Edition: U.S. / Global

A Rabbi Gets and Gives Warmth in Curacao

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER, Special to the New York Times
Published: September 25, 1988

Rabbi Aaron L. Peller, an American who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., remembers the winter of 1978 as having been particularly cold and bitter. He had been assisting an older rabbi in Philadelphia for four years and had started thinking of moving on. The snow drifts and the skidding on the expressways had turned his mind to warm places.

He learned of what seemed like a dream assignment: the post of spiritual leader here in the Caribbean at the oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, a beautiful Sephardic temple with blue-tinted windows and heavy brass chandeliers, built by the descendants of refugees from the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions.

''Me and 500 other guys would love to have that pulpit,'' he recalls telling his wife, Rivkah. As it turned out, two dozen others had applied. But the search committee and the congregation liked Rabbi Peller.

Ten years later, Rabbi Peller is one of the most admired and well-known figures on this little Dutch island of 170,000 people just off the coast of Venezuela.

Most residents of Curacao are Roman Catholic. Many others are Protestants. There are only 425 Jews and only one rabbi, and that has contributed to Rabbi Peller's rise to prominence. He automatically joined the triumvirate of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders invited to official functions. Representatives of the churches in Curacao take turns giving a nightly religious message on local television before the news. Thursday night is reserved for the Jewish message and the program that night has become known as Rabbi Peller's.

Probably more than anything, though, Rabbi Peller, who is 40 years old, has become a highly regarded and highly visible part of his adopted community because of his cheerful, outgoing style and his involvement in life on the island.

''He's active; he's everywhere,'' said Maria Liberia-Peters, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands Antilles and a native of Curacao, the largest of the five islands in the grouping.

''He's very warm, very stimulating, very inspiring, very vibrant,'' said Mrs. Liberia-Peters, a Roman Catholic. ''Some people only move in their little small world in the community. But his world is Curacao.''

Rabbi Peller, who was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia in 1974, pleasantly startled residents within weeks of his arrival by beginning to speak the local Papiamento language.

When he walks through the narrow streets of Willemstad, a 17th century village that looks like a stage set, shop owners and strollers call out greetings.

Curacao is blessed with balmy weather year-round, which Rabbi Peller says he finds relentlessly appealing. But he says what really drew him to Curacao was the chance to work in another culture and to immerse himself in the majesty of the 256-year-old Mikve Israel-Emanuel Synagogue. 'There's Still an Emotion'

''There's still an emotion when I go up on the pulpit,'' he said.

Rabbi Peller works in a small, book-lined office off the synagogue's tiled courtyard, next to the entrance to a small museum of relics and paintings documenting the history of the congregation that was established here in 1651. The present synagogue was consecrated in 1732, the fourth to stand on the site in the heart of Willemstad. Jews from Curacao helped establish the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., which was dedicated in 1763 and is the oldest synagogue in North America. They also helped congregations get started in New York and Charleston, S.C., and on other Caribbean islands.

Rabbi Peller's five immediate predecessors stayed only three years in Curacao. He has been given tenure, and he and his wife say they think of themselves as permanent residents.

The search committee had a hunch Rabbi Peller would be in for the long haul. ''I think that's what endeared him to most of us,'' said Rene Maduro, a 48-year-old management consultant who was president of the synagogue when Rabbi Peller was being hired and is back in the post again. ''He seemed willing to throw in his lot.''