<h2>For Ruth Behar and her family, Cuba is not only a place of birth, but a site of refuge.</h2>

Last December, Ann Arbor resident Ruth Behar returned to Havana, her place of birth, to put the finishing touches on her newest novel, Letters from Cuba. She stayed in the same apartment building where she lived her first five years until 1961 — when her family left the island two years after Fidel Castro took over.

During her visit, the author worked in the nearby park she went to as a child, using public Wi-Fi to go over final editorial changes. The neighborhood is just a half-block from Temple Beth Shalom, also known as the Patronato Synagogue, a major hub of the Jewish community built just years before Behar’s birth.

She said the nostalgic location for the visit was intentional. 

“I wanted to feel the island right before my book went to press,” said Behar, a writer, anthropologist and the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the first Latina to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.

“I wanted to be there in Cuba again as I was letting the book go,” she said.

For Behar and her family, Cuba is not only a place of birth, but a site of refuge. Her great-grandfather Abraham Levin journeyed there from Poland in 1924 during the rise of antisemitism in Europe. He lived in the rural Cuban village of Agramonte.

Behar’s Letters from Cuba, geared toward middle-grade students, was inspired by the true story of her maternal grandmother, Esther, a Polish Jew who journeyed by ship alone at age 17 in 1927 to join her father in Cuba. There, she helped make enough money to bring over the rest of her family from Poland, on the eve of the Holocaust. 

The book features fictional letters from Esther to her younger sister, Malka, and imagines the experience of Esther as a young Jewish immigrant in a foreign country. Behar said that fiction became the perfect outlet for a Jewish immigration story that history does not have much record of. Instead, she used details heard in family stories, like the bread and bananas her great- grandfather sustained himself on upon arrival. 

“That was a clue to how these new immigrants were taking care of themselves,” Behar said. “It showed how they were gently immersing themselves, trying the fruit of this new culture, while still trying their best to follow the kosher traditions of the old country.”

In addition to her grandmother’s story, Behar said she was motivated to write the book by the climate of hostility toward immigrants exhibited by the Trump administration. She saw connections between her family’s migration patterns and current events.

“It brought the past and the present together for me,” said Behar. “I thought, ‘My own family went through this.’”

In the 1920s, when Behar’s family was trying to escape persecution, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas on how many people could come to the country from Southern and Eastern Europe.

“My family was unwanted here, so our American lives began in Cuba,” she said. 

After Communist revolutionary Castro seized power in 1959, Behar said 94 percent of the Jews in Cuba left. Until her immediate family could obtain American passports, they spent a year in Israel living on a Spanish-speaking kibbutz. The family then immigrated once more to join her maternal grandparents in Queens, N.Y. 

“I can actually remember looking out [the] ship’s window and seeing the Statue of Liberty when we arrived,” Behar said.

There, they joined a sizeable community of Jewish Cubans, and Behar worked hard to learn English. Still, she held onto her love of Spanish, and eventually pursued a career that allowed her to engage with her passion for language and diversity.

“As a cultural anthropologist, I have this intellectual passport that not only allows but encourages me to connect with the places I write about,” she said. 

As part of her anthropological research and writing, she has lived and worked in Mexico and Spain. She has also made many return trips to her native Cuba. 

“I do research there on the Jewish community, art and literature, and try to reconnect with the place I was born,” she said.

Haven from the Holocaust

Now, Behar enjoys a home base in Ann Arbor, where she teaches courses on Cuba and its diaspora and the concept of home at the University of Michigan. For herself, the concept of home evokes feelings of gratitude. She recognizes Cuba as the sanctuary that saved her family from a possible death in the Holocaust. 

In Letters from Cuba, Behar aims to repaint this picture of the island as a center of welcome for many Jews. She said when it comes to Jewish migration to Cuba, scholars focus on the story of the SS St. Louis, a German luxury ship that carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939. Only a handful were allowed entry into Cuba upon arrival. Behar believes this tragedy is out of character for the diverse country. 

“I wrote this book in contrast to those stories,” Behar said. “I wanted to show that Cuba did offer sanctuary to very many Jews, that the majority, in fact, did find refuge.” 

