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When Flor Feldman moved to Berkeley in the 1970s, she went in search of a Jewish community like the one she knew growing up in Mexico City.

Her childhood was spent hanging out with friends at El Centro Deportivo Israelita, a giant JCC that served as the central hub of Jewish life in the city. Like 90% of Mexican Jewish children, she attended Jewish day school, where the curriculum focused as much on Mexican history as geshichte, or Jewish history. She was taught Yiddish and Hebrew in the same breath as Spanish and English, and as a teen joined a Zionist youth movement.

“We were Jewish and Mexican, and you didn’t question what culture you belong to. It was all blended very seamlessly,” she recalled. “When I came here, it felt like an ‘either or,’ not an ‘and.’”

For the past three years, a growing number of Latin Jewish families seeking affinity in the Bay Area have come together through Olamim: Latin Jewish Belonging for Families. The Berkeley-based community aims to create spaces where “Jewish and” is not only welcome, but celebrated. Olamim, which is Hebrew for “worlds,” was established by educator Ariela Ronay-Jinich, who, like Feldman, is originally from Mexico City and often felt she had to choose among her identities in America.

In August, Olamim is launching a family school, a play-based, bilingual program for families with kids ages 4-8 that blends Latin Jewish culture with community-building. The classes are meant to be multigenerational, with participation from parents, grandparents and extended family. Ronay-Jinich will facilitate the monthly Saturday sessions, which will be conducted in English and Spanish. The program, the first of its kind in Northern California, is funded by a grant from the Jews of Color Initiative.

Feldman and her grandson, 3, and granddaughter, 6 months, are among several families who have already signed up.

“It was very interesting to find out that there’s an all-encompassing group of people like us that are Jewish, American, Latin, who speak Spanish to their kids and want them to know about all three cultures,” said Feldman. “I thought, ‘How many [others] like our family are there?’”

According to Ronay-Jinich, there are many.

Last year she published a study based on her research of Latin Jewish identity in the Bay Area, noting the challenges families face making educational choices for their children. Extrapolating from a 2021 demographic study of the regional Jewish population showing that 25% of families with young children identify as multiracial and multiethnic, and 23% of that group speak a home language other than English, Ronay-Jinich believes that Latin Jews make up a sizable portion of the population. 

With national data estimating they represent 4% to 6% of the American Jewish community, she figures that with “350,000 Jews in the Bay Area, that means there are about 11,000 of us.”

The term “Latin Jewish” is broad and generally refers to Jews with heritage from Latin America, which includes Mexico, Central America, South America and most of the Caribbean islands. 

Within the Latin Jewish community, intersectionality is inescapable in a way that is not experienced by most other Jewish groups. As Ronay-Jinich states in her study, “Latin Jews are a multiethnic people whose racial, cultural and linguistic heritages and experiences may be tied to immigration, intermarriage, adoption and conversion [and] these unique circumstances each have particular implications for family life, ethnic identity formation and socialization.”

Latin America is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the world, with 826 Indigenous groups across 33 countries. 

Olamim makes this diversity a centerpiece of its programming. Families are encouraged to share their cultures with the group to encourage inclusivity. In the past, people have introduced foods, music, holiday traditions and folk art specific to their culture.

“Belonging is something that we build together through participation and through contribution, which is a very Latino value,” said Ronay-Jinich, who lives in the East Bay and has a 5-year-old daughter. “You don’t show up to receive. You show up to be a part of something, and you come with something.”

Deby Plaza and her 5-year-old grandson Emilio are also signed up for the Olamim Family School. Plaza was born in the U.S. to an Argentine Jewish mother and an Indigenous Peruvian father. When her grandfather died, the family moved to Argentina to support her grandmother, returning to America in 1982 to escape what became known as the Dirty War. Waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, it was a period of state-sponsored terrorism with death squads that hunted down anyone suspected of left-wing or communist sympathies, disproportionately targeting Jews.

