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Ole', oy vey!
Haven for Acapulco’s Jews
by Murray Malkin
C anadian Jewish News
It’s down the road from the
Holiday Inn, past the hot new
disco, the golf course and three
liquor stores, but right across from
the Acapulco Center, Mexico. It’s
impossible to miss it. Hotel Posada
Del Sol and its magic letters,
kosher, drawing Jewish tourists
like a magnet.
Jewish tourists looking for a
good meal—a bowl of matza-ball
soup, some chopped liver, maybe a
bit of herring—come here for a
meal, a nosh. Most tourists don’t
expect to find kosher food in
Acapulco. Taco stands, yes, steak
and lobster, maybe, but a kosher
restaurant?
But it’s there, and the owner,
Maria Gancz, a Hungarian Jew,
has been running the restaurant for
16 years. However, the restaurant,
located in the hotel, is only a small
part of the intriguing story about
Jewish life in Acapulco. The real
story is Jerry Goldberg, a
transplanted American who keeps
things hopping in Acapulco for
Jews. Goldberg is the city’s
mashgiach.
Goldberg was hired by the chief
Rabbi of Mexico in order to make
the stay of vacationing Jews more
comfortable
"An Orthodox Jew wants away
from home what he gets at home I
try to make him at home so he
won't lift a finger,” says Goldberg,
w ho spends a good deal of his time
worrying about arranging minyans
two or three days in the future.
"We have aliyas to Acapulco and
the new Jews who come to
Acapulco don’t know that they'll
be helping.”
Goldberg, who spends about
eight hours a day around the
restaurant, is a friend to every Jew
who wants a friend. He speaks
English. Yiddish, Hebrew and
Spanish, so if he can’t help a
person in one language, he’ll more
than likely be able to do so in one
of his other three tongues.
Besides arranging the minyans,
which take place in the small shul
at the back of the restaurant,
Goldberg helps to find rooms for
persons arriving in Acapulco only
to find their room already
occupied.
“Or sometimes a guy comes
down here, his wife spends too
much money and he’s broke. I’ll
take his personal check. Anything
to help a fellow Jew in trouble. It’s
all what I feel a mashgiach should
do."
Goldberg says there are only
about 15 Jews living in Acapulco
year round. Most are either in the
clothing or jewelry business and
they have nothing to do with
Goldberg, the kosher restaurant or
the little synagogue. “Most of them
go to Mexico City for the High
Holidays because we close on May
31 and we don’t open until
November.”
One of the little touches
Cioldberg started in order to make
the stay nicer for the guests and
diners at the restaurant was teaching
the waiters Yiddish. On Friday
night, the waiters wish their
patrons “Good Shabbis" and on
holidays "A good Yontif."
Goldberg says sometimes this
causes problems, because the
people getting the greeting
automatically think they’ve run
into a Mexican Jew. “They start
speaking a mile-a-minute Yiddish
and to the waiter it sounds like
Martian But they know what to
do, they yell “Mashgiach” and I
come to the rescue."
According to Goldberg, the only
reason there's a kosher restaurant
here is because the owner of the
Posada Del Sol, a 75-year-old
Lebanese Jew who moved to
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Mexico when he was three, “keeps
the restaurant going out of respect
to his late Orthodox Jewish father.
This is his contribution.”
An American airline has
requested on many occasions to
rent the space that the restaurant
occupies, but “Carlos Hadid, the
owner, says no. He is a wealthy
man who owns three hotels in
Mexico City, land in Brazil and the
land of the British embassy in
Israel.”
Even though Hadid is extremely
generous to his fellow Jews, by
practically giving them the
restaurant and shul, Goldberg says
he knows little about Judaism
One of Goldberg’s little touches
involves having candles available
for women to light for Shabbat
“When I told Hadid that I needed
candles for the women, he told me
it was no problem. He would buy
them and send them to the shul. So
you know what arrives? A case of
Yahrzeit candles,” says a laughing
Goldberg.
Everything in the synagogue was
obtained through donations,
lallesim, an eternal light, prayer
books.
The synagogue needed a Torah;
and when Hadid heard that, he
bought a beautiful one which
Goldberg loves to show guests.
“There’s only one problem, it’s not
parchment, it’s on paper and it's
been Xeroxed. Moshe Rabainu
didn’t know about Xerox; if he did
maybe he would've been into
it But still, we can't use the
Torah,’’ says Goldberg.
Goldberg, who makes only $200
a month as the mashgiach. has to
spend several hours a day in the
sun because of a skin disorder. He
spends the rest of his time helping
his fellow Jews. “1 feel I’m
perpetuating the Jewish precepts
that all of us hold so dear.”
Icwixh Digrsl
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Page 15 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE August 3, 1979