The phone rings and I hear my father’s deep voice answer “ Hola?”, immediately a smile grows on his face and he begins speaking Hebrew then back to English and then Spanish. As I help my mom make dinner, yucca con mojo (a root vegetable with garlic sauce popular in Latin America) with a side of hummus and tahini. As a child I thought there was nothing unique or different about my upbringing. I thought everyone’s family spoke in a mixture of languages and all Jews ate borekas and sanchocho soup with matzoh balls. Having been raised in a highly ethnically diverse area such as Miami I never thought twice about the concept of a Latin or Sephardic Jew (meaning Jews from Spain) being strange or unusual.
I grew up attending temple in a Cuban Jewish community where I regularly heard prayers in Hebrew and in Spanish and then ate borekas (puff pastries cooked by Jews of Turkish descent). My grandparents owned stores in Latin neighborhoods and they were raised and still had family in Colombia and Cuba. My father was an Argentinean Jew whose ancestry included Poland and Russia making him an Ashkenazi Jew. The dichotomy of my father’s light features with my mom’s dark features made for a colorful mixed appearance amongst my siblings and I. Being that both my parents spoke Spanish and had been raised in South America, Spanish was my first language. I also attended Hebrew school in a Latin Jewish synagogue and eventually learned English as I entered grade school. Soon I was mainly speaking English both in and out of the house and my Hebrew lessons eventually stopped. But my father still felt the need to keep Jewish traditions alive. My house was kept kosher, temple was attended on important holidays, and Friday was reserved for festive large Shabbat dinners for friends and family where my family and I would crowd in front of the flickering flames of two candles and recite the prayers by memory.
I remember the bitterness of the wine followed by the dry and sweet challah bread, the texture of the white table cloth that covered the large oak table in the dining room. My father would recite the prayers in Hebrew and my siblings and I would parrot them as best as we could, my small fingers tracing the strangely curved letters with the random dots that could only be read from right to left. But then as times changed and my parents began working more, visits to temple were lessened. Friday night dinners which had once been reserved for festive large Shabbat dinners were now abandoned and we were lucky if the Shabbat candles were even lit, as the lights now mostly came from the television sets. I was now attending school with more American children, specifically with many American Jews. I remember the stiffness and staidness of their Shabbat dinners, where both the conversations and the food was bland. I missed the colorful and loud family get-togethers with three languages being spoken at one table and the warmness of the Latin and Mediterranean cultures swirled together. Even the way the Ashkenazi’s read their prayers and the food they ate was boring to me.
I remember my friend’s disbelief or disapproval of Sephardic or Latin Jews. I remember one commenting “those aren’t real Jews”. Or worse “You don’t look Jewish?”. I was always puzzled at this statement because in both my family and lifetime I have seen Jews from all over the world, with dark chocolate eyes to light grey, strong noses and button noses, curly hair and pin straight hair, black and white, tall and petite. I didn’t think that Jews had any certain “look”, I thought that they just looked like whatever region they were from , Ashkenazi’s looked like any other eastern European , and Sephardic Jews looked like any other person from the Mediterranean. The ignorance and perpetuation of stereotypes reinforced by most of the population even within the Jewish community always bothered me.
As I grew older I had lost many of my childhood traditions. I hadn’t gone to temple in years; I still kept Kosher to some degree but mainly as a result of me being a vegetarian, and had forgotten all but several prayers. Perhaps it is no coincidence that during this time I was undergoing many emotionally difficult times. I was in middle school and my parents, now divorced, were constantly working. I often had to make dinner for my brothers and always felt too busy to light the candles or follow any other traditions. I also began to question my beliefs and faith in the world around me. My first boyfriend was raised in a very religious Orthodox home, and when I asked to meet his family he resisted, basically suggesting that I wasn’t “Jewish enough”.
I then dated a Catholic boy whose religious hang-ups I could not understand. His house was covered in crucifixes and pictures of a bloody Jesus on the cross. These images were very graphic and different to me coming from my own household where mezuzas (small scrolls of the torah, attached to doorways) and deep blue glass eyes were hung to protect from the evil eye. His family would ask me questions about Judaism and even though we had similar origins (his family and my grandma were both from Colombia) I felt a strong disconnect from him culturally. I felt annoyed when he would forget important holidays especially since I took the time to celebrate his holidays with him, and the small cultural subtleties were always lost.
It was around this time that I had reclaimed many of my childhood traditions.I made it a point to practice Shabbat and kiss the mezuza as I entered and exited a room, I prayed and explored more of my religion. My sister was also undergoing a religious transformation. She had just returned from living in Israel and came back spiritually replenished and forever changed. She began to spend most of her time in the campus temple at her college, began eating kosher and became friendly with the rabbi and his family. When she would visit my house she would implore that my siblings and I also become more religious and spiritually involved. She lent us books on Jewish Spiritualism and mysticism, and introduced me to lectures given by rabbis that spoke about modern issues. She began to travel more and meet other Jews from all over the world and when she spoke about Israel she seemed to glow. “You don’t understand Steph, I feel at home there. Everyone understands you” she would tell me. She would beg me to get more involved in the Jewish community and thought that it would help me deal with my mixed up emotions.
My most recent ex-boyfriend was raised mainly Christian, his father was Jewish but was raised in a mostly Christian/Catholic neighborhood in rural Pennsylvania. His mother was Catholic, and in the Jewish religion the child takes the faith of the mother. While his father’s side was technically Jewish, they had spent multiple generations in this Christian community and had completely assimilated into the culture and practices of that region. He ate pork and other non kosher foods, had never been to temple, had no cultural or biblical knowledge of the Jewish religion and had never dated a Jewish girl. In the eyes of the Jewish community he was not a Jew, not by birth nor in practice. Yet he would claim that he was Jewish even when I would explain to him that in the Jewish religion, he was not. He had no respect for the laws of kashrut or Jewish holidays and his ignorance about the culture began to wear on me. When I went to his hometown to meet his families I was greeted with a plate of pork sliders, I quickly passed and began to look for something that I could actually eat. I was then approached by a family member who began to ask me questions about myself, where I had met my then boyfriend, and where I was from. When I mentioned that I was a Latin Jew, an exaggerated contorted look grew on his face and he bluntly replied “I didn’t know they made those” then rudely laughed. “Well I guess I’m a special edition from the factory” I replied curtly before ending the conversation. I didn’t even have the energy to explain to him that Judaism is a religion with cultural practices but that pockets of Jews live in countries around the world, that we didn’t magically pop up and live on “Jew-island”. I wanted to tell him that Jews exist in multiple parts of the world, and that not every Jew resembles the stereotypical Woody Allen character.
More recently I was able to experience the beauty of my cultural heritage during the wedding of my cousin. Him being a Colombian/ Cuban Jew, he had met and fallen in love with a Cuban-Turkish Jew with a lovely large family and they decided to get married. At the wedding Spanish music played and we danced the Hora. All of the Abuelas (grandmothers) were dressed to the nines and kisses were freely exchanged. It felt so good to be in a room full of people just like me, were I was not considered an oddity or a freak. It was that night that reinforced my desire to marry someone from the same culture as myself. Today I continue to practice and delve more into my religion on a spiritual level. I don’t consider myself to be very religious, but I do try to apply the spiritual and common practices of Judaism to my everyday life. I hope to marry someone who understands my disdain of pork products and my love of Carlos Vives, someone who’s Abuela makes delicious borekas , and lastly someone who loves me. They will be my besheret ( soulmate in Hebrew) and what better place to meet him, then in Miami?
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