אהרן מנדס חומסיירו

Chacham Aron Mendes Chumaceiro (5570/1810–5642/1882) was a Sephardi rav of Amsterdam who served as chief rabbi of Curacao in the Dutch West Indies. Born in Amsterdam, he was raised in the celebrated beit medrash Ets Haim of the Portuguese kehillah, receiving its rabbinic degrees, and in 1852 was elected first av beit din of the community and head of Ets Haim itself. In those years he also edited the first Jewish weekly in the Dutch language.

When the future King Pedro V of Portugal visited Amsterdam in 1854, it was Chacham Chumaceiro whom the parnasim delegated to receive him and show him the beit medrash — where the king, reading the donors’ names on the walls, remarked that he felt as if he stood in his own Portugal; upon taking his throne he removed the civil disabilities of Portugal’s Jews.

In 1855 he accepted from King William III the appointment as chief rabbi of the colony of Curacao, where he led the oldest kehillah of the western hemisphere. From there his standing served Jews beyond his own community: at the request of the crown’s special envoy he successfully arbitrated the claims of the persecuted Dutch Jews of Coro, Venezuela, driven from their homes across the sea — a settlement accepted by all parties. He returned to Amsterdam in his last years and was niftar there in 1882.