Signs reading “Bienvenidos” and “Centro de la Communidad Judia” brightly decorated the walls of Casa Otoñal, the senior complex on Sylvan Avenue, as David Kaminsky, a retired New Haven physician, was bravely asking in his rapidly evolving basic Spanish, “Como usted si llama?” His interlocutor patiently answered that her name was Paula Valantin, that she came to New Haven in 1952 and has been a resident at Casa since 2003.
With the warmth flowing perhaps more easily than the reflexive Spanish verb forms, many similar conversations were launched during the fourth session of the Jewish Coalition for Literacy’s ten-session conversational Spanish course, hosted on Tuesday night at Casa.
The Spanish class is being offered under the auspices of the Coalition, itself a program of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater New Haven (JCRC) and its director, Lauri Lowell (seen in the picture with the teacher, Casa’s debonair associate director, Tomas Miranda). The Coalition has about 35 tutors (and is recruiting for more) – mainly retired or semi-retired people associated with the Jewish Community Center (JCC) in Woodbridge. For the last few years they have been working at three New Haven elementary schools: Columbus Family School, Katherine Brennan, and, most recently, Nathan Hale.
“We’re learning Spanish,” explained another one of the students, Richard Witten, a retired school principal from Trumbull, “because a lot of the kids we work with have Spanish as their native tongue. If you can speak some of the language, you make much better relationships, and the learning is faster.”
To practice what he preached, Witten exclaimed, as he waited in line for the sumptuous vegetarian kosher cuisine (platanos maduros, paella vegetarian, flan, caf√©’), “La comida estuvo mui buena.”
Building relationships between the Jewish and Hispanic community of New Haven, an effort going back approximately 20 years, was in fact being celebrated and reflected in the largest sense by the class, the dinner, and the guests. Among them were Casa Executive Director Patricia McCann-Vissepo (on the left in the photo) and Linda Kantor, a Casa board member, and a member of the JCRC. “Linda is a mega mensch,” McCann-Vissepo said in her conversational Yiddish, “because everything she does is for someone else; she is the finest person I’ve ever known.”
“The Latino community in New Haven is blossoming,” said Kantor, “and like the programs at Casa, they are reaching out to everybody.”
“The Jewish community has a great deal to teach us,” countered Mcann-Vissepo, “like how to survive and assimilate but without losing your language and culture.”
“I’d say the opposite,” interposed Kantor (seen in this photo with longtime Casa resident and senior companion Maria Fonesca and Coalition Spanish student Joyce Feen). “I’d say the Jewish community learns from yours. I look around and see this place – Casa is a settlement house like the one where all the Jews in this country, including my family, learned skills and languages – and it reminds me of our roots. Plus I’m moved and proud of the spirit of people who persevere in the face of challenges.”
Across the room, Sharon Bender (to the left in the photo), another JCRC member, and student in the class, was cutting a rug to the music of Los Otonales, with Ellen Rubin, a nurse, who teaches yoga at Casa through the Visiting Nurses Association. Bender, who has a master’s degree in gerontology and is a former board chair at Tower One/East, the city’s pioneering senior housing complex, underscored the Latino-Jewish connection. “Many of us, like Linda Kantor, learned how to work with the Jewish community and the City to build senior housing, and then we brought our know-how here.
“I mean who do you think Casa Linda, one of the Casa’s buildings out front, is named for? It’s in recognition of Linda Kantor’s helping found the center in 1982. The point now is to share what we know to help keep people in all our communities in their homes and in their communities as long as possible.”
The theme of the night was literacy – how it’s important not only for the tutors to have some basic Spanish literacy, but more importantly, how to increase in the coming years the number of tutors the Jewish community, through the Coalition, will provide New Haven public schools. “Back in 1995, the writer Leonard Fein made a commitment to Bill Clinton that the Jewish community nationally would provide, as part of the America Reads initiative, 100,000 tutors,” Lowell explained. “The Boston Jewish community has about a thousand, and L.A. has 800. Hartford maybe 200. We are going to build on the 35 we have and recruit as many as possible. Why? Because it’s basic, it’s empowering,”
And there was something else Lowell had on her mind. “We don’t live in a vacuum. All of the communities in the city need to take care of each other. I mean, honestly, people see the Jewish community is thriving and self-sustaining, which is true. But let’s not forget history, or what’s happening in the Middle East today. We help others because it’s right, but also it’s right for others to help us if the need arises. That’s why I do this: the message is through tutoring, through our work with Casa and all our programs, that we are one community.”
Well, Tomas Miranda was about to take that idea of family an arresting step further. “I am convinced,” he has been telling his classes, “that my ancestors are Jewish.” Before he came to New Haven, when he was principal of a school in Norwalk, one of his teachers, who was Jewish, was doing genealogical research and showed him a list of Spanish surnames of families likely to have been forcibly converted during the Inquisition. “All my family’s various branches were on that list! This is a work in progress.”
“By the way,” he asked Lauri Lowell, “what happens in a Jewish home on a Friday night?”
“You’ll find out,” she answered, “when you come to my house.”
“We thought we hired a Spanish conversation teacher,” added Brenda Brenner, to the right in the photo, who is the coordinator of the Coalition, “and we got not only that, but sophistication, Spanish culture, and the Marranos!”
For those interested in receiving formal training with reading and other specialists to become tutors through the Jewish Coalition for Literacy, registration is Oct. 17 at 9:45 at the JCC in Woodbridge. Contact through this e‑mail.
Did Tomas Miranda get a chance to teach Alan Cooper and the others a formal lesson? Alas, the food and music and atmosphere were just a tad too congenial for study. No matter. There was the good talk and the Spanish menus and “brochas” (as Mc-Cann-Vissepo would say) before eating, that is, the “oracion antes de la comida,” offered in Spanish, English, and Hebrew. A lot of learning took place. And the next lesson the Coalition is planning at Casa? Tomas Miranda was heard to whisper to Lauri Lowell: “A Latino Hanukah party.”
