Kingston (Jamaica)

Pirate-port Sephardim to the 1912 Shaare Shalom (sand-floor) synagogue - Jamaica's surviving congregation.

Modern locality anchor

Kingston (Jamaica)

Jamaica · City · 18.0°N 76.8°W

This anchor orients the sourced locality record. It is not a reconstructed historical position or border; the single map below provides geographic context.

View location

Where is Kingston (Jamaica)?

Land geometry: Natural Earth 1:50m via world-atlas. Pins mark modern localities or representative regional anchors stored on Atlas place records, not historical borders and not reconstructed positions. · Sources & methods

THE COMMUNITY TIMELINE · EVERY NODE DATED

What happened to the Jewish community of Kingston (Jamaica)?

1655–1912

1655-1700s: Sephardic settlement under the English

1912–present

Shaare Shalom era (united congregation, 1912)

Today

Tiny community; heritage landmark.

LANGUAGES & COMMUNITY

What did Kingston (Jamaica) sound like?

Ladino / Judeo-Spanish (Judezmo; Haketía)Hebrew (עברית, Ivrit)

Ladino / Judeo-Spanish (Judezmo; Haketía) is a language with its own grammar, literature, and history — not “broken” anything, and not a dialect of Hebrew.

AFTER · IN FULL COLOR

What survives today?

In Kingston (Jamaica)

Tiny community; heritage landmark.

Shaare Shalom Synagogue
synagogue · public landmark
Built 1912; sand floor.
Hunt's Bay Cemetery
cemetery · historic site
17th-century graves.

SOURCES & REVIEW

Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (place entry)
Macmillan Reference USA · 2007
Vital Statistics: Jewish Population of the World (2024 country figures)
Jewish Virtual Library · 2024 · open source

Reviewed 2026-07-30

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