Behar also hopes the book will fill a gap in children’s learning, to deliver them the diverse kind of anthropological material she teaches to her students at the University of Michigan. 

“They’ve read a lot of World War II stories,” Behar said. “They’ve read a lot of immigrant stories. But they don’t know the stories of Jews who went to Cuba.”

In sharing this history, she believes the novel will teach young readers to have compassion toward other immigrant children and hopefully make her readers better citizens of the world.

Perhaps most integral to Behar’s newest literary adventure, however, is remembrance. As remaining Holocaust survivors pass on, and as Behar worries about what she sees as a new climate of fascism, the author wants to make links between past and future traumas. 

“We have to do everything we can to bring this historical memory into the present so young people can see it in relation to the contemporary struggles occurring,” she said. “We have to be able to connect all these things and understand how past and present are always in relation to one another.”

Rahman* was out buying food when Spanish police handed him a 500 euro fine for breaking coronavirus restrictions. “I’ll pay this as soon as I get a residence permit,” he told them. He laughs and shakes his head as he tells the story on a video chat. “Look how thin I’ve become, I weigh only 57 kilos,” he says. The 21-year-old Palestinian lets the webcam display his skinny 1.70m frame. 

We speak in Swedish, mixed with Norwegian expressions – his capacity in both languages is testament to the nearly five years he split between the countries as an adolescent. They were formative years where he learned that even apparently kind gestures like the offer of a place to stay could open the door to unfathomable cruelty. 

It was a time where no matter what Rahman suffered, the legal right to remain in Europe always eluded him. His lack of status contributed to appalling crimes being committed against him, just as it left the criminals unpunished. He has been exploited and deported but his dream of Europe endures and he has found his way back to the continent but the future is uncertain. 

In October 2013, 15-year-old Rahman arrived in Sweden alone. Like so many other young refugees, had heard many good things about Sweden: children are protected, they get to go to school and feel safe, their rights are respected and almost all get to stay.

He grew up in Jordan with Palestinian parents from Gaza. Jordan’s citizenship laws had no place for Rahman, leaving him stateless. When the war in Syria was in its third year his father wanted to send him across the border to fight with jihadists against the Syrian regime. His mother disagreed and the teenager fled to what she hoped would be a place of safety. 

Refugee shelter

In Sweden, Rahman lived in a refugee shelter, started school and quickly learned the language. He played football in his spare time. But despite his young age and troubles in Jordan, the court of migration in Stockholm rejected his asylum application in the summer of 2014.  

He didn’t know what to do, or where to go. The only thing he was certain about was that he couldn’t return to Jordan and his father. Rahman decided to stay in Sweden without a permit. He left the youth hostel in Stockholm to avoid being deported, and cut off contact with his guardian. 

That’s when a friend introduced him to Martin: a large man in his thirties, with a shaved head and heavy gold chains around his neck. Once Martin understood Rahman’s situation, he invited him to a flat in central Stockholm. 

When he got there Rahman was shocked. Some people sniffed glue; others did cocaine. He was given a drink – it was the first time he had tried alcohol. The night became a haze. Martin took him into a room. Rahman was struck to the ground and felt hands on his body. 

The rapes and beatings continued for months. Martin threatened to kill him if he tried to run away. Rahman had seen guns and knives around the flat and didn’t dare argue or ask questions. “I had nowhere to go. No money. And there was no one to help me,” he says. 

Fast food and drugs

A lot of people came to the flat, and it was Rahman’s job to keep it clean. He was given fast food and drugs. Martin would call at any hour and send him off with a bag and address to deliver it to. He was sent on drug trips across Europe, for which he was given new clothes, a fake passport and a bag to carry. Rahman, usually on drugs, slept through the flights.

Rahman is among thousands of children who came to Sweden in recent years only to go missing when their European dreams were shattered. According to the Swedish Migration Agency, 2,014 unaccompanied minors are missing without trace since 2013 — equivalent to almost 70 school classes. The threat of deportation is often mentioned as a reason for these disappearances, as is human trafficking. 

But no one really knows, because no one is searching for them. The police keep records but often don’t actively search for the children. Municipalities say children no longer resident in their area are not their responsibility. The Swedish Migration Agency says they can’t examine the cases of missing children. In 2016, the UN Human Rights Committee criticised Sweden for failing to prevent these disappearances. 

