St. Maarten / St. Martin

City overview

St. Maarten is a 37-square-mile island split between two nations — Dutch Sint Maarten in the south and French Saint-Martin in the north — with no border formalities between them. The Dutch side delivers resorts, casinos, duty-free shopping along Philipsburg’s Front Street, and the Simpson Bay strip; the French side offers Marigot’s market, the restaurant village of Grand Case, and quieter beaches like Baie Longue and Orient Bay. Princess Juliana International Airport is one of the Caribbean’s main air hubs, which makes the island unusually easy to reach and a natural jumping-off point for St. Barths, Anguilla, Saba and Statia. Jews first reached the island as refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and a community grew through the 17th and 18th centuries. The island’s original synagogue was abandoned in 1781 and later destroyed by a hurricane; remnants of the old Jewish burial ground were documented in Philipsburg during a 2012 rescue excavation, and the Sint Maarten National Heritage Museum maintains a small exhibit on the island’s early Jews. Permanent Jewish life returned in stages from the 1960s onward, and in 2009 Rabbi Moishe and Sara Chanowitz arrived as Chabad emissaries. Their center in Simpson Bay opened in January 2011 as the first functioning synagogue on the island in roughly 230 years. Today the resident Jewish community numbers a few hundred, swelling to around a thousand in high season, and includes students at the American University of the Caribbean medical school. Practical framing for a kosher traveller: everything Jewish on this island runs through one address. Chabad of St. Maarten/Martin is the synagogue, the kosher kitchen, the Shabbos meal host and the visitor information desk, all in one. There are no kosher restaurants, no kosher grocery, and no other minyan. Plan food in advance and the island works beautifully; arrive without a plan and you will be living off packaged OU products from Carrefour.