Samuel and Tamar Kaswan moved to Milwaukee with their three young sons in September. But while they have been settling into their new home in Bayside, they have grown increasingly alarmed about conditions facing their parents, other family members and friends in their native Caracas, Venezuela.
In an increasingly anti-Semitic and unstable political and economic climate, attacks on Jews there are escalating. On Shabbat two weeks ago, in one of the worst manifestations of this trend, a group of some 15 “heavily armed men” broke into the Tiferet Israel Sephardic synagogue in Caracas.
During a five hour raid, Torah scrolls were damaged, prayer books ripped apart and anti-Semitic graffiti like “death to all” and “Jews get out” were sprayed on the walls.
Computers with the private data, names, addresses and financial information of Venezuelan Jews were also seized. [See article in last week’s Chronicle.]
Political and economic stability have been in decline since President Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, and anti-Semitism has been on the upswing. These conditions have caused the Jewish community to leave the country in large numbers in the last decade.
Though the exact extent of this exodus varies by report, Kaswan said he thought Venezuelan Jewry numbered about 20,000 when he was growing up and some reports say it may be half of that now.
Of his six closest friends, he said, four now live in Miami, one in Canada and only one remains in Caracas.
He is naturally worried about the safety of his parents and confers with his siblings, reads Venezuelan news sources online and speaks with friends in Miami continuously, he said.
His brother, a physician in Boston, helped to organize a rally outside the Venezuelan Consulate in New York.
But Kaswan doesn’t have much faith that his parents will join their children in the U.S. “They don’t really want to leave.”
Kaswan, 42, said he was aware of isolated anti-Semitic incidents in Caracas during the years he was growing up there. But he remembers his childhood and youth as happy and secure. Being Jewish in Caracas placed him in “a little world,” he said.
“Venezuela was a very welcoming place for Jews and a land of opportunity” for many, many years, Kaswan said. “Until the 1970s, if you worked hard you could do well there.
“There were always good relations with the government and the other faiths. There was an interfaith organization and my rabbi [at the traditional Union Israelita de Caracas] was its president for a long time,” he said.
But the world of Kaswan’s childhood “has vanished now, and [that’s true] not only for Jewish people,” he said.
What the Jewish community needs now, Kaswan said, is for Americans to “put pressure on the Venezuelan government to protect Venezuelan Jews. The Jewish communities in the U.K. and Israel are doing that.”
The middle of three children, Kaswan attended the only Jewish high school in the heart of Caracas’ Jewish community, the Hebraica Jewish Community Center. He earned his undergraduate degree in Caracas and married Tamar, five years his junior, an architect who was raised in the same community and graduated from the same high school.
Though his siblings both live in the United States — his sister lives in Palo Alto, Calif. — they did not grow up thinking they would leave Venezuela. They came to the U.S. for higher education with the intent of returning.
Kaswan earned a Master of Business Administration at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and returned to Caracas, where he worked for an American consulting company. A project brought him to Monterrey, Mexico, where his client, a Mexican cement company, offered him a position. The couple moved there in 2001.
When Kaswan was offered his job at Johnson Controls, he told the company’s representatives that he would also need to look into Jewish life and community here.
Luckily for Kaswan’s prospective employer, a Johnson Controls representative involved in recruiting him lived in Bayside and had Jewish neighbors, Robin and Steven Arenzon, whom he enlisted to help.
“[The Arenzons] helped us by showing us the community, bringing us to [the Milwaukee Jewish Day School] and hosted an open house so that we would meet our neighbors and friends of the community,” Kaswan told The Chronicle in an interview at the Starbucks in Audubon Court last Friday.
Reassured that they had found a place with a strong Jewish community, Kaswan took the position as corporate director of learning and development at Johnson Controls. And living in Bayside since September, the couple and their three sons, Joel, 9, Alex, 6, and Ariel, 2, are enjoying life in their new city.
They like the “warmth of the people, especially the Jewish community, our kids’ school, our new-found friends and neighbors, having so many things to do, beautiful surroundings,” Kaswan said.
They also enjoy the ease of getting around, while “at the same time being close to a big city like Chicago.”
As for the weather — they are getting used to it, he said.
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