Riverdale family among the first to visit Cuba after thaw

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Now that the United States and Cuba have taken the first tentative steps toward rapprochement, experts are expecting a flood of Americans to visit the last holdout of the Cold War era. 

Gary Wartels couldn’t wait. Travel is still restricted to educational and religious groups, so he and his wife, Carolyn Myer Wartels and their children, Noah, 17, and Rebecca, 19, joined a Jewish mission that proved to be a real eye-opener.

As the owner of Skyview Wines and Spirits, one of America’s largest and best purveyors of kosher wine, Mr. Wartels knows Riverdale’s Jewish community very well. But, by his own admission, he knew nothing about the Jews of Cuba before embarking on a year-end trip to the island nation organized by Chai Missions, a California-based not-for-profit dedicated to aiding Cuba’s small but tenacious Jewish community.

 The Wartels joined a group of just 18 Americans for a week between Christmas and New Year’s during which they distributed medicine and some cash and met with representatives of Jewish organizations all over the island. Since the 1959 revolution, Mr. Wartels explained, “ the number of Jews in Cuba has fallen to just 1,300. Before, there were more than 100,000 with synagogues all over the island.”

“With so few Jews,” he added, “they can’t keep Kosher — not because they’re repressed; there’s just no infrastructure.”

Havana hosts two synagogues — one Conservative and one Orthodox — each with just 50 to 100 families. There’s a Jewish Community Center, too. “It’s an older, more rundown version of The Riverdale Y,” Mr. Wartels said, “run by an 80-year-old woman.” 

She told the group that movie producer Steven Spielberg had sent money to renovate the center.

“We were told there’s no anti-Semitism,” said Mr. Wartels, “but there’s no economic opportunity, so the kids emigrate to Israel.”

Gary Wartels, Cuba, Skyview Wines and Spirits, Chai Missions, Richard L. Stein
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