Throughout the early twentieth century thousands of European Jews sailed to Mexico looking for opportunity and escaping increasing persecution at home. A small group made their way north to the border town of Tijuana. The members of the Tijuana Jewish community are immigrants and their descendants from Eastern Europe --- Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from countries like Poland, Russia, Lithuania and Rumania. There are also Sephardic Jews from Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, as well as Arabic Jews from Syria and Lebanon. From the 1920s these people created the first Jewish temple in Tijuana and subsequent congregations such as the Maguen David, The Hatikvah, and the Centro Social Israelita de Tijuana.