Shabbat in Guatemala City

(Thanks to Diane Bernbaum for letting me use a lot of her email to write this blog.)

We’d been told that  our Shabbat would be an emotional highlight of the trip.  It was.

We arrived  in Guatemala City in the early afternoon and went straight to the Chabad House. as a convenient place to have lunch.  We each ordered our meal in advance for Friday lunch and Saturday dinner after havdalah, and for those that keep strictly kosher, it was the first chance to have a non-vegetarian meal.   The rabbi is Israeli born but his parents made aliya from Argentina,  so he is a native Spanish speaker.   They have been in Guatemala for 16 years.  They have nine children, and the  oldest three study in New York, where their mother grew up and near their grandparents.    The younger children of school age sit at computers for a virtual classroom, their classmates being other children of Chabad world-wide. Apparently they press keys to raise their hands or write on the board, and it becomes like a real classroom.  We saw one of their kids totally focused on his screen with earphones on his head. All the children are trilingual, speaking Hebrew with their father, English with their mother, and Spanish with everyone else.

 The rabbi, Shalom Pelman, sat with us while we ate and told us a history of the Jews in Guatemala.  We also heard about the history from a friendly representative of the Centro Hebreo that night.  Here is a summary of what both said.  There are about 800 Jews that live in Guatemala, and more that visit, especially young Israelis out of the army.  There is a Chabad rabbi near Lake Atitlan, and he and his family often host tourists.

Jews probably came during the Spanish conquest but there is no firm evidence.  At some point there were Jews in Antigua, and there are last names such as Katz, Rosenberg, Cohen and Ashkenazi, but people with those last names whose family has been in the country for more than 150  to 200 years, have assimilated and have no memory of their Jewish connection.

When Germans came to Guatemala starting in 1843 and developed coffee farms, Jews were among them.  Starting in the early 1900s, Sephardic Jews from Turkey, Egypt and other such countries settled in Guatemala City, and the first synagogue was built in the center of the city, called Maguen David, and dedicated in 1925.   The synagogue is still in use and has amazing acoustics.    As Jews became more successful in their professions, many moved to better neighborhoods.  However, many still go to services there on Shabbat.  Maguen David has a minyan and class held in it once a week.  

From 1935 to 1950, a growing number of Ashkenazic Jews arrived in Guatemala, first to escape Hitler and then as survivors.  At first they used a room in the back of the Sephardic shul for services.  Eventually once of the more successful businessmen donated a big piece of property in zone 9 to make an Ashkenazic synagogue.  At leave five football courts could fit in that property.  The synagogue Centro Hebreo was finished in the 1960s, and if one looks at it from the air, it looks like a Jewish star.   It can seat 250, was recently renovated, and has a stunning stained glass mechitzah  ("wall" dividing men and women during prayer) that is about four feet tall.


We spent Erev Shabbat with the Ashkenazi Orthodox community, Centro Hebreo.  It was a pleasant evening.  There are perhaps 10-15 families who are Shabbat-observant and the rest of the congregation is less so.   Security is very tight.   We needed to provide photos of the front page of our passports before we left the States, and when we arrived on Friday night,  one entered the fence into a room.  Then the door to the gate closed, and only after it is closed, does  a second door from the air-lock open into the synagogue courtyard.  We only saw the shul, but two members of our group spent Shabbat morning and afternoon  there as well and got a tour of the whole complex which includes a soccer field,a kosher grocery store, and a cafe.

The Ma’ariv service itself was about 45 minutes long, led by a new, young Spanish-speaking rabbi.  It was all in Hebrew, and those of us familiar with the liturgy could follow easily.  Most of the tunes were familiar and the davening was spirited, but as in most Orthodox shuls, focused on the men's section..  

 Although it is an Ashkenazi congregation, the davening was led from the center of the room in Sephardic form.  However, there was also a lectern at the front of the room, on the bima where the ark was. At the end of the davening, Danny Siegel from our group gave a teaching about a section of Talmud emphasizing the principles of social justice that inspired our trip. Afterwards, the entire congregation went downstairs to the social hall for a full meal.  We were told attendance was sparser than normal because many members of the congregation were at a wedding in Antigua over the weekend).  Perhaps there were 50-60 of us including our twelve. There was a big spread: meatballs, rice, potatoes, veggies, salads, soup and an extensive dessert table.  A similar dinner is hosted this every Friday night.  

Some of the women in our group enjoyed chatting with Brenda Rosenbaum, who was raised in Guatemala and is the founder  Mayan Hands, which I mentioned in  a previous blog.    Brenda had one relative from Europe who had immigrated to Panama at the turn of the 20th century who started out as a peddler and eventually ended up in Guatemala.  On her other side, her relatives  were born in Aleppo, Syria and raised in Egypt.    Brenda was actually born in Italy and the family moved back to Guatemala, which was considered safer, at the time of the Korean War.  Brenda moved to Albany, NY to study for a Ph.D. in Anthroplogy at the time of the extreme violence of the country's Civil War in the mid-1980s but still maintains a house  in Guatemala and travels back frequently.  A very nice man named Tommy came over and talked to our group and told us more about the Jewish community of Guatemala.   I think he was the one that mentioned that many of the young people are leaving Guatemala.  At one point, there were sixteen Jewish youth from Guatemala in the IDF, Israeli army.  Some are staying there.  

