Sephardic Jews in Cuba - From all their Habitations

Judaism, Wntr, 2002 by Margalit Bejarano

Communal Organization

When the first immigrants from Turkey settled in Havana, they found a small group of American Jewish businessmen and employees of American firms, whose Jewish activities consisted in conducting services on High Holidays, and managing the Jewish cemetery that they had acquired in 1907. The American Jews, who spoke English and Yiddish, looked down at the poor peddlers from the Middle East, whose Jewish rites and customs differed from their own.

The communal organization of the American Jews granted burial grounds to the Sephardic Jews, who became numerically the dominant Jewish group in Cuba. In November 1914 they founded their own communal organization--Union Israelita Chevet Ahim--with the objective of supplying all the religious and social services of the Sephardic population.

The Union Israelita Chevet Ahim was modeled after the Kahal of the communities in the Ottoman Empire. It was structured as a centralized and comprehensive body, with the synagogue as the basis of communal life. The statutes of the Union Israelita Chevet Ahim, which were approved by the provincial authorities, stipulated that the members of the communal organization would not become public charges. (32) In the absence of a Turkish diplomatic representation, the Sephardic Jewish community became the representative to the Cuban authorities of the Jewish immigrants from Turkey, part of whom remained without their passports after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

The Sephardim who settled in Havana resided in La Habana Vieja, the old quarter near the port, which later also became the center of the East European Jews. Their communal organization saw itself as the organization of all the Sephardic Jews residing in Cuba, including those who settled in the towns of the interior. Its basic structure, as a central and comprehensive communal organization, was maintained throughout its existence. The concentration of small nuclei of Sephardim in the main towns of the provinces motivated the foundation of separate organizations which maintained close links with the mother community in Havana, and accepted its religious supremacy.

Religious leadership played an important role in the consolidation of the Sephardic community. Among the immigrants who reached Cuba in the early 1920s were a number of rabbis and Hebrew teachers, headed by Rabbi Guershon Maya, descendant of an old rabbinical family in Silivri, (33) who acted as the spiritual leader of the Sephardic community for over 25 years. In 1924 Rabbi Maya founded the first Jewish day school in Cuba, which later also served the children of the immigrants from Eastern Europe, who emigrated to Cuba in the early 1920s, hoping to reach the shores of the United States. Collaboration between Sephardim and Ashkenazim was limited, due to differences of language and culture. Ashkenazi Jews joined the Sephardic organizations in the towns of the interior, being too small in number to create their own organization. The Union Israelita de Cuba, the Zionist organization that was founded by Eastern European Jews, functioned for a few years under the auspices of the Chevet Ahim. With time, however, S ephardic activists were pushed aside by the Yiddish-speaking Jews and developed their own Sephardic frameworks. (34)