Cuban Jewish 'ambassadors' seek support for their community
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- Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:00:44 GMT
Cuban Jewish 'ambassadors' seek support for their community
By DAVID LAZARUS, Staff Reporter
Thursday, 08 November 2007
Cuban Jewry is small, isolated and aging. Yet, it is also united and determined to preserve and strengthen its community.
That was the main message two Cuban-Jewish "ambassadors" delivered when they made their way across Canada recently as part of a cultural exchange initiative.
Jeiro Montagne, 26, and Nikolai Botino, 20, said in an interview that despite the challenges faced by Cuba's Jews, it is a community that values its Jewish heritage and strives to maintain it.
That goal, however, is made more difficult, they said, by the fact that in Havana, where two-thirds of Cuba's approximately 1,500 Jews live – one-tenth the number of those who were there before the 1959 revolution – there is only one kosher butcher shop and no rabbi for its main synagogue, the Beth Shalom.
The community is also effectively isolated from any significant U.S. Jewish support because of the long-standing American sanctions against Cuba. At least one-third of Cuba's Jews are elderly and increasingly in need of social support from the patronato, the Jewish community's main organization there.
On the more positive side, Montagne and Botino said, the community is well-organized. Despite the absence of a rabbi, there is a cantor from Rosario, Argentina, who is serving for now as the spiritual leader, and there is an abiding identification with Israel, although no overt expression of it.
Even though there is a significant level of intermarriage, there are also cases of women – and men – converting to Judaism. Montagne and Botino, who were born Jewish, were not circumcised after birth, but both eventually underwent the procedure.
They stressed that Cuba's younger generation of Jews is now working to keep the Jewish flame alive.
"Youth are taking the leading role in Jewish community life," said Botino, who teaches computer technology. One of the most prominent young Jewish groups, he said, is Kesher, which helps seniors and families.
Montagne, a sports therapist who works at the Havana branch of ORT, noted that "there were 200 people at High Holy Day services. Usually on Shabbat, there are 60 or 80."
The two young men were to return home Nov. 6 after arriving in Canada on Oct. 22 and meeting with students at Jewish and non-Jewish schools and institutions across the country.
In Montreal, where they landed first, Montagne and Botino met with teens and younger students at venues that included the Teen Program of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, the Akiva School, Herzliah High School, Bialik High School and the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.
Then it was off to Ottawa, Toronto, Kingston, Waterloo, Guelph and London. Montagne and Botino then separated to travel to Halifax and Vancouver, respectively, before returning home, They spoke at 15 campuses in all. Coordinating their talks outside Montreal was Yacov Fruchter of UIA Federations Canada's National Jewish Campus Life (NJCL).
Congregation Shaar Hashomayim's education director, Stefani Novick-Fernandez, said the trip to Canada was a reciprocal visit, after the Shaar led its own trip there in March 2006, as part of a pilot teen program.
That trip proved so successful, she said, that upon her return, at the behest of ORT Havana director William Miller, she consulted with NJCL's Alexis Pavlich of Toronto, who herself was preparing to lead a Canadian student delegation to Cuba last May.
When Pavlich returned, she and Novick-Fernandez came up with the idea of bringing young Cuban Jews to Canada to speak across the country about Jewish life there. A lot of Cuban government red tape was involved, Novick-Fernandez said, but things worked out. Also involved in organizing the initiative was the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, which is sending its own delegation to Cuba on Nov. 15.
In the message they brought to Canada, Montagne and Botino spoke of the need for the Canadian Jewish community to continue to give its traditional, long-standing support, both materially and morally. They rated Canada as Cuban Jewry's most prominent supporter, with others including Mexico and Argentina.
Montagne said the Cuban government has had very positive relations with the Jewish community, despite the country's official atheism. There have been no restrictions on religious practice since 1991, and Fidel Castro himself, they related, paid a surprise visit to the patronato on Chanukah about a decade ago. And despite the fact that the government severed ties with Israel in 1973, Montagne was in Israel in 2004, as part of the Taglit program, and there are Cuban Jews who have found a way to make aliyah.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Jewish life in Cuba, Botino suggested, "is how we can do so very much with so little." Outside of kosher supplies, which are always needed, the community needs things ranging from prescription glasses to laptop computers.
"We're trying," Botino said.
Novick remembered from her own trip last year being "extremely moved not only by what the Cubans don't have… but by all that they do with so little."
She said that during their visit to Canada, Botino and Montagne spoke about the Cuban Jewish community's "vibrancy despite its size, and its need for people to visit them, to remember them, to bring them some much-needed basic supplies, and to know that each and every day, in the face of some enormous obstacles, they reclaim their Jewish heritage."
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