Many, like Rahman are vulnerable to abuses and traffickers. According to a 2015 survey by a Swedish government agency, the County Administrative Board, most suspected child trafficking cases involved unaccompanied minors. At that time, none of the trafficking investigations involving unaccompanied minors, had resulted in a prosecution.

Systemic failure

To understand where the system was failing, I researched every suspected case of human trafficking of minors in Sweden during a four-year period up to 2015. According to police reports and preliminary investigations, more than half of the trafficking cases involved sexual slavery, in which nearly half of the victims were boys. The police’s failed response to trafficking was systemic.

Rahman was one of those cases. I tracked him down in Norway. After several months, he had managed to escape Martin. On reaching neighbouring Norway, he once again applied for asylum and reported his experience of trafficking to authorities. Rahman and his lawyer felt they didn’t take his case seriously. Because the trafficking took place in Sweden, Norwegian police passed the investigation to their Swedish colleagues. Rahman didn’t trust the investigators in either country. They didn’t seem to realise how dangerous it would be for him to single out Martin with no guarantee of protection.

Shortly after Rahman turned 18, we spent a few days at a seaside resort. Surrounded by glittering Norwegian fjords, he and his court-appointed guardian sat outside on a mild summer evening. He leaned against her with his big ragged hair, long eyelashes and gentle smile. “She’s like a mother to me,” he said.

The Swedish trafficking investigation was eventually dropped. His asylum application in Norway was also rejected. Now he was no longer technically a child. In the summer of 2018, he was deported to Jordan.  

After nearly five years in Europe, Rahman struggled to fall in line with the more socially controlled society in Jordan. He couldn’t return to his strictly religious family: he now smoked, drank alcohol and wore an earring. He was meant to try and find a job without a national ID, which also meant no access to doctors or hope of returning to education. 

Yellow dinghy

The police seemed to relish harassing him. They would ask: Why were you in Europe? Why have you come back? And he was mocked by friends and relatives: Where’s the money, the success, the expensive things? For a while he worked 12-hour days at a tourist bazaar for wages that did not even cover his rent. After a few weeks, unable to see any other way, he decided to leave again. 

First he attempted to sail to Greece via Turkey but the yellow dinghy was stopped by Turkish coast guards. After a month and a half in a Turkish prison, he returned to Jordan. He still had a Norwegian girlfriend at the time. As a European she could just take a plane and come to visit for a few weeks. Rahman has none of these options. 

His friends in Norway arranged for him to stay with people they knew in Kosovo and he planned to continue overland further into Europe. But he was arrested in Montenegro and sent back to Kosovo. He became severely ill and returned to Jordan. But in his head he was already making new plans to reach Europe.

“I can’t build a life here,” he told me in the summer of 2019. “I want to go to Europe again. I am never giving up.”

This time he went to Morocco. Rahman knew this was his most dangerous journey so far. “But I am going to make it, I am sure of it!” he insisted. Later that summer, he reached the Moroccan border with the Spanish exclave, Melilla. This gateway to Europe is enclosed with high barbed wire fences and monitored by drones. Migrants and Moroccan boys his age were everywhere, hoping to get through the border at night. Some had been trying for months, even years. Rahman’s plan was to swim around the sea fences, a treacherous feat where border guards sometimes fire plastic bullets at swimmers. His first four failed attempts and was hurt in a fall before he finally managed to swim into the port of Melilla. 

Cargo ship to Spain

“I am so happy – I am in Europe again!” he said in a message. 

Afraid of being forced back to Morocco by authorities in Melilla, he stowed away aboard a cargo ship to mainland Spain.  He was given a place in a refugee shelter and 50 euros a month to live on. But this assistance was cut after six months, just as the coronavirus pandemic hit Europe.

As we kept in touch over the years, I would always ask how he was and he always replied, “good,” no matter the circumstances. He has to stay positive, he says, to keep going towards what he longs for: an ordinary life, with a home, a girl and children. He would like to study languages and maybe work with tourists as he is so used to meeting new people. 

