A crucial part of the study abroad experience involves immersion in a new culture and way of life. And this fall, as I left for a semester in Chile, that was exactly what I hoped to do. But when I got there, I discovered that embracing a new culture can be trickier than it seems.
I arrived in the coastal city of Viña del Mar at the end of August – just in time to prepare for the High Holidays. I wasn’t looking to stay with a Jewish host family, or run off to the Hillel Center two hours away in Santiago, but it felt important to celebrate. Luckily, when I met my host mother for the first time, I saw a silver menorah charm hanging around her neck. The coincidence put me at ease: I had a place to celebrate the upcoming holidays – and as a bonus, I wouldn’t have to explain my disdain for ham and seafood that find their way into just about every Chilean dish.
Little did I know that was only the first hurdle jumped. A trickier dilemma than how to politely turn down a ham-adorned pizza emerged right before Yom Kippur. The trip coordinators surprised my group with tickets to a concert by the popular Chilean band Los Jaivas. The catch? The concert would begin at the same time as Kol Nidre, the first service of Yom Kippur. The day of the concert, I decided that, although I didn’t want to rush over to temple, a concert would be out of the question. Even after explaining Kol Nidre’s significance to the other students – Jews and non-Jews alike – they didn’t seem to understand why I passed up the concert. But as I meditated in my room, I could hear cheering from the concert down the hill and was thankful for my quiet space.
Viña del Mar, where I spent the majority of my time, is one of the largest cities in Chile. But even with its sizeable Jewish population, there was no store where my host mother could buy a challah for Shabbat – and, to my even greater dismay – no bagels. This is more astonishing if you consider that fresh bread is available on just about every block! But if you live in Viña, you buy challot from a woman who prepares them in her kitchen, or you bake them yourself.
Feeling like a minority is one thing. Feeling hated, as I soon discovered, is something entirely different. Graffiti is ubiquitous on Chile’s city streets, and one day I noticed a KKK and drawing of a klansman in a robe and hood among artists’ “tags,” political slogans, and declarations of love. It took me several more weeks to realize that the marks on the stairs I climbed several times each day, the ones that looked like a four-square game, were filled-in swastikas. In other areas, I encountered un-altered ones.
This graffiti made me think more closely about my Judaism than the High Holidays had, and equally thought-provoking was the constant presence of Catholicism. I felt uncomfortable when thanked in the name of Jesus for visiting the disabled, taken aback when I was asked what Chanukah is, and downright shocked when I had to describe kugel to my Jewish host mother. By the time the local synagogue received a bishop as a special guest during services on Erev Rosh Hashanah, it just blended in with the rest of the Chilean syncretism I’d experienced.
At the end of my trip, though, the synagogue was still the most familiar place in Viña del Mar. The Hebrew school children put on an end-of-the-year performance that reminded me of the songs I learned as a child. In that room, the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem of hope, held a different significance than when I sang it years ago. It helped me regain confidence in Israel’s potential to make peace with its neighbors – and in my ability to adjust to a new culture without forgetting my own.
