May 12, 2008 -- A group of Yeshiva College students and Dominican high school students from the neighborhood of Washington Heights discovered some unexpected common ground on a recent visit to “Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic,” an exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park, New York City. The exhibit tells the little-known story of the thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees who settled in Sosúa, a small coastal town in the Dominican Republic. The country, headed by Rafael Trujillo, was the only one out of the 32 gathered at the Evian Conference convened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 that agreed to accept the Jews. Over 5,000 Jews moved to Sosúa, where they established a synagogue, schools, a museum, and even a cheese factory, all of which still exist today. This piece of history came as a pleasant surprise to students in the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program at Yeshiva College and members of the Alianza Dominica, the community center in Washington Heights, where the university is located. The group toured the exhibit on Sunday May 4 with two Yeshiva University physics professors, Dr. Gabriel Cwilich and Dr. Freddy Zypman. “I had no Idea that a Jewish community existed in the Dominican Republic,” Yeshiva University junior Michael Cinnamon said. “Hopefully, shared experiences like this will help us build stronger ties with the local Dominican community, who may be more intertwined with us than we thought.” Chira Mejia, a volunteer at Alianza Dominicana and a sophomore at CUNY City College, led a group of Dominican high school students on the trip. Mejia expressed her hope that Yeshiva will continue to be involved with the Alianza and other community initiatives, “because after all we have a lot more in common than we thought.”