| By Anita Snow, Associated Press |
Some two dozen people listen as a young woman reads the
scripture in their native Spanish. "Amen. Amen,'' they respond.
Nearly four decades after Castro's Marxist revolution triumphed
on this Caribbean island, the Jewish community has shrunk from
around 15,000 to just 1,500.
There is no rabbi, no Jewish school. There are just three
synagogues in the nation's capital of 2 million and one kosher
butcher.
Nevertheless, the remaining Jews struggle to keep their
religious faith and ethnic traditions alive in a country better
known for African cults, Roman Catholicism and atheism.
Along with their Catholic compatriots, Cuban Jews say they look
forward to the arrival here Wednesday of Pope John Paul II.
Representatives of their community, along with leaders of
several Protestant denominations, will privately meet with the
pontiff before his final Mass Sunday in Havana's Plaza of the
Revolution.
"This pope has treated Judaism very well,'' said Dr. Alberto
Mechulam, who directs religion classes in Hebrew at the Patronato.
"This pope has erased the whole idea that the Jews were
responsible for the death of Jesus.
"This pope is very special,'' he said.
Inclusion in the meeting with the pope is important to Cuban
Jews, who admit that it was hard keeping the faith after Castro's
1959 revolution.
"All of my schoolmates left after the revolution and many of
them have gone on to have good lives, never lacking anything,''
said Adela Dworkin, 59, vice president of the Jewish Community
Center at the Patronato.
"I, too, probably would have had a better life had I left,''
she said in the center's library, which she founded more than two
decades ago. "My life has been very austere.
"But if we all had left, Cuba's Jewish community would have
disappeared.''
While most in the Jewish community initially supported Castro's
new government, many left Cuba after he turned toward socialism and
their businesses were expropriated or shut down.
Many moved to Miami. Others took their families and businesses
to New York, Mexico or Israel.
After Cuba officially embraced atheism in 1962, believers in
all
faiths shied away from formal worship, though it was never formally
prohibited. "It was more of a kind of self-censorship, fear of how
their neighbors would see them,'' Dworkin said.
But anti-Semitism was never a problem in Cuba, either before or
after the revolution, she said.
Dworkin declared that her Russian parents, who were denied
entry
into the United States and settled in Cuba "never, ever had to be
afraid here of being Jews.''
It helped that Cuba's dwindling Jewish community always had the
support of brethren abroad.
Since the early 1960s, the Canadian Jewish Community every year
has contributed the matzoth, ritual wine and other traditional
foods for Passover seders here.
Rabbinical students from Argentina spend years teaching Cuban
Jews Hebrew and the history and traditions of their ancestors.
Jewish groups in Mexico and Venezuela have provided money and
goods.
But the struggle to keep the traditions alive has been fought
mostly by Cubans such as Mechulam, who said he never stopped
believing in God, even as the nation's rabbis and other Jewish
leaders drifted away.
Now 62, he wants to make sure that young Cuban Jews are aware
of
their culture and history.
Photographs of skeletal victims of the Jewish Holocaust in
Europe under the Nazis are plastered outside the second-floor
classroom above the synagogue. "Never Again,'' a sign declares.
Travel posters of Israel and photographs of Jewish weddings and
other ceremonies adorn other walls.
"The community almost disappeared,'' said Mechulam, who wore
his yarmulke in observance of the Sabbath. "But always a light was
left burning.''
© 1998Associated Press