But there is very little space to talk about the future right now. Rahman does not even know what tomorrow will bring, where he will sleep or how he will eat. He is considering two unwanted options: Start selling drugs again or commit a crime deliberately to get caught. “If I get arrested, I have somewhere to live until corona is over,” he said. 

Rahman’s European dream has brought him back. Despite the trials he has gone through, the stateless boy is now a young man but no closer to having papers. The asylum process in Spain is long, up to 18 months, and uncertain and that was before the pandemic. He thinks of Sweden or Norway but doubts his chances. From Scandinavia to Jordan he has never been granted the right to belong. “Why is that?” he asks. “Why can’t I be legal anywhere?”

*Name changed to protect his identity.

Check out this article at the Guardian.

This article is part of the Europe’s Dreamers series, in partnership with Lighthouse Reports and the Guardian. Check the other articles of the series here.

Over the course of a single summer in 2020, Jewish graves in Worms, Germany, were vandalised, an Austrian Jew was attacked in the street and a calendar published in the Czech Republic that glorified Nazi leaders. It came in a year during which Europe and the world marked 75 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Meanwhile, Belgium, Denmark and Poland have either proposed bans or actually banned ritual slaughter, the method by which millions of Jews and Muslims in Europe require their meat to be killed. In Iceland, Denmark and Norway, a furore has erupted over circumcision, with critics arguing that the practice is inhumane and should be banned for those under the age of 18.

“It is very frustrating, there is no question,” Rabbi Menachem Margolin, president of the European Jewish Association, told Euronews from his office in Brussels.

“You just think, […] why do we have to [do this] again […]. Three weeks ago it was the circumcision issue in Belgium […]. Two weeks ago it was circumcision in Denmark, this week it is ritual slaughter in Poland, I mean what is next?”

Kosher meat

Poland’s ban on kosher meat was pushed through by the governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) earlier in September against the objections of its two minority coalition partners, potentially bringing down the Polish government and paving the way for new elections.

The ban on kosher meat was part of a wide-ranging law on animal welfare, which will similarly outlaw Muslim halal slaughter and the production of fur. It is currently in a 14-day review period, but the fact that the PiS was willing to let its coalition collapse to pass it suggests it could stand.

Speaking to Euronews last week when the law was passed, Margolin told Euronews that the campaign for the animal welfare law had distinct antisemitic overtones, presenting the supporters of the law as “good Polish citizens” and its opponents, among them the Jewish community, as bad. But there will also be a practical impact on Europe’s Jewish community.

“Limiting the export of kosher meat from Poland will immediately impact Jewish people from all over Europe because many Jewish people from Europe consume kosher meat coming from Poland,” he said.

Margolin is keen to make the distinction between antisemitism, on the one hand, and a lack of respect for Europe’s religious minorities, including Jews, on the other. Being attacked in the street, he said, is unpleasant, but it is a crime and should be treated as such. The slow chipping away of religious freedoms is the bigger threat to Europe’s three million Jews, he said.

“Of course, governments have to be very tough with people who commit crimes against Jews. But much more important is to take care of the long term: education and a strong commitment to ensuring freedom of religion,” he said.

Key to beating both, he said, is education. As the events of the Holocaust, when six million European Jews died in the death camps of Europe, recede in the memory of Europeans, as the generation that remembers fascism in Europe is dying out, the history of Europe’s Jews must be made part of the curriculum in every school in every European state.

“Antisemitism is a very old disease. If you want to fight against anti-Semitism you have to educate,” he said.

‘Ignorance is an open door for populists’

“We have been pushing European governments to update the curriculum [to] include more information about the Jews, their customs, their history, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, these are things that Europe has faced for two millennia. Every child needs to learn about that,” Margolin said.

Ignorance, he added, is “an open door” for the populist movements of both right and left, and it is from the right, left and the political centre that antisemitism is coming. He is reluctant to name and shame but said centrist parties have noticed the success that the far right and left have had using hatred to win votes, and are now adopting similar tactics.

“What we see is that mainstream political parties do not take the right direction in order to fight the extremists, they adapt themselves to part of that agenda, which is very dangerous,” he said.

“I prefer not to attack anyone in particular. It is a phenomenon that is all over Europe. All over the world. But when it comes to the Jewish situation it is a dangerous direction.”