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From Chabad To Rum
by George Medovoy It is also one of Chabad’s far-flung centers, with a synagogue in the university town of Schoelcher, just north of the capital city of Fort-de-France. Young Rabbi Moshe Yehuda Nemni, who speaks French, English, Hebrew and Yiddish, carries the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s torch here, promoting Jewish identity in a place where you’d least expect to find it. Jews have actually lived on the island since 1645, when they were expelled from Brazil by Portuguese authorities and sought refuge here. Today’s Martinique Jews are French citizens, and as citizens of an official “department” of France, they enjoy many of the modern economic and educational infrastructures of the home country. The earliest Jews brought expertise for producing sugar cane, which Martinique uses to make Rhum Agricole, a high-quality product based on pure sugar cane juice instead of the more common molasses. As our plane approached Aimé Césaire International Airport, my wife and I could see sailboats resting off Martinique’s famous Diamond Rock — a far cry, I whispered to myself, from the ambiance of refugee ships carrying those early Jewish immigrants who were suddenly cast upon the open seas. For the Jewish tourist, Jewish Martinique is filled with many surprises. On the way to Chabad, we noticed several Jews wearing kippot and walking to the synagogue for Friday evening services. That’s when I met Rabbi Nemni, a very friendly Londoner whose parents are Tunisian. Nemni’s wife is French, and the couple has three small children. Chabad’s large, Sephardic-style synagogue, constructed in 1996, has a bima in the center. There is also a large hall next door for special functions, and a mikveh. The synagogue runs a kindergarten with 20 children. A Talmud Torah class meets every Sunday, and Rabbi Nemni “dreams of starting a day school eventually.” “Because we’re an island,” he said, “everything is limited, so we can’t depend on other towns around us.” With typical self-sufficiency, Chabad runs a kosher food store on its premises, and a kosher restaurant operates out of the home of one of the community’s members. A nearby supermarket does carry a limited number of kosher items. Chabad holds religious services every day and draws at least 100 members on Saturdays. After Chabad, my wife and I thought that we had exhausted our Jewish discoveries on the island, but we continued to be surprised by encounters where we least expected them. One of these took place at Neisson Rum Distillery in Le Carbet, a little town on the northwest coast, where Columbus first set foot on the island in 1502. It was here that we met physician Claudine Neisson-Vernant, of Jewish and black heritage, and her son, Gregory, who owns the distillery and gave us a tour. Visits to other Martinique distilleries, like the Saint James Distillery and its rum museum or Clement Distillery’s Domaine Acajou, provide not only tasting opportunities, but 18th-century plantation homes on sprawling, palm-lined estates — reminders of rum’s ties to the slave trade, which was introduced by the Dutch in the 17th century and officially abolished by the French in 1848. But Neisson, which opened in 1931, has no ties to slavery. During our tour, we watched a truck dump a load of freshly picked sugar cane from Neisson’s fields, before a big crushing machine helped start the cane’s magical transformation into rum. Martinique’s rums also bear an official French classification — like the classification given to French wines — known as Appellation d’Origine Controlee. No other rum in the world carries this government standard. Neisson-Vernant touched on her family’s history, telling us that her father had left Martinique before World War II to study chemistry in France. By 1940, he had married his wife, a Russian émigré from Odessa. Neisson-Vernant was born in Nice, in France’s wartime Free Zone. These Russian origins made us wonder if Neisson-Vernant was Jewish, putting together the story of a Russian mother with a Jewish-sounding maiden name, my wife asked: “Are you Jewish?” “Oui,” Neisson-Vernant told us simply, and then she went on to say that her maternal grandfather had been killed in Buchenwald. Later, she spoke humorously, recalling her father’s comment that, as the daughter of a Jewish mother and a black father, she would suffer the problems of not one, but two, diasporas. Over the next two days, my wife and I toured the island’s northeastern side, detouring into the northern rainforests and hills, where Martinique’s music and dances, so filled with the rhythms of Africa, were preserved by escaped slaves. Back on the coast, we arrived late one afternoon at Le Domaine Saint Aubin, a Creole plantation house transformed into a stunning boutique hotel, owned by Laurent and Joelle Rosemain, a young Parisian couple. Laurent is a former Parisian jazz drummer, and his wife, a Sephardic Jew with Tunisian roots, was a milliner for Comédie-Francaise. Joelle has crafted designs for the inn’s drapes and chair coverings and does double duty as its cook. Though not formally trained as a chef, her kitchen skills have earned the inn’s restaurant designation as one of the top five in Martinique. In the mornings, Laurent sets out fresh croissants and jams on the veranda — and plays some of his favorite jazz CDs, including greats like Paul Desmond and Chet Baker. This lovely boutique hotel offered not only a peek at the mountainous northern part of the island sometimes overlooked by the average tourist, but another unexpected Jewish connection. Resources: For information about Martinique, visit www.martinique.org, or call (212) 838-7800. Martinique is 429 miles southeast of Puerto Rico, with flights from Miami via San Juan. The official currency is the euro. For Le Domaine Saint Aubin, visit www.ledomainesaintaubin.com. (Meals here are not kosher). For Neisson Distillery, visit www.neisson.com. |
  
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