Downloadable Guide to Jewish Cuba

Engineering student Abel

Hernàndez Eskenazi is committed to using his technological knowhow to promote the rich Jewish heritage of his native Cuba. A fourth-year student at the Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana, the 22-year-old Eskenazi has developed an app that traces the 500-year history of the island’s Jews, a community that peaked in the 1920s at around 24,000 and now numbers between 500 and 1,000.

“I believe I am very fortunate to belong to a community that has never allowed the flame of Judaism” to be extinguished, he said. “Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic crisis has worsened, which has also affected the Jewish institutions of Cuban Jews.

“My hope now,” he added, referring to his app, Judíos en la Historia de Cuba, “is that the Cuban Jewish community will be more connected to its history.”

The app—in English, History of the Jews in Cuba—is the culmi - and the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, a volunteer group that has installed dozens of similar markers across the United States, from small towns like Wild Horse Butte, Utah, to cities such as Memphis, Tenn.

“We want the markers to be in town hubs, where there’s foot traffic,” explained Scheinfeld. “While we want to pay tribute to history, we nation of Eskenazi’s participation in the 2021-2022 Lauder Fellowship, which is an international student network sponsored by the World Jewish Congress. As part of the program, fellows must create and implement an initiative that uniquely benefits their home communities.

With the help of several university friends, Eskenazi developed the free Spanish-language app, available through Google Play, that traces Cuban Jewish history as well as Jewish contributions to the island’s culture, science, politics and economy. Cuban Jewish history scholar Fidel Babani León helped source content for the app, which features interactive games and a quiz to test your knowledge.

For instance, did you know that Luis De Torres, a crypto-Jew born Yosef ben HaLevi HaIvri, is thought to have been one of the first Europeans to explore Cuba, in 1492?

De Torres arrived with Christopher Columbus, whom he served as Arabic and Hebrew translator for the voyage Columbus thought would be a shortcut to Asia.

The app has been downloaded more than 500 times—or, as Eskenazi joked, “five times more than the enrollment of students [in] the Jewish Sunday school in Havana.” That is encouraging proof, he believes, that non-Jewish Cubans are downloading the app in an attempt to learn about their Jewish neighbors.

Eskenazi hopes his app will inspire pride among Jewish Cubans in their heritage and prompt those who are not affiliated to engage with Jewish institutions—including Cuba’s also want people to engage with the renaissance of creative life in the Catskills.”

A stone’s throw from the vintage stores, wine shops and eateries, the new generation of Catskills leisure-goers can learn about their vacationing predecessors from the markers. Each one will have information about specific local landmarks on the front, Borscht Belt background on the reverse and a QR code that links visitors’ phones to the website of the Catskills Institute, an academic initiative at Northeastern University that promotes research and education on the importance of the upstate New York region to Jewish American life.

In Monticello, for instance, visitors to the Crawford Public Library courtyard will learn about Kutsher’s, Laurels and other hotels once