location for Jewish resettlement at the coastal community of Sosúa on the site of an abandoned banana plantation. DORSA provided funding, infrastructure and training to help the mostly urban Jewish refugees--who were largely unaccustomed to farm work or physical labor--to build an agricultural community from the ground up.