There is a certain kind of conversation that happens only when you are far from home—when the sun is too warm, your guard is lowered, and the universe decides to hand you a story you did not know you were meant to receive.
On Friday afternoon, our pool attendant, a young Costa Rican man named Juan, approached me quietly. He had noticed my tattoos: a Star of David on my chest, and the outline of Israel—my map, my anchor—on my left shoulder. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “Sir… excuse me,” in the tone of someone stepping carefully toward something personal.
“My grandfather was Jewish,” he said.
He offered the information with a mixture of pride and uncertainty, as though he knew the fact mattered but wasn’t sure how. Then he told me his grandfather’s name: Menashe. He pronounced it deliberately. It is also his own middle name, he added—a detail he shared the way one offers a small key without yet knowing what door it opens.
A name like that carries weight. Hebrew names carry memory. They hold histories long after the stories themselves fade from a family’s retelling.
Menashe, his grandfather, was born in Brasław, Poland. He fled in 1945 or 1946, and that detail alone reveals what is not spoken: any Jew leaving Poland in those years had survived the Shoah through hiding, rescue, improbable luck, or sheer will to live. Menashe was one of them.
He made his way to Cuba, joining roughly 12,000 Polish Jewish refugees who arrived on the island after World War II. They built new lives during the Batista years of the 1940s and ’50s—opening stores, forming small synagogues, rebuilding fragments of Jewish life under the Caribbean sun.
Then came the Cuban Revolution of the early 1960s. Castro’s rise and the nationalization of private businesses sent the Jewish community fleeing again. Many went to Miami, Puerto Rico, Venezuela. Juan’s family went to Costa Rica, where his parents and grandparents began once more.
One family, three countries, three upheavals. A Jewish story stitched across geography and survival.
When I asked Juan what he knew about Judaism, he shrugged gently.
“Nothing,” he said. “Only that my grandfather was Jewish. Only the story of how he survived.”
He knew that much. And sometimes a single remembered story is enough to keep a spark alive.
Later that evening, as the sun slid down over the Pacific and the air softened into Shabbat, I felt something stir—something about presence, timing, memory. I opened my phone so Juan could read the Spanish translation of Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Blessing our people have spoken for nearly three thousand years.
He read the Spanish softly to himself.
And then I placed my hands on his shoulders—hands that moments earlier had been skimming the pool’s surface—and I blessed him in Hebrew:
Yevarechecha Adonai v’yishmerecha.
Ya’er Adonai panav eilecha vichuneka.
Yisa Adonai panav eilecha v’yasem lecha shalom.
Afterward, I added the blessing I offer every Friday night to my own son, Leor:
Yesimkha Elohim k’Ephraim ve’khi Menashe.
May God make you like Ephraim and like Menashe.
Ephraim and Menashe—two brothers who did not fight. Two children raised in a diaspora who nevertheless hold their identity. Two names Jacob chose as the model for all future Jewish boys because they represented continuity in a world of uncertainty.
And how could I not—standing before a young man named for his grandfather Menashe, a survivor whose identity crossed oceans and revolutions, only to reappear poolside in Costa Rica in his grandson’s middle name?
I told Juan:
“May you also live in the spirit of your Menashe—your grandfather.
A man who survived the Shoah.
A man who rebuilt his life twice.
A man whose courage lives inside your name.”
His eyes glistened. Not because he suddenly felt Jewish—identity is not a switch—but because he felt the power of memory. The dignity of inheriting a story. The weight of peoplehood, even when one stands outside the practice of it.
Jewish history is not only found in synagogues or libraries. Sometimes it is found in a pool attendant’s middle name. Sometimes it lies dormant until someone recognizes it, names it, blesses it.
What struck me most was how peoplehood persists—quietly, stubbornly, beautifully. A name carried from Poland to Cuba to Costa Rica still has power. A blessing spoken in Hebrew can resonate with someone who has never heard Hebrew before. Memory does not die easily. It waits. It listens. It surfaces when the moment is right.
On Friday night, under a sky striped with fading light, I blessed a young man named Juan. But truly, I blessed the endurance of a story that refused to disappear. The Jewish people survive not only through rituals and texts, but through names, memories, and the remarkable resilience of identity.
Sometimes a name is enough to keep a story alive.
Sometimes a blessing helps it awaken.
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