Joel EngelhardtJewish Federation of Palm Beach County travelers revisit the home grandparents’ fled in the middle of the night and restock a synagogue’s pharmacy.
Lauren Steinberg got the address from her aunt.
It led to a home in a well-off section of Havana, Cuba, where her grandparents lived many decades ago.
Steinberg had never been to Cuba before and her grandparents never returned after fleeing in the middle of the night in 1962.
Now she felt anxious as she approached the split-level yellow house.
A woman answered the door.
Steinberg’s cab driver translated: “Welcome,” the woman said. “Come look. This is your house.”
Steinberg’s parents were born in America. But her mother’s parents were Cuban. They left in 1962, three years after Fidel Castro came to power.
While her grandfather, a physician, died in 2016 and her grandmother passed in November, Steinberg rediscovered them in the home’s well-preserved pink-tile bathroom straight out of the 1950s.
“It was totally what my grandmother would do,” Steinberg said.
And she learned the story of what happened to the home after her grandparents’ departure. They left nine months after they sent their 10-year-old daughter to America. That daughter, Steinberg’s aunt, provided the old home’s address from memory.
The home’s current owner explained that she had bought the house 15 or 20 years ago from a man who worked at a university hospital. The man told her that a colleague had given the home to him.
Steinberg’s grandfather, the doctor.
“Her generation has a sense of guilt knowing what happened to the generation before them,” Steinberg said. “A lot of these homes were left in the middle of the night. ‘Here I am enjoying this home and the people who came here before me, I know what they went through.’”
A Jewish prayer service in Cuba
Steinberg, a Boca Raton periodontist, went to Cuba with the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County on a five-day mission in late February. They brought medical supplies to restock pharmacy shelves and engaged in an experience that showed them, at its core, Jewish worship is universal.
“The poverty levels in Havana are worse than I’ve ever seen,” said federation President and CEO Michael Hoffman. But when he joined congregants in celebrating Shabbat in Havana, he felt a familiarity with the prayers, the same ones he recites at his synagogue in West Palm Beach.
Like so much in Cuba, however, it felt like it came from a different era.
“It reminded me of going to synagogue in the ’80s with the design and look,” he said.
He also detected a major difference: No antisemitism.
In America, Jews gather with armed security. Not so for the tiny Jewish population in Havana, he said. Jews number about 650 in Cuba, Hoffman said, a nation of 11 million.
Cuba has two main synagogues, he said, both in Havana.
The synagogues have no security.
They also have little money.
Restocking the pharmacies
The two Jewish pharmacies in Havana, where many people go for basic medical care, had nearly no supplies, he said. The federation’s two dozen travelers from Palm Beach County packed their suitcases for their American Airlines flight from Miami with 3,000 pounds of goods and supplies.
“It was a pretty dire situation from a medical standpoint,” said Dr. Jennifer Buczyner, a neurologist with the Atria Health and Research Institute in Palm Beach, who went on the trip.
Doctors are paid just $15 to $20 a month, Buczyner said.
“It’s more lucrative to be a waiter.”
Patients buy life-saving medicines on the black market.
A surgeon heads the pharmacy and teaches Sunday school at the synagogue but the pharmacy serves anybody in need, not just the Jewish community, she said.
When the West Palm Beach group arrived, the power grid was down. They stocked the pharmacy shelves by flashlight.
They brought ibuprofen, blood-pressure medications, antibiotics, epi pens, steroids and medicines to treat flu, fungus and Glaucoma, much donated by Buczyner’s employer, Atria.
“There are certain times we are actually saving people’s lives and this was one of those times,” Hoffman said.
The level of poverty was striking. Food rationing limits residents to five eggs per month. Street market stalls were half-empty. Lines at stores ran out the door. Hoffman’s wife baked 25 challahs, the braided Jewish bread. They handed them out to help 50 to 60 families, Hoffman said.
In Cuba, Hoffman saw buildings destroyed without a bullet fired, garbage in the streets, cars from the 1960s and 1970s and little signs of construction.
“I’ve been to war zones,” he said. “Ukraine. Northern Israel.”
But this, he said, was different. “It’s decay. It’s shocking to walk around and see.”
Steinberg carried her Cuban grandparents’ wedding photo with her in her wallet. She showed it to the woman who now lives in the house.
It touched her.
Steinberg agreed to leave the photo behind. She saw it as a way of returning her grandparents, who were Catholic, not Jewish, to the home they had given up so many decades ago.
“I’ve heard the stories,” Steinberg said. “You know, the way your family dynamic was shaped by experiences they had there. But it’s hard. … How do you pass this on to your children?
“It’s almost like Cuba is spoken of as a mythical place because none of us had gone back. … Seeing this changes your perspective.”
Joel is a founder, reporter and editor at Stet News. His award-winning newspaper career spanned more than 40 years, including 28 years at The Palm Beach Post, which he left in 2020. Joel lives with his wife in Palm Beach Gardens. He volunteers on the board of NAMI Palm Beach County and the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
