By Laurie Goering. Tribune Foreign Correspondent.
Chicago Tribune. March 6, 2001
HAVANA -- Cuba's first Jew, Luis de Torres, arrived on the island in 1492,
as Christopher Columbus' translator.
Centuries later, Jewish pirates prowled the blue Caribbean waters off Cuba.
In 1898, thousands of U.S. Jews volunteered for the Spanish-American War effort,
many opting to stay in Havana afterward. Several of the founders of Cuba's
Communist Party were Jewish.
"We've had Jews in Cuba since the beginning," says Maritza
Corrales, a historian in Cuba's Ministry of Culture.
For all their long history, though, Cuba's Jews are struggling today to keep
their once-flourishing community alive. Heavy emigration, cultural isolation,
aging and long years under officially atheist Marxist rule have taken a toll on
the island's synagogues and its believers.
Cash-strapped Cuba no longer has even one rabbi. "It's very expensive
to pay one since the community has to provide a house, a car, a salary,"
Corrales said. Marriages and circumcisions must wait until foreign religious
officials come to visit.
Cuba's remaining Jewish leaders are searching for creative ways to
revitalize the community, from re-establishing a tourist-drawing Jewish sector
in Old Havana to converting non-Jewish spouses. But the path ahead is a
difficult one.
At the island's last kosher butcher shop, open every Tuesday in Old Havana,
nearly all the men and women thronged outside the iron gate, with its Star of
David, are in their 60s.
"The community's getting weaker," says Aaron Espinosa, 65, lined
up with a bag and cardboard-covered government ration book to buy a few ounces
of hamburger or beef ribs. "I'm afraid if it goes on like it is now, we'll
disappear."
Cuba once boasted one of the larger per capita Jewish populations in Latin
America. During the first half of the 20th Century, Jews from Turkey flocked to
the island to avoid World War I, followed by other emigres from Poland, Russia,
Hungary and the Balkans. Most had been turned down for U.S. visas and chose Cuba
as a landing spot in hope of eventually moving on to the United States.
By World War II, more than 20,000 Jews lived in Cuba, and Acosta Street in
Old Havana--still widely known as the capital's "Jewish Street"--was
alive with kosher bakeries and cafes and Jewish-owned clothing stores.
The difference between then and now "is the difference between day and
night," says Espinosa, as he strolls the narrow, quiet streets of the faded
Jewish quarter. Apart from the butcher shop and a nearby synagogue, there is
little sign of Acosta Street's former occupants.
The downward spiral in Jewish population began in the years following World
War II, as Jews who had fled Europe for Cuba gradually made their way to the
United States, reducing Cuba's Jewish population to around 12,000.
The population crash came in the years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
Jews, like other Cubans, had their businesses seized by the new socialist
government and 95 percent of them fled, mainly to the United States and Israel.
"Jews were professionals and businesspeople who had recently learned
the lessons of totalitarian regimes in Europe," writes Moises Asis, a
prominent Jewish historian and former teacher in Cuba, who left for the United
States in 1993.
Today not more than 1,500 Jews live in Cuba, two-thirds of them in Havana,
and the population struggles to match each death or emigration with a birth or
conversion.
Samuel Zagovalov, 53, the community butcher, has seen one of his own sons
emigrate to Spain, and another, more recently, to Israel. Within the past five
to six years, Jewish leaders say, about 600 mostly young Cuban Jews have made
their way to Israel, under an emigration agreement negotiated quietly between
the two nations.
"The youth we have almost all go to Israel, so what we have left is the
old people," Zagovalov says. "But the community is still alive."
Like many Cuban Jews, Zagovalov--whose parents arrived from Russia in
1929--has had trouble marrying within the Jewish faith. His first wife was not
Jewish, a second converted and only the third time around did he find a spouse
within Cuba's small Jewish community.
"Since about 1965 it's been hard to find Jewish women I liked," he
says with a shrug.
According to Asis, 93 percent of Cuban Jews tallied in a 1989 study had
married outside the synagogue. Conversions among their spouses have become a
major source of new Jewish blood for the community.
This month, Roberto Behar's wife of 16 years, Magaly Ventura, 60, will begin
the process of conversion to Judaism, under the tutorship of a visiting Chilean
rabbi. She'll study for three months, then take a ritual bath to complete the
process, says Behar, 69, a regular at Old Havana's synagogue. Afterward, they
plan to marry again, in a formal Jewish ceremony.
"She loves the Jewish religion" and attends synagogue every
Saturday, says Behar, the son of Turkish Jewish immigrants.
Ventura's conversion is typical. In Cuba, it's generally long-married
spouses who convert, church leaders say.
For a nation that considers Israel an enemy, Cuba's government has afforded
the island's Jews a large measure of respect and tolerance.
Jews are the only Cubans who can buy beef in government-run peso stores, a
nod to religious restrictions on pork, the island's staple meat.
Synagogues were never shut down, even during the long years when Cuba's
socialist leaders discouraged religious practice. And Cuban Jews uniformly say
they have encountered no anti-Semitism.
"It's an advantage to be a Jew here," Zagovalov said. "I
don't remember one minute of anti-Semitism in my life. It's hard to find a place
in the world apart from here where that's true."
Cuban respect for Jews, Cuban historians note, is due in large measure to
Fidel Castro, who came of age during World War II, reading of the atrocities in
Europe.
Jose Marti, Cuba's cherished nationalist hero and poet, also abhorred
discrimination against minorities and studied Hebrew in Madrid.
Fabio Grobart, a Cuban Jew, was one of the founders of the Communist Party
in Cuba in 1925, and for decades served as a party ideologue and the man who
introduced Castro at party meetings.
Even today, Jews hold high-ranking positions within the Communist Party,
serving as vice ministers of the national bank and the fishing industry,
Corrales said.
That's not to say things have been easy for Jews in Cuba. While
discrimination has been rare, the Castro government's "negative attitude
toward religion, Zionism and Israel affected the Jewish community very much,"
Asis wrote, and may have discouraged practice of the Jewish faith until
restrictions on religious behavior were eased in 1991.
Today, relatively few Jews--particularly outside of Havana--have held on to
Jewish practices and traditions, especially outside the synagogue.
At Adath Israel orthodox synagogue in Old Havana, a dozen older men in
yarmulkes and prayer scarves chant prayers in Hebrew each morning, their wives
listening to the service from the other side of an opaque glass wall.
Another Havana synagogue offers a program of Sunday morning Hebrew studies
for children, designed to pass on Jewish tradition.
In cities like Camaguey and Santiago, however, where local Jewish
communities number under 100 members, few Jews still know Hebrew, or have ever
had a Seder dinner at home.
In an effort to recover such traditions, groups like the Cuban-American
Jewish Mission, based in Oakland, visit Cuba to deliver religious supplies,
books and instruction, particularly outside Havana.
Keeping kosher is a near impossibility for most Cuban Jews, as few can
afford two refrigerators and two sets of pots and pans to keep meat separate
from milk, said Bob Safran, whose wife, June, is executive director of the
California mission.
"But celebrating holidays at home with family, having Jewish ritual
objects in the home and pictures to remind them they're Jewish, that's possible,"
Safran said.
Salim Tache Jalak, 72, the administrator of the Adath Israel synagogue, has
even bigger plans.
In conjunction with a Cuban government agency that is restoring the
crumbling buildings of Old Havana, Tache hopes to bring back to life a portion
of the Old City's once vibrant Jewish corner.
He sees Jewish shops reopening, Jewish families moving back to Acosta
Street, and a Jewish museum opening at the former Chevet Ahim synagogue nearby.
He's already halfway through the rehab of the Adath Israel synagogue, which now
sports a new wooden altar carved with scenes from Jerusalem and historic Havana.
That, he believes, is a better future for his aging congregation than simply
waiting their turn to take a spot in the overgrown Jewish cemetery at
Guanabacoa, on Havana's eastern outskirts. | 