(Jewish Group) Puerto Rico's synagogues prepare for Rosh Hashanah in the wake of Hurricane Fiona
Hurricane Fiona, which hit Puerto Rico over the weekend, left synagogues without water or power in the days leading up to the High Holidays. But leaders of the island’s Jewish community said their back-up plans seems to be working, and expect the usual crowds at Rosh Hashanah.
The Reform, Conservative and Chabad synagogues on the island, and the Jewish Community Center, are in the San Juan area, which sustained relatively little damage in the Category 3 storm. But the hurricane shut down Puerto Rico’s electrical grid, and left most people without clean water. As may as eight people died in the storm and in the flooding that followed. While the Jewish community is safe, the storm brought challenges, said Diego Mendelbaum, director of the JCC and Shaare Zedek, Puerto Rico’s Conservative shul.
Temple Beth Shalom, a Reform shul, sustained damage to its solar panels. They were supposed to power the synagogue’s generator, which was installed after Hurricane Maria, the 2017 Category 5 hurricane that killed about 3,000 Puerto Ricans and devastated the island’s economy.
“We decided that it was necessary to install an emergency power source. We went with a solar-powered generator with Tesla Powerwalls, which was designed to be able to keep us not reliant on the instability of the grid,” Vevio Schnitzer, the administrator of Temple Beth Shalom, said. “And it’s been working fine for the last five years. But in the moment of truth after the hurricane, it failed.”
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