While many of the newcomers are professionals, there are, as in every immigrant generation, those who face economic difficulties. The congregation organized “The Closet” where members can purchase clothes at a low price. The program has been so successful that the synagogue won a Jewish Community Service Award for adopting a program geared to helping the needy.
I had met Rabbi Yeshurun more than a dozen years ago in a house that housed an Orthodox congregation in Curacao. It was the year 2000 and Rabbi Yeshurun, 24 years old and fresh out of Israel’s Beit Amiel Institute for Training Rabbis for the Diaspora, had assumed the pulpit of Shaarei Tzedek. He had a dream, “to build a proper, permanent synagogue building for his congregation.” He made it happen by becoming a fundraiser, accountant, contractor, interior designer and construction expert, marshalling the resources until the new synagogue rose on a 50,000 square foot plot.
His training in Curacao makes him a perfect fit in Skylake as he deals with building and energizing a new community. “Jewish continuity has always been for me the highest priority. It’s a sacred task,” he said.
The dream of expanding Skylake Synagogue is the rabbi’s as well as its president, Eduardo Nicolaievsky, and it came on the heels of the infusion of new membership. They plan to expand the social hall by 25 to 30 percent, or six property lots which the congregation has purchased, a distance of a city block. With an expanded social hall, the congregation can create a revenue-generated facility, noted Rabbi Yeshurun.
In the final analysis, to the visitor, N.E. 183 Street may look like a non-descript, small street. But when there are services, functions, classes, celebrations at Skylake Synagogue, the neighborhood certainly feels the strong pulse of this house of worship. No surprise, therefore, that new Jewish immigrants feel at home in the area Rabbi Yeshurun likes to call “Florida’s Brooklyn.”
“Jews feel at home here just as in Brooklyn,” he says smiling proudly.
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Sixty percent of the congregation at Skylake Synagogue hails from Venezuela, a country that has seen a drop in its Jewish population from about 30,000 Jews to 7,000, according to synagogue president Eduardo Nicolaievsky, an oral surgeon, who hails from Mexico. He remarked that the Venezuelans remain very close knit. “They grew up together,” he added, and “they landed here.” For years Venezuelan Jews, like others, knew the U.S. – “their children went to school up north, they vacationed here, and they owned condos here,” he said.
As is the case with other émigré groups from Venezuela, Jews have fled the country for security and economic reasons. “A real change occurred in Venezuela and it was time to get out,” pointed out Jack Bandel, an M.D. and former president of the synagogue. He added that many of the newcomers are engineers, physicians, journalists and professionals. Even with all the turmoil and instability in Venezuela, there are Jews who still take the two-and-a-half hour flight from Miami to Caracas for business.
Jews trace their arrival in Venezuela as far back as the mid-17th century, though the vast majority of Sephardic Jews landed in that country at the turn of the 20th century from places like Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. Ashkenazi Jews arrived in Venezuela during the mid-20th century, mostly from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania.
The main goal of the new Venezuelan immigrants is “to build up a community based on ideas it had in Latin America,” said Dr. Bandel, including the ideal of “kehillah.”