Edition: U.S. / Global

Jews' Refuge in Caribbean Becomes a Resort

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER, Special to The New York Times
Published: August 17, 1989

When Felix Koch, a young radio repairman from Vienna, reached the northern coast of the Dominican Republic nearly 50 years ago, he found a raw, wild land with patches of jungle and rolling stretches of dry scrub brush.

A handful of wooden shacks, the remnants of a failed banana plantation, rose among the trees and bushes. There were no roads, no running water, no electricity, nothing that resembled the elegant city he had left.

Still, Mr. Koch was overjoyed. He was Jewish and he had been on the run from Hitler's Nazis for more than two years. Now, he and scores of other Jewish refugees were making a new home.

''We were very, very happy,'' Mr. Koch said the other day. ''We were alive.'' Cattle and Real Estate

The first years in the Sosua settlement were disappointing. As soon as the war ended, many refugees left for Miami, New York or Los Angeles.

But most who stayed have prospered. Today, most of the 40 or so remaining settlers and relatives are wealthy and a few are millionaires, thanks to a tourism boom that has sent land prices skyrocketing.

The settlers had already been doing well as cattle farmers and as the Dominican Republic's leading producers of cheese, sausage and ham. But when the tourists started pouring in, land that once might have brought a few hundred dollars an acre started to sell for $60,000 an acre and one prime piece recently sold for more than $600,000 an acre. Holdings of several hundred acres are not unusual.

Mr. Koch bought a small piece of land for the equivalent of about $2,000 an acre 24 years ago. A would-be buyer recently handed him a blank check, Mr. Koch recalled, and said, ''You fill in the price and I'll pay it.''

About 10,000 people live in Sosua. Most are Dominicans, but there are also a many Americans, Canadians and Europeans. Construction crews are at work on hotels and condominiums on almost every vacant lot. Even in the summer, the slow season in the Caribbean, most hotels are full.

One of the few remaining original buildings is the renovated synagogue, a plain building with varnished pine walls and plain benches, flanked by a street named for Dr. Joseph Rosen, a New Yorker who helped the settlement get started.

The modern history of Sosua is encapsulated in one building. First it was a plantation warehouse. Then the settlers made it into a commissary. Now it is a discotheque. Next door is a restaurant offering waffles, hamburgers and tacos.

The Sosua settlement is one of the few good things anyone can recall about Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years before being assassinated in 1961. While other countries were reluctant to receive Jewish refugees, General Trujillo offered to shelter up to 100,000. #670 Refugees Reach Island The general's gesture was not purely altruistic. He had shocked the world a few years earlier by ordering the killing of more than 15,000 migrants from Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Now he hoped to get some favorable publicity. He also hoped the refugees would marry Dominicans and, as he put it, ''whiten'' the Dominican population, with its mixture of Spanish, Indian and black bloodlines.

As it turned out, only 670 refugees reached the Dominican Republic before the war made travel impossible, and few married local women.

Now, some have gone into the tourist business with hotels and condominiums. Mr. Koch, who is now 73 years old, started with one guest room a few years ago and now has 14 on a narrow strip of grass that ends on a bluff overlooking the ocean, wherethe sun sets each evening in a blaze of color. Most of his guests, he said, are non-Jewish Germans.

''They're very friendly,'' he said. ''And I'm very friendly. They don't ask me and I don't ask them.''