Coming from an interfaith background, Plaza said it wasn’t until adulthood that she became active in religious Jewish life. She attended Beyt Tikkun, a Renewal congregation in Berkeley, for a while because she liked its “hippie approach,” and then Temple Beth Hillel, a Reform synagogue in Richmond, for Shabbat services with her mother. She went to a few Sephardi events but found they were geared more to English- and Hebrew-speaking Jews with North African heritage rather than to Spanish-speaking Jews.

It wasn’t until she joined Olamim that Plaza felt she was in the right Jewish space for herself and her family, where she could communicate and learn in her native language. 

“It was my first experience of being around Spanish-speaking Jews as an adult,” the Berkeley resident said. “I did it in Argentina for a couple of summer camps, but I was 9 or 10 — I didn’t even know what I was doing. [At Olamim] I learned Jewish songs in Spanish that I had not heard when I was a kid.”

In Latin American cultures, families tend to be close-knit and almost never refer to nuclear families alone. It is common for households to be multigenerational and for grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins to be actively involved in raising the children.

A key component of Olamim Family School is that it will be conducted in Spanish and English. Ronay-Jinich notes in her research that a majority of Latin Jewish parents see Spanish-language fluency as one of the most fundamental cultural connections for their children. Until Olamim, parents had to decide between a Jewish education and a Spanish one — often choosing the latter. Spanish fluency is so important to the wider Latino community that there is a derogatory term, “no sabo” (a grammatically incorrect translation of “I don’t know”), used to shame Latino youth who are not proficient. Additionally, in many families Spanish is needed to communicate with elders, so parents who desire a close relationship between generations view being bilingual as nonnegotiable.

Oakland-based Jewish musician Isaac Zones and educator Vivian Santana Pacheco chose to raise their 5-year-old son with Spanish as his first language. They’ve participated in a number of Olamim programs over the past three years, and Santana Pacheco has served as a community educator and parent leader for the group.

Zones, who is on staff most summers at Camp Tawonga, a Jewish camp near Yosemite, and performs at Jewish events throughout the year, said that while he feels comfortable in most Jewish spaces, he is aware that his non-Jewish partner and their son might not always feel at home.

“I’ve had to think about issues of race and class in a way that’s very personal and think about what kinds of situations are going to be good for my family,” said Zones. “Those issues come up sometimes, especially if you’re raising a child who is Latino and Jewish and Spanish-speaking, and taking that child into predominantly Ashkenazi, English-speaking spaces — it’s definitely something that comes to the forefront of your mind.”

Ronay-Jinich said she finds this is a common struggle for Latin Jewish families.

“It’s not just about what we think is best for our kids. It’s also about the communities we want to be a part of,” she said. “There’s contending with racism in the Jewish community and antisemitism in the Latino community. For families who have kids of color, for whom their kid is going to be the only kid of color, that might be the dominating factor in their choice.”

For Rachel Salinas, a Jewish mom of two, the Olamim Family School will offer an intentional space for her family to be fully themselves in their Judaism. Her husband, who is a first-generation Mexican American, decided to convert to Judaism while she was pregnant with their first child. Although conversion is becoming more accepted, “there’s still things people say that make you feel not as included,” she said, and her husband has dealt with microaggressions based on his skin color.

“We have to be more thoughtful and intentional about shaping these little humans and shaping the experiences that they’re a part of so it helps to form their identity and their belief structure,” she said. “Before I found Olamim, I had kind of done this whole mind map of what I was hoping to create and source for my kids in terms of the types of experiences I wanted us to be a part of, and communities I wanted to find.”

Feldman, like Salinas, believes that it is important to instill confidence in kids from multicultural backgrounds and that the Olamim Family School will play a part in that.

“If you grow up with multicultural exposure, you feel comfortable with it and you carry it with you wherever you go,” said Feldman. “Which is what I want for my grandchildren. And when people meet you, you will find acceptance because you’re comfortable with yourself. I think that it’s very important to grow up with that.”

Registration for the Olamim Family School is open through Aug. 13. Eight classes will be held through April.