-Second in a series—
By Donald H. Harrison
- SAN DIEGO — Before moving from University at Albany (SUNY) to teach at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Diego–an institution which today is part of Alliant International University–Bernardo Ferdman held a joint appointment as a professor in Psychology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. In his synagogue, meanwhile, he had helped to create a Latino-Jewish Seder.
Those experiences prompted him, after relocating 21 years ago to San Diego to telephone the American Jewish Committee’s office and volunteer to become involved in what was then the nascent Latino-Jewish Coalition, co-chaired by Marty Block and Ralph Inzunza.
Today, the American Jewish Committee calls itself the AJC, and no longer has an office in San Diego. The Latino-Jewish Coalition still exists, but its original leaders have moved on. Block, a former AJC chapter president, is now a Democratic member of the California State Senate. The group continued independently for a while, but now operates under the auspices of the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), led by former AJC Chapter Director Linda Feldman. Ferdman serves as one of four co-chairs of the Coalition along with former State Assemblyman Howard Wayne; Caridad Sanchez, San Diego District Director for U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer; and David Valladolid, CEO of the Parent Institute for Quality Education.
The Coalition is not a large organization, Ferdman noted during a January 10 interview at his office. Its main function is to provide “a space where people could learn across differences,” he said. “I remember David Alvarez (the city councilman now in the Feb. 11 runoff against Kevin Faulconer for mayor of San Diego) was at some of the meetings. I remember when Enrique Morones (immigration activist and founder of Border Angels) and (now retired Sheriff) Bill Kolender were there and had a conversation that they never would have had in public on issues related to the border and immigration.”
Not all the Coalition’s activities focus on San Diego area issues For example at 7 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 23, at the Lyceum Theatre, Ferdman will moderate a discussion featuring director Todd Salovey, who is an Orthodox Jew, and Herbert Siguenza, the San Diego Rep’s artist in residence, about the play based on Julia Alvarez’s In The Time of the Butterflies, about four sisters, each with the code name of “Butterfly” and a number corresponding to their birth order, who opposed the regime of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Cross-cultural conversation has been an important feature of Ferdman’s life, who was born in Argentina, moved at age 7 to New York City, moved again a few years later to Puerto Rico, and eventually returned to the U.S. mainland to study (at Princeton) and to teach. In our interview, I asked Ferdman to compare and contrast the Jewish communities he found in his various areas of residence, starting with Argentina.
He commented that on his father’s side he was the fourth generation in Argentina, his great-grandfather coming to Argentina in the 1890’s in a colonization program sponsored by the Baron de Hirsh Fund to encourage Jews to go into agriculture. Ferdman’s father grew up in the rural north of Argentina, with a strong Jewish identity but not being very observant. His mother came to the capital city of Buenos Aires from Poland as a little girl, promptly forgetting the Polish language but continuing to speak Yiddish while she learned Spanish. Ferdman described the Jewish community of Buenos Aires as large and ranging from those who “maintain a traditional Jewish life to those who were completely assimilated and maybe think of their Judaism as simply an historical fact of their ancestry more than anything else.”
Contrasting with the United States, Jews in Argentina tend to think of being Jewish as belonging to an ethnic-cultural group rather than to a religious group, Ferdman said. “The religious practice is not as much a core,” he said. At one time, there were approximately a half million Jews in Argentina, but “people left, assimilated, intermarried so now it is relatively smaller.” So assimilated were many Argentine Jews (though not all) that in many families “you would have nieces and cousins who may be Catholic. In my own family, there is everything. I remember having second cousins who would put out shoes for Three Kings Day (a Christian observance celebrating the three “wise men” who visited the baby Jesus in the manger) and I would say, ‘How come we don’t do that?'”
As in Mexico City, a large part of Jewish life in Buenos Aires revolved around a sports club–similar but far more extensive than the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla. While Argentina’s constitution requires that the president of the country be a Roman Catholic, said Ferdman, Jews have been quite involved in culture, politics and the arts. The country also was known, during the dictator Juan Peron’s time, as a haven for Nazis, and it was in Argentina where mass murderer Adolf Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents. Under a military government, dissenters, including many Jews, were “disappeared” — carted off and presumably murdered by the military. It was also in Argentina where terrorists, believed to have been financed by Iran, blew up the Jewish Community building and the Israeli embassy in cases that have never been prosecuted.
Turning to Puerto Rico, Ferdman described the Jewish community based in San Juan as one of perhaps 500 families, including strong representations of expatriates from the United States and refugees from Cuba. “I haven’t lived there for 34 years but my family is still there,” Ferdman said. The community’s future “will depend on the kids — will they choose to stay? Will they intermarry with each other and create families?”
He said the San Juan Jewish community has numerous merchants, but not as great a proportion of professionals as are found in other Jewish communities. There is both a Conservative synagogue and a Reform synagogue. San Juan does not have a sports center similar to those found in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, but some families and groups may utilize the facilities of local hotels for similar purposes. When he was a boy, Ferdman was active in Young Judaea, a youth club sponsored by Hadassah. Through Young Judaea, one could go to summer camp in the United States or on programs to Israel. In fact, “my niece came back last summer from a program in Israel. She has just finished high school.” While the preponderance of the community may be found in San Juan, he noted that Chabad serves a small community in Mayaguez.
Asked how he would describe San Diego’s Jewish community to family and friends in Argentina and Puerto Rico, Ferdman responded he would describe its “growing Jewish cultural presence” and would list as important factors the Center for Jewish Culture (which now includes the Agency for Jewish Education); the Jewish Film Festival (to be held Feb. 6-16 this year) “which brings everyone out;” and the Israel Independence Day celebration, which he said he loves “because it brings everyone across all sectors, everyone together for that day. It is across all the religious streams and all the organizations, and there is such a variety, so I think it is pretty unusual.”
He said he would also tell them about the JCC “which is like some of the clubs in Argentina, but perhaps less all-inclusive” in terms of its activities. “You have the Ken, which is more insular but reproduces those things that you have in Mexico and Argentina. You also have a very diverse international Jewish community, that is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic… South African Jews add to the mix here. They have SAJAC, and many of the other groups have their own (organizations) and also interact with the larger community. It is nice. Everyone can find something!”
Ferdman advocates people making an effort to learn about each other. “For a little while I was on the (national) advisory board of the AJC’s Latino Institute, and I am interested in that type of learning–having Latinos learns more about Jews and Israel and having Jews learn about Latinos,” he said. Under the auspices of the California School of Professional Psychology, he directed a border project, which sponsored conferences for psychologists from Tijuana and San Diego, but after a while, “the different groups had different issues and it fizzled out.”
As a Jew, he said, “I don’t pretend to be a prototypical Latino, but I identify as fully Latino. But Latino is a big umbrella, Latinos in the United States are used to diversity… There is a sense that there is this variety, not that there aren’t issues around color or race or discrimination. There are … but there never has never been the feeling that ‘no, you are not fully Latino.’ ”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com