By Anita Snow
Associated Press Writer

HAVANA (AP) -- Elderly men wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls and women in modest dresses slide onto the wooden benches at the Patronato Synagogue every Saturday to pray to the God of Abraham in the land of Fidel Castro.

Some two dozen people listen as a young woman reads the scripture in their native Spanish. "Amen. Amen," they respond.

Nearly four decades after Castro's Marxist revolution triumphed on this Caribbean island, the Jewish community has shrunk from around 15,000 to just 1,500.

There is no rabbi, no Jewish school. There are just three synagogues in the nation's capital of 2 million and one kosher butcher.

Nevertheless, the remaining Jews struggle to keep their religious faith and ethnic traditions alive in a country better known for African cults, Roman Catholicism and atheism.

Along with their Catholic compatriots, Cuban Jews say they look forward to the arrival here Wednesday of Pope John Paul II.

Representatives of their community, along with leaders of several Protestant denominations, will privately meet with the pontiff before his final Mass Sunday in Havana's Plaza of the Revolution.

"This pope has treated Judaism very well," said Dr. Alberto Mechulam, who directs religion classes in Hebrew at the Patronato. "This pope has erased the whole idea that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.

"This pope is very special," he said.

Inclusion in the meeting with the pope is important to Cuban Jews, who admit that it was hard keeping the faith after Castro's 1959 revolution.

"All of my schoolmates left after the revolution and many of them have gone on to have good lives, never lacking anything," said Adela Dworkin, 59, vice president of the Jewish Community Center at the Patronato.

"I, too, probably would have had a better life had I left," she said in the center's library, which she founded more than two decades ago. "My life has been very austere.

"But if we all had left, Cuba's Jewish community would have disappeared."

While most in the Jewish community initially supported Castro's new government, many left Cuba after he turned toward socialism and their businesses were expropriated or shut down.

Many moved to Miami. Others took their families and businesses to New York, Mexico or Israel.

After Cuba officially embraced atheism in 1962, believers in all faiths shied away from formal worship, though it was never formally prohibited. "It was more of a kind of self-censorship, fear of how their neighbors would see them," Dworkin said.

But anti-Semitism was never a problem in Cuba, either before or after the revolution, she said.

Dworkin declared that her Russian parents, who were denied entry into the United States and settled in Cuba "never, ever had to be afraid here of being Jews."

It helped that Cuba's dwindling Jewish community always had the support of brethren abroad.

Since the early 1960s, the Canadian Jewish Community every year has contributed the matzoth, ritual wine and other traditional foods for Passover seders here.

Rabbinical students from Argentina spend years teaching Cuban Jews Hebrew and the history and traditions of their ancestors. Jewish groups in Mexico and Venezuela have provided money and goods.

But the struggle to keep the traditions alive has been fought mostly by Cubans such as Mechulam, who said he never stopped believing in God, even as the nation's rabbis and other Jewish leaders drifted away.

Now 62, he wants to make sure that young Cuban Jews are aware of their culture and history.

Photographs of skeletal victims of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe under the Nazis are plastered outside the second-floor classroom above the synagogue. "Never Again," a sign declares.

Travel posters of Israel and photographs of Jewish weddings and other ceremonies adorn other walls.

"The community almost disappeared," said Mechulam, who wore his yarmulke in observance of the Sabbath. "But always a light was left burning."
 
Copyright 1998 The Associated Press