Synagogue Trip to Cuba Brings in Much-Needed Assistance

Earlier this year, 32 members of Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen left on a weeklong trip to Cuba to assist the Jewish communities there.

Elizabeth Hirsch, the Reform congregation's executive director, detailed the strict guidelines that the group traveled under, and noted that the group -- like others in the past -- "really had to go through hoops" to get there.

There used to be 15,000 Jews in Cuba before Fidel Castro seized power in the 1950s. Only 10 percent of them are left, according to Hirsch -- less than the entire congregation of Beth Or, which has more than 1,150 families. About 85 percent of Cuban Jews reside in Havana, with the rest scattered in smaller communities across the island.

Pictured here is the entrance gate of the Guanabacoa Cemetery, a Jewish burial ground just outside of Havana, Cuba.

To prepare for the trip, members packed suitcases full of staples to distribute abroad, such as clothing, toiletries, school supplies, Hebrew-Spanish books and medicine. To be a part of an official humanitarian mission requires that each participant bring in a minimum of 15 pounds of medicine -- including asthma inhalers, allergy pills, antibiotics and over-the-counter drugs, such as acetaminophen -- in addition to making monetary donations.

The Beth Or contingent met with members of Cuba's Jewish community in Havana, visited a Sephardic synagogue and donated medicine. Because the shul has an insufficient membership base, its 700-seat main sanctuary, explained Hirsch, is now used for government offices; services are held in the small chapel there.

The group also made a stop at a large Ashkenazi synagogue called the Patronado, where they dropped off more medical supplies to a pharmacy that's run out of the synagogue's upper office space.

They also saw Jewish cemeteries, where they witnessed the graves of Jews who fought in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. In addition, they went to several of the country's half-dozen Holocaust memorials -- a surprising number, said Hirsch, for a Communist country roughly the size of New Jersey.