Abraham Mendes de Castro

In 1751, Abraham Mendes de Castro, a Sephardic Jew who lived on the island of Curaçao, donated the wooden beams needed to expand the Holy Ark in the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue, the oldest continuously used synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. In 1760, de Castro commissioned the first bilingual Hebrew–Spanish Bible from publishers in Amsterdam. While the proceeds from sales of this edition were intended to go to Jewish communities in Hebron and Jerusalem, he died before the work was completed.