Jewish Guatemalans – Part II

Photo: Jewish Guatemalan author Francisco Goldman

Continued from here….

Fast forwarding to present day Guatemala, the Jewish population stands at around 1,200, mostly concentrated in Guatemala City. According to the Jewish Virtual Library:

The community comprises three main groups: the German, the Sephardi, and the East European, each with its own institutions, the Sociedad Israelita de Guatemala and Bet-El (Reform), Maguen David, and Centro Hebreo (Conservative/liberal Orthodox) respectively, each also with their own synagogue. Other organizations, unified under the Comite Central, include B’nai B’rith, Wizo, and two youth groups, the Maccabi, and Guafty, a Reform youth movement. The Organizacion Sionista de Guatemala comprises all Zionist groups. A Jewish school, called Instituto Albert Einstein, founded in 1957, is authorized by the Ministry of Education and has an enrollment of 100 children from kindergarten through preparatory levels.

Guatemala and Israel have a good relationship, and there is an Israeli embassy in Guatemala City.

Guatemala can boast of two firsts in Israeli history. It was the first country to announce its recognition of Israel, by Jorge Garcia Granados in the UN immediately after the proclamation of the state. Guatemala was also the first country to open an embassy in Jerusalem, under the same Garcia Cranados. Later, under international pressure, the embassy was moved to Tel Aviv.

I’ve comprised a list of well known Guatemalan Jews whose names might be familiar. The information is from Wikipedia.

1. Francisco Goldman (born 1954) is an American novelist.
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish-American father. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his second, The Ordinary Seaman (1997), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He currently resides in Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York. He also teaches at Trinity College (Connecticut
2. Alcina Lubitch Domecq (b. 1953) is a Jewish Guatemalan short story writer. She was born in Guatemala to an Auschwitz survivor father, and an Iberian-Guatemalan mother. After her parents’ divorce, she moved to Mexico in the sixties and left in the early 1970s. After a stay in Europe, she made aliyah to Israel where she now works as a janitor in a Haifa hospital. Her works include The Mirror’s Mirror: or, The Noble Smile of the Dog (1983) and Intoxicada (1984); she has had short stories, focusing mainly on the Jewish condition, published in many anthologies.
3. David Unger is a famous Guatemalan-American author and translator. He was born in 1950 in Guatemala City. In 1955, he emigrated to Hialeah, Florida with his parents. Unger graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with a B.A. and received an MFA from Columbia University. He is currently teaching at the City College of New York.
4. Dr. Eduardo Stein Barillas (born 20 October 1945) is a Guatemalan politician. He is the current Vice President of Guatemala, serving a concurrent four-year mandate with that of President Óscar Berger, who took office on 14 January 2004. Prior to his election, he had held a number of positions with the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Organization of American States. He also served as foreign minister under President Álvaro Arzú (1996–2000).
5. Jaime Permuth is a Guatemalan photographer living and working in New York City. Permuth graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1991 with a double major in Psychology and English Literature. In 1994 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His photographs have been shown at several venues in New York City, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Queens Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Museum of the City of New York, The Jewish Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. He has also exhibited internationally at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Guatemala, Casa del Lago in Mexico City, and the Israeli Parliament.

Currently I am reading The Long Night of the White Chickens by Francisco Goldman. It is an well written and powerful book about a young Guatemalan woman who is murdered apparently because she was involved in corrupt adoptions. I will write more on that book when I finish it.

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