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Anyone who visits the Jewish community of
Havana will invariably meet Adela Dworin, the
president of Beth Shalom Synagogue and the
Patronato Community Center and the unofficial
historian of the Jewish Cuban community. Beth
Shalom is the de facto headquarters of the Jewish
community, with a Hebrew school (pictured
here), an on-site pharmacy, a computer center
and a video screening room. Dworin gives tours
of the synagogue nearly every day to tourist
groups from all over the world.
Yacob Berezniak reads from the weekly parsha
to his 6-year-old daughter, Eisheva. Berezniak
started coming to Adat Israel when he was two,
and he had his bar mitzvah there in 1994. He
is president of the synagogue as well as the
only kosher “sochet,” or slaughterer, in Cuba.
Every Tuesday he plies his trade at Carniceria
Kosher, where, unlike other Cubans, who are
not allowed to buy red meat, Jews can fill their
monthly meat ration with kosher beef.
Teenagers at the Beth Shalom Sunday school participated in the synagogue’s
Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies. This is also the age when many
Cubans start to think about leaving the country. In the past several decades,
the majority of Cuban immigrants to Israel have been in their 20s and 30s.
B’NAI B’RITH 27