“The Zionists were behind the American attack on our country.” This is how the president of Venezuela spoke upon assuming power, one day after the deposition of President Maduro. This clearly antisemitic statement reflects and summarizes the oppression imposed on the Jewish community of Venezuela for over a decade. These Jews faced adversity and intimidation with bravery, preserving their identities and maintaining unwavering dignity.

By Zevi Ghivelder

CONJUNCTURE

The situation of Jews in Venezuela at the beginning of 2026 is extremely delicate and uncertain, reflecting the political chaos the country is going through. The safety of the Jewish community is directly linked to institutional instability and the recent fall of the Chavista regime.

Venezuela is experiencing a moment of rupture following a US military operation on January 3rd, which resulted in the capture and removal of President Maduro. Because of this fall, the country is facing a period of transition. The small remaining Jewish community in Caracas and Maracaibo has adopted a low profile, avoiding public demonstrations to avoid becoming a target of retaliation from supporters of the old regime who remain in power. During the Chávez and Maduro governments, antisemitism was fueled by official rhetoric, often disguised as anti-Zionism, that is, devastating and repeated criticism of Israel. The deposed regime maintained close ties with Iran and Hezbollah. The collapse of these alliances could still generate episodes of violence against synagogues and Jewish schools. In essence, Jews in Venezuela currently suffer from the same problems as the rest of the population: scarcity of resources, inflation, and urban crime. The Jewish community therefore maintains a cautious stance, as the country's political future remains uncertain and, above all, subject to the unfolding of its institutional relationship with the Republican government of the United States.

HISTORY

It is not known for certain when Jews first arrived in Venezuela, but most accounts suggest that there were converts living in Caracas and Maracaibo in the mid-16th century. Although there were no established Jewish communities during this period, interactions with merchants from nearby Dutch colonies, such as Curaçao, likely brought some Jews to the country. In the following centuries, there is almost no trace of Jewish life in Venezuela.

In the early 19th century, native peoples fought against Spanish colonizers in pursuit of independence. During the wars of liberation, many Jews fought in Simón Bolívar's army, and at one point, Jews from Curaçao provided them with shelter and military assistance. When Venezuela gained its independence in 1811, relations between the new republic and the Jewish people were friendly, as evidenced by the adoption of a constitution in 1821 that affirmed religious freedom in the country. This, along with the strengthening of ties with the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean islands, which had Jewish populations, allowed for the establishment of a permanent Jewish community in Venezuela. The 19th century also witnessed a steady flow of Jewish immigration to the country, with some Portuguese and Dutch Jews from Curaçao arriving in the city of Coro around 1827, and a group of Moroccan Jews later settling there. Although many of these Jewish immigrants managed to achieve a certain level of prominence in various sectors, they were not accepted throughout the country. Assimilation also became a problem for many members of the community, particularly those from Curaçao. At that time, the Dutch Jews living in Venezuela practically disappeared, absorbed by the non-Jewish segment of Venezuelan society. Even so, many Jews prospered and managed to achieve a certain level of prominence in various sectors. The arrival of Jews from North Africa and, later, from Eastern and Central Europe, after the First World War, contributed to this.a World War II and throughout the 1920s, he strengthened the Venezuelan Jewish community and helped establish community institutions.

There was an influx of Jewish immigration from Europe after the Holocaust, despite immigration restrictions. The Jewish population in Venezuela continued to grow in the following decade, particularly after the fall of dictator Pérez Jiménez in 1958. During the Six-Day War in 1967, some Venezuelan Jewish volunteers went to Israel. The Jewish community was further strengthened with the arrival of Jews from countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and even Israel in the 1960s, and Jews from other Latin American countries during the 1970s.

Venezuelan Jews held many prominent positions in the country during the second half of the 20th century. A Jewish citizen – Ruth Osterreicher de Krivoy – presided over the Central Bank from 1992 to 1994. Henrique Capriles, a closeted Jew, was governor of Miranda from 2008 to 2017.

The community is currently organized under the aegis of the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela (CAIV), which represents it before national and international organizations. The Venezuelan Jewish community is equally divided between Sephardim e ashkenazim Religious life is generally traditionalist, with around 16 synagogues in the country.

Relations between Venezuela and Israel have been tense in recent years, deteriorating due to the foreign policy implemented by Hugo Chávez. Following the conflict between Israel and Gaza in 2008-09, Venezuela severed all diplomatic ties with Israel.

In January 2009, President Chávez expelled the Israeli ambassador as a form of protest against the offensive in Gaza. In April, the then Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Nicolás Maduro, met with the Foreign Minister of the Palestinian National Authority in Caracas, where formal diplomatic relations were established.

OPPRESSION

During a relatively peaceful Shabbat in late December 2025, Venezuelan Jews were unaware that Donald Trump had just intensified the pressure on the Maduro regime. On social media, the American president had published an unequivocal warning: “To all airlines: consider the airspace over and around Venezuela completely closed.” The announcement represented yet another escalation in the campaign that Washington had been waging in recent months against the Caracas government. What most frightened the increasingly smaller Venezuelan Jewish community was the uncertainty about what would come next. “Will the United States invade or not? If they decide to attack, will it be an operation with a defined target? Or something bigger that could put anyone walking down the street at risk?” asked Rabbi Oshri Arguane of the Tiferet Israel del Este community in Caracas, anxiously, in a conversation with the Argentinian magazine at the time. Mishpachah"People are still trying to lead normal lives, schools are open, businesses too. But it's undeniable that there's a lot of tension."

Rabbi Arguane observed that many Venezuelan Jews were grappling with the consequences of the country's growing isolation. Just days earlier, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had issued a security alert, recommending that airlines avoid Venezuelan airspace. In response, the country revoked the operating licenses of six major international airlines. This decision triggered two serious complications. On the one hand, it intensified the feeling that some kind of American attack might be imminent, leading many Venezuelans to mobilize to leave the country. As a result, prices skyrocketed. Tickets that cost around $700 were being sold for no less than $4. At the same time, people who had traveled and intended to return home were stranded abroad. While speaking with the magazine, the rabbi awaited a phone call from his wife, detained in Spain and unable to return to Caracas. The desperation was so great that community members began hiring drivers to take them to the border with Colombia, from where they would try to reach their most desired destinations, Miami or Madrid.

Since 2007, Venezuela had been governed by the Socialist Party: first under Hugo Chávez and, after his death, under Vice President Nicolás Maduro, who began governing in 2013. Elections in the country were widely considered a sham, and the ruling party managed to remain in power at the expense of ordinary Venezuelans, who were impoverished to alarming levels. Venezuela, once the fourth largest economy in Latin America, had fallen to eleventh place.

Venezuelan Jews came to admire the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, elected in 2023, who had revealed an enthusiasm for Judaism never seen in any other contemporary ruler. Milei made his first official trip to Israel. On his next trip, to the United States, he participated in a Shabbat celebration in New York and liked to recite passages from the Bible. Parasha (Excerpt from the weekly Torah reading) in official speeches. Inspired by the “Abraham Accords,” Milei announced that Argentina could lead what he called the “Isaac Accords,” a Latin American parallel to the normalization agreements signed with Israel by various Arab states. He envisioned a regional coalition of leaders who openly support Israel, urging them to combat antisemitism and reject intolerant ideologies.

The laudatory allusions made by Venezuelan Jews to Milei spilled over community boundaries, provoking irritation in Maduro and members of his government's top echelon who, through public statements, intensified hostilities against Jews. But, strictly speaking, the progression of antisemitism in Venezuela was recurrent, stemming from the government of Hugo Chávez.

It was an escalation that progressed along the course of classical antisemitism, evolving into "state antisemitism," as happened in the Soviet Union from the beginning of the 50s. Like the Kremlin's actions, in Caracas the admonition against Jews was also camouflaged under the rhetoric of political anti-Zionism.

During the Hugo Chávez era, from 1999 to 2013, antisemitism became visible due to government initiatives, which were engaged with the left both domestically and in the country's foreign policy. Chávez used antisemitic clichés in his speeches. In a famous Christmas address in 2005, he stated that "descendants of those who carried out the crucifixion have taken possession of the world's riches." This statement was obviously interpreted as a frontal attack on Jews. In 2004 and 2007, the Venezuelan secret police raided the Centro Hebraico Jewish school in Caracas, claiming to be searching for weapons and subversive documents. Nothing was found, but the psychological impact on the community was devastating.

Following the conflict in Gaza in 2009, Chávez expelled the Israeli ambassador and broke off diplomatic relations. Around the same time, the Tiferet Israel synagogue was desecrated by an armed group, including police officers, who spray-painted hate messages and stole community records. Their intention, in fact, was to conduct a survey of Jews residing in the country's capital, a kind of census, similar to the one carried out by the Nazis after the occupation of Paris in 1940.

Maduro inherited and intensified Chávez's rhetoric, integrating it into his narrative of a "war of resistance against imperialism," a slogan that has been out of use for over fifty years. During campaigns against his opponent Henrique Capriles, the state media and Maduro himself resorted to anti-Semitic insults, calling him a Zionist with a clear pejorative connotation. President Maduro was keen to blame "international Zionism" for the protests against his government or for the economic crisis, which, as he said, resulted from "global conspiracies orchestrated by Jews." The close military and political relationship with Iran and the support for groups like Hezbollah increased the feeling of insecurity and, along with the surveillance of Venezuelan Jews, they came to be seen as "foreign agents."

The direct result of this progression was the drastic reduction of the Jewish population in Venezuela: from 25 at the beginning of Chávez's government to about 5 to 7 today.

SPEECHES

Like his mentor, Fidel Castro, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez liked to denounce his critics as fascists and Nazis, whoever they might be, from insignificant individuals to the most prominent figures in any country. But in reality, the militarization of Venezuelan society and its exacerbated nationalism, coupled with persistent anti-Semitic demagoguery, enveloped Venezuela in a totalitarian framework, much like those that characterized Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

One of Chávez's favorite targets was Henrique Capriles, the Venezuelan presidential candidate for the Democratic Unity Movement (MUD) coalition. Capriles, then 40 years old, had been governor of the state of Miranda. He was a practicing Catholic, but did not deny that his grandparents were Jewish escapees of Nazism and that his great-grandparents had been murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp. After Capriles won the MUD primary election, the state media, controlled by Chávez, began attacking him with overwhelming anti-Semitic propaganda.

Prominent leaders of the Jewish community denounced the prejudice and demanded remedial action from the Caracas government: “We urge President Chávez to put an end to this campaign, which will certainly become more threatening as the election date approaches.” This statement was signed by Shimon Samuels, director of international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Another Jewish leader, Abraham Foxman, director of the American institution Anti-Defamation League, released a statement: “The people of Venezuela must firmly reject the tactics of the Chávez regime of recycling classic anti-Semitic artifices that label Jews as disloyal, as threats to the country's values, as capitalists responsible for economic difficulties, and as part of a LOBBY "international Zionist".

Chávez did not issue a public retraction, even though he had defeated Capriles in the election and had subsequently declared: "The Jews are undermining the efforts and progress of our Bolivarian Revolution." These and many other antisemitic attacks, disguised as official statements, caused thousands of Jews to begin leaving Venezuela in a veritable exodus, selling off their properties and abandoning prominent positions among the country's liberal professionals.

The journalist Matthew Fishbane wrote in the magazine. Tablet“Many moved to Bogotá, Colombia, a city that for decades was marked by violence, but which now seems like an island of safety and peace compared to Caracas.” The journalist added: “The Venezuelan capital used to house tens of thousands of Jewish residents, but the numbers have plummeted. The exodus from Caracas reflects a national trend as Chávez’s durability is unpredictable. Half of the Venezuelan Jewish community has fled the social and economic chaos that the president unleashed, along with the distressing feeling that they were being specifically suffocated by the regime.”

The insecurity of Venezuelan Jews was more than justified. Chávez's speech on Christmas Eve 2005, in which he associated Jews with the crucifixion, had a significant impact on the population, just as Hitler's pronouncements had been absorbed by the Germans. In another report, Fishbane wrote: “In December 2007, state police raided the most important Jewish social club in Caracas. Not by chance, they carried out this operation on the same day that Venezuelans voted in a national referendum on presidential term limits that favored Chávez. Masked and armed police officers positioned themselves aggressively, while Jewish elementary school children arrived for classes.” About a year later, Chávez described Israel's war against Hamas in 2009 as “a genocidal Holocaust against the Palestinian people.” A few weeks after the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, armed intruders vandalized a synagogue in Caracas, leaving behind several anti-Semitic graffiti messages, including "Jews out of here." In June 2010, after the Israeli navy blocked a Turkish flotilla bound for Gaza, Chávez criticized "the terrorist and criminal nature of the Israeli government." Speaking on state television, he launched a fierce attack: "I take this opportunity to condemn once again, from the bottom of my soul, the State of Israel." That same month, Chávez met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Venezuela and, once again, alluded to the Israeli government as genocidal.

The mass emigration of Jews from Venezuela is tragically similar to what happened in the Caribbean in the early 1960s. According to historian Irving Louis Horowitz, a staggering 90% of Cuban Jews fled the island shortly after Castro took power. For decades, Havana instituted a constant stream of antisemitic propaganda emanating from Moscow. As Horowitz explains, the Soviets provided Cuba with the model for attacking human rights activities and organizations as “an extension of the Jewish Zionist conspiracy.” Castro hosted the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, after which he strengthened relations with Yasser Arafat's PLO.

The antisemitism of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution was inspired not only by Fidel Castro, but also by Iran, which, thanks to Maduro, has a strong alliance with Venezuela. Will this close relationship last? Only the White House holds the answer to that question.

Zevi Ghivelder is a writer and journalist