Anita Nosnik
Anita's roots trace to Poland and the upheaval of the Holocaust. Her mother, Fella Cukier, arrived in Cienaga, Colombia in September 1939 at age ten, speaking only Polish, barely escaping the Holocaust and reuniting with her father, who ran a bakery. Her father, Moises Panzer, was born in Havana, Cuba after his family was turned away from a closed Ellis Island, and later moved to Barranquilla. Anita's parents met when her mother was ten and married when she was twenty. Her paternal grandparents ran a tannery and made aliyah to Israel in 1960, and her father and uncle ran an architectural company that built the community's Jewish school and the Bethel conservative synagogue.
Anita grew up in a close, well-organized Jewish community in Barranquilla, attending Colegio Hebreo Union from preschool through twelfth grade. Her family observed conservative Jewish life, with Friday night services and dinners a fixed part of the week. Community women, known as the costurero, cooked and catered for weddings and celebrations, giving proceeds to the poor. She left home in 1972 to study nursing at the University of Miami, then studied physical therapy in Mexico City. She married Pedro Nosnik in 1975 in Barranquilla, lived briefly in Mexico, and moved to Baltimore in 1976 while Pedro completed his residency.
In June 1978 Anita and Pedro moved to Dallas so Pedro could pursue neurology at UT Southwestern, and they have remained for more than forty years. They raised three children, Leah, Israel (Izzy), and Stephen, and now have several grandchildren. Anita volunteered with the Jewish Federation helping Russian immigrants, supported AIPAC and Chabad, and worked as a realtor, keeping strong ties to the Jewish community. She and Pedro are active philanthropists, hosting charity dinners for local Jewish schools and organizations. Her mother, at 93, lives in Dallas, and Anita treasures her Colombian Jewish heritage, which she works to pass on to her children and grandchildren.
Full Transcript
good afternoon um annie hi fonda um uh my name is fonda arbetter and i am going to interview you for the one story at a time project viva shalom celebrating the latin american jewish people in dallas and i would like you to talk about when your family originally immigrated to the country of colombia correct and uh i want you to share about their lives in the early years there okay so i'll start with my mother my mother's uh name was uh is fella cookie de panzer that's my married name my maiden name so cookier is c-u-k that was my mom's maiden name and she married
my dad moises m-o-i-s-e-s pantser p-a-n-c-e-r uh my mom arrived in barranquilla colombia actually in a small town called sienaga which was the port uh in the atlantic ocean in over on the north side of the country right between barranquilla and cartagena and she arrived and in september of 1939 at 10 years old barely escaping the holocaust she arrived with her mother her father for some reason was already in colombia uh and had a bakery uh in a little town called cienega uh after that my mother uh she came with a cousin who was given to my grandmother because she has 16 siblings and she gave
the cousin to my grandmother to take him because they were in line to go to the concentration camps so mom arrived in colombia at 10 years old speaking only polish at that time and reunited with my grandfather and that was how my mother arrived my dad on the other hand also from poland his parents uh israel and toba t-a-u-b-a panzer came also from uh poland uh but they thought they were living in the 1926 somewhere around there uh they thought they're coming to america because they already had a brother and two sisters in new york but they but when they arrived in ellis island ellis
island was closed so they dropped them off in havana cuba and my dad was born march 28th in uh havana and after two years of working in cuba my grandfather heard that they were growing money on the banana trees so he packed up and left and moved to barranquilla so my father and his brother his brother was born already in in colombia in barranquilla they grew up there [Music] and my mother continued to be an only child um my parents met when my mother was 10 years old and got married when my mom was 20 and my dad was 21 years old my my grandfather
on my mother's side died very young i don't remember him he was a diabetic and uh so um i don't know um much about him but my grandmother lived very close to our jcc in our school and my grandparents on my father's side they had a tannery company and in 1960 they made aliyah to israel and my grandfather died um a year later he he had cancer and then afterwards my dad uh brought my grandma back to barranquilla and she uh my grandmother was toba pantser and my uncle's name was samuel panzer he made aliyah to israel as well um my father and my uncle
had an architectural company that actually built the school the rjcc that went from preschool to high school uh he built the in barranquilla he built the the conservative synagogue called bethel synagogue where i got married in 1975 and a lot of the people that you're interviewing here got married as well uh my father was very active in the community he brought the first uh conservative rabbi to barranquilla his name was angel crayman from argentina and i grew up in a conservative environment i went to a jewish school from preschool till 12th grade our school was called colegio ebreo union and um i had about 36
kids in my graduating class and the school had 49 non-jews and 51 jewish people uh and we had a waiting list but in order to keep the school more jewish we kept it at 51 we had a great education we still have contact with a lot of our friends uh jewish and not jewish because the non-jewish kids wanted to go in the jewish school and so um my father was president of the my grandfather was one of the uh two or three um patrons of the community uh together with uh alfredo steckerl and um and carlos kaluzin and israel nas a panzer um i had
a great life in barranquilla uh we grew up uh you know going to schule every friday uh i had to be home every friday night for for services and for dinner then we could find dates and do whatever we wanted um a lot of us have left colombia but we keep it very close in our hearts i left home in 1972 when i graduated high school and went to the university of miami to study nursing and after two years i was sort of dating um pedro gnostic who happens to be my husband now and so i beg my dad to let me go to mexico
to school so i enrolled there in physical therapy and i graduated physical therapy in mexico city at the hospital ingles it was called the abc american british crowd country hospital and we got married in 1975 in barranquilla colombia and then i moved to mexico my husband was finishing medical school so we lived with my in-laws for nine months and then came to the states again in 1976 uh we moved to baltimore maryland where my husband was doing his residency in internal medicine at sinai hospital and our first daughter leah was born in february 9th of 1977 and after um two years in baltimore we moved
to dallas in june 15 of 1978 uh because my husband pedro was accepted at ut southwestern to do neurology and so we came to dallas at that time in 1978 and he went on to do his residency in 40 plus years later we're in dallas and i have two other children israel who was born august 28 of 1980 and stephen who was born may 10 of 1984. my daughter leah lives in montclair new jersey she is married to stephen moranis and they have two beautiful girls ella born and she's seven years old born in december six and mina uh born november 11 they're seven and five years old then israel we call him izzy uh lives in dallas married to rachel moran um rachel um uh umansky and they have two boys meyer who's seven years old um born in june 21st and uh sydney who was born april the 12th he just turned five years old and my baby stephen lives in new york city he is married to caroline goldberg and they have two boys one is jack uh he will be five on me on may 26 and the little monkey his name is uh charlie he was born december 10th of uh last 2019.
uh leah is an executive for a media agency and she works very hard uh she went to wharton undergrad school and has an mba from stern nyu my middle son is a physician he is a pediatric urologist and he went to school in michigan undergrad and duke medical school and the baby he went to university of michigan and is in the wine industry in new york he's an importer and distributor of wines and spirits in new york and new jersey uh do you have any family left in columbia no well i have some cousins but i have two sisters uh younger i mean older than
me i'm the baby in the family my sister miriam tabasinik she lives in miami she is a physician and an architect and she uh also grew up in the same school as i grew up we all graduated together and then i have another sister her name is raquel panzer and she has one daughter that lives in fort lauderdale that has two boys and a girl my sister miriam has two girls and a son one of the daughters lives in dallas sandy tabasinic and she has a boy and a boy a girl and a boy how often do you see all of your family do you
get together for jewish holidays uh my sisters come quite often to that last because my mother is 93 years old she lives in dallas and so they come to visit um quite a bit and we always get together we try to get together for holidays but mainly for we have a lot of bar and meets fuss coming up now for the grandkids the next generation uh but we always got together for everything and um what else tell me about your jewish involvement in dallas uh when i first came to dallas in 78 um i worked as a volunteer at the jewish federation uh mostly driving
at that time there were a lot of the russian immigrants that were coming to dallas at that time and i drove them to the doctors and helped out uh with finding them the housing and everything i also were was part of many of the jewish federation events that we did that were the galas and everything um and i participated in my synagogue you know i belong to habat with rabbi dubrovsky so i've been very active in the community as well uh we are very active in apac so that's our involvement with israel uh since you know we're we're very involved um socially and and giving
uh to aipac for many many years because when you grow up in a latin country it's not like in the states but like your home away from home is israel so we were always actually it was almost like a rule that if you were part of the jewish community in barranquilla you had to give x amount of money every year that was given to israel that was no choice it was depending on your income you had to give money to israel so we were very involved i have uh my father's brother went to israel and so he passed away already but um i had a
family there my father had aunts and uncles that were still very orthodox from um from poland that went to israel uh so i was able to visit sharma check in benebrac because the family was extremely religious i also had the pleasure of meeting one of my mother's cousins in one of the kiwisim that we visited she survived auschwitz because she was a nurse that was she was a pharmacist that worked for mengele and that's how she saved her life wow what a very interesting background you have annie yeah um would you like to show some pictures of your family oh my god well uh here's
my dad moises and my mother and this is their first great grandson mandy who is 23 or 24 years old now um here this is a great picture this is my grandmother my father's mother she passed her name was toba cancer and she passed when she was 101 years old in barranquilla so she's buried in uh this is another picture of my parents which i think there it was a beautiful picture um oh i have uh this is the picture of me my rehearsal dinner 1975. you can see my dad and my two sisters my dad and my two sisters rocky and