CARRY THE GUILT
Costa Rican Jews find it difficult to recognize that they carry an intergenerational trauma inherited from centuries of persecution and expulsions. Not to mention the Holocaust, which left no one unscathed; neither the survivors nor their descendants.
The first reason was very clear. Centuries of anti-Semitism made Jews the scapegoats for all the evils of Western culture; it made us fearful of saying anything that could be used against us. Obviously, for such a persecuted minority, protecting the family in any way possible and not speaking out about any abuse within it was part of the culture. In other words, silence is golden.
Currently, most of the community is Polish or from Eastern Europe. Our grandparents fled persecution and poverty that affected the 1930s. To do so, they often had to leave behind their parents and siblings.
Making the journey was easier for a man than a woman, and obviously, for a young person. My father and his brothers not only left their parents but also their sisters and their nieces and nephews, and dozens, if not hundreds, of relatives. No one would imagine they would never see them again.
These experiences, in theory, should have made the Jewish family more like the Costa Rican family.