  Most of the local women sat in their own groups at dinner.  I did chat with a young businessman from Israel, code switching between Spanish, Hebrew, and English.  The congregation has a sofer (scribe) from Israel--originally from Yemen--who lives part time in Guatemala and part time in Israel.  He was fascinating.

But  Friday night was nothing compared to the high point of Shabbat morning. There is a very small Reform congregation called Adat Israel, and they warmly hosted us as if we were returning family.  The congregation was started by individuals who had come to Judaism along different paths.  Jeannette, the president who sat with Diane, Marcy, and others at lunch, grew up Catholic and was always in trouble with the nuns because she didn’t believe what they were teaching. She had a grandmother who wouldn’t cut fingernails or cook on Saturdays and spent the day reading the Bible (much the same as the story with  Diane's sister-in-law, Ninfa, who, after she became Jewish discovered she had Converso roots and that her family had been Jewish centuries ago.). One man had a Jewish grandfather and wanted to honor his memory by becoming Jewish.  One family moved from Columbia because no one there could help them become Jewish.  Another had taught Hebrew to seminarians until a few years ago when he helped start a home for disabled adults.  He introduced himself to us in Hebrew.  Another had started out as Catholic, explored evangelical Christianity,  a messianic church but didn't like the Christian bent, and finally discovered Judaism. 

In 2010 several members of the group went to the annual conference of Latin American Progressive Jewish communities, were interviewed by a group of leaders (they said that it felt like a bet din) and were then helped to make contact with support.  One person was Rabbi Elyse Goldstein.     She has taken the congregation under her wing as a volunteer, arranging to bring their children to Jewish summer camp in Canada and teaching them at a distance over six years. When she felt they were ready, she visited with two other rabbis in 2013, and held a bet din for each of them and converted those she felt ready, which was 24 of the 26.  Then she remarried three of the couples who wanted to get married under a chuppah.   The congregation is a full member of the World Union of Progressive Congregations.

The congregation meets in a small house with the downstairs set up as a shul, complete with a donated ark and a Torah covered in an exquisite Torah mantle made of Guatemalan cloth.  One of the congregants lives in one of the bedrooms upstairs and is a caretaker.  The neighborhood is a twenty-minute drive from the upscale Orthodox synagogue.  Needless to say, there is no security guard or need for xeroxed passports here.

The congregation uses a prayer book from Costa Rica which is in Spanish, Hebrew, and some English. It’s hard to describe the spirit in the davening/praying. Many of us were in tears at many points in the morning. The service was co-led by Elijah, a young father of a four-year-old who was born in Guatemala but lived in Los Angeles for several years.  He announced the page numbers, decided what would be read in Hebrew or in Spanish etc.  The young woman who was the shaliach tzibur ( like a cantor) was an amazing 21-year-old, named Rebecca, with a voice that made your soul vibrate.  She is the daughter of Jeanette, the president of the congregation.  She spent last summer at Brandeis-Bardin Institute and when Diane told her that the camp’s director, Navah Kelman Becker was a student of hers, they formed a special bond.  I was sitting next to Ilana, the director of Fair Trade Judaica, when Rebecca/Rivka started to sing, and her voice sent shivers through me.  I leaned over to tell Ilana, and she responded by telling me that Rebecca had  decided several months ago to study at American Jewish University in LA next year and eventually to become a rabbi.   That brought tears of joy to me and they continued to fall slowly for the next ten minutes.  Even now as I write this and when I tell others, I get goosebumps.  Our group members offered to donate money so that she can have a tallit from the Mayaworks weavers.  

The two leaders asked if anyone wanted to hold the Torah scroll when it came out of the ark, and Pamela, the president of her Reform congregation in Massachusetts, volunteered.  

 The members of the congregation do not yet know how to chant the weekly portions from the Torah scroll,  so four of us came prepared to read an aliyah each of three verses..  Diane, Susan, Betsy and I all chanted.  

 Susan  spontaneously was asked to read the Haftarah (a portion from the prophets) since she had the last Torah reading, and she beautifully sightread and chanted the very long portion.

Ilana  give a drash on the Torah portion of the week and on Judaism and  principles of fair trade.   She was wearing a beautiful tallit from MayaWorks.

 The service was longer than other Reform services that I had attended and had a lot of Hebrew.  Participants were enthusiastic in their prayer, filled with kavannah.  At the end of the service, Diane and I offered to teach the Ladino version of the prayer Ein Kelohenu, but it turned out that many of the Guatemalans already knew it.  So we ended up teaching it to some of the U.S. visitors! 

Afterwards the members set up tables, rearranged the new pews as picnic benches and served us a delicious chickpea stew with rice.  There was so much warmth and welcoming in the room.  There isn’t a lot of acceptance of this congregation among the more established Jewish community here and we were glad that our visit was a support to this Reform congregation.

We  ended our Shabbat back at the hotel with havdallah and a text study Ilana led comparing the principles of the Fair Trade movement with Jewish values.  It was quite an extraordinary day.