An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba

Chapter 33: A Beautiful Pineapple

33 a beautiful pineapple It is May 2005 and Julio César Alomar Gómez is at the synagogue in Santiago de Cuba arranging on a table some pictures and posters that will form part of an exhibit about the Holocaust for the next day’s Yom HaShoah remembrance.The Joint Distribution Committee has provided him images of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Kristallnacht, “La noche de los cristales rotos” (the night of broken glass), a pogrom carried out in 1938 in German towns, during which windows of synagogues, Jewish homes, and Jewish stores were smashed with sledgehammers while many Jews were beaten to death. It is only recently that Jews in Cuba have begun commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day. As I watch Julio carefully sifting through the fragments of history scattered on the table, I am struck by the mysterious ways in which Jewish cultural memory is transmitted from one generation to the next. Julio’s ancestors didn’t suffer in the Holocaust . He is a convert to Judaism. Jewish history has become his history by choice, as has the project of passing on the rituals of Jewish remembrance. The flight of the Jews from Cuba after the Revolu- [ 216 ] Behar_3P-03.qxd:Behar design 7/30/07 2:28 PM Page 216 tion has left a vacuum that is being filled by people like Julio, dedicated converts who are planting the seeds of Jewish memory in the far-flung corners of the island. I’ve often thought that in Cuba’s synagogues there should be a prayer recited every day thanking God for all the Jewish converts. Julio has turned off all the fans so the pictures won’t blow away, and it is getting steamy in the synagogue as we sift through the painful images of persecuted European Jews in woolen coats and caps. “Let’s go upstairs and talk in the office,” he says. “There’s air conditioning up there.” We make ourselves comfortable around a small table, I pull out my notebook , and Julio proceeds to tell me his life story. From the way he tells it, his life began on the day he met his wife Matilde Farín Levy, a sister of Eugenia Farín Levy, the president of the Jewish community of Santiago de Cuba. Julio says, “We were married on the 21st of December in 1984. We’d met in July of that year. Very casually. During carnival here in Santiago. Matilde wasn’t someone who went to parties, but she’d gone with a friend. And a friend had invited me as well. We all spent the night together. After that I courted her feverishly until she married me.” Although raised Catholic, Julio says that after the Revolution he studied physical education and became an atheist. When he met Matilde he didn’t believe in anything. Matilde lived with her two sisters and her mother. They didn’t talk about religion, but on Fridays, in the privacy of their home, the women lit a wick in a little cup of oil at nightfall.The synagogue had closed in 1979, and since no one had a Jewish calendar, they couldn’t celebrate the holidays . All they did was light the oil on Fridays. Julio says he would watch them but he never asked any questions. He also noted that unlike other Cubans, who would receive a ration of oil that was half lard and half vegetable oil, the family’s ration was entirely in the form of vegetable oil. When he asked Matilde about this, she told him very simply that her family didn’t eat lard. It wasn’t until 1993, when the Joint Distribution Committee sent two teachers to organize the Jewish community, that Matilde and her family finally spoke openly about their Jewish heritage. Julio found himself drawn to Judaism and began to study Hebrew and Jewish history. After the reopening of the synagogue in Santiago in 1995, he decided to undergo circumcision and [ 217 ] In the Provinces Behar_3P-03.qxd:Behar design 7/30/07 2:28 PM Page 217 conversion, along with eight other adult men and six boys. Subsequently, he and Matilde, together with seven other couples, were married in a collective Jewish ceremony under a chupah. Julio now leads weekly Shabbat services at the synagogue. Alejandro, the only child of Julio and Matilde, is one of the regular Torah readers. Throughout the process...