The Jewish community in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, lost five of its members in Surfside and the unusually tight-knit community is still reeling, JTA reported.

Seniors Christina Beatriz Elvira, z’l, and Leon Oliwkowicz, z’l, were among the first victims whose remains were recovered and identified, and the bodies of three Jewish Venezuelan young men were found later: Luis Sadovnic, Moises “El Chino” Rodán and Andres Levine.

The three young men, all in their 20s, were raised in the small and tightly intertwined community in Caracas – a city where the Jews feel that the community is one extended family.

“The entire community feels this tragedy in the most innermost core of our beings,” Miguel Truzman, vice president of the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, told JTA. “They were boys that we watched grow up; the whole community is deeply traumatized and devastated by this tragedy.”

All three boys attended the private Jewish high school in Caracas, the Colegio Moral y Luces Herzl-Bialik Jewish school. The school accepts students from all levels of Jewish backgrounds and of course, ethnic backgrounds, as the community’s small size precludes more than one Jewish school. The school was founded in 1946 by Ashkenazi emigres but Ashkenazim and Sephardim mingle together in the classrooms.

“The Venezuelan Ashkenazim allowed the Sephardim to study in the school without the slightest problem. If you go to another Latin American country, like Mexico — or even around the world — every community, depending on their origin, has their own school,” Sami Rozenbaum, journalist and current editor-in-chief of Nuevo Mundo Israelita, or New Israelite World, the community’s weekly newspaper, told JTA.

“Our community stands as a reference point in the world because of its integration. We are fully united. Here there’s no distinction between who’s from Ashkenazi or Sephardi ancestry. The only separate components are the synagogues and the religious and cultural traditions of each group.”

In the early 1990s, the Jewish community in Venezuela numbered 25,000 members but that number has dwindled to less than 6,000 due to the dismal political and socioeconomic situation in the Latin American country. As Venezuelan Jewish immigrants settled in the US, Israel, Mexico and Panama, almost all the Jews who remain in Venezuela are Orthodox, live in Caracas and have developed a unique closeness.

Venezuela is almost free of anti-Semitism despite the fact that both former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and current President Nicolás Maduro espouse anti-Semitic messages, including trivialization of the Holocaust. “Criticism of Israel in Maduro-controlled or -affiliated media continued to carry anti-Semitic overtones, sometimes disguised as anti-Zionist messages,” the US State Department’s 2020 Report on International Religious Freedom on Venezuela states.

However, the Venezuelan population seems to largely ignore these messages. “Venezuelans are not antisemitic. For example, if they see someone wearing a kippah on their head and do not know what it is, they’ll ask you. The unfamiliar does not cause them estrangement but respect,” said Isaac Cohen, chief rabbi of the Israelite Association of Venezuela (AIV), an umbrella organization representing Jews of Sephardic origin.

“The reason I have been here for 43 years is that I do not feel, nor have I experienced antisemitism. Although, of course, in Europe, there is cultural antisemitism, but here there is no such thing as an antisemitic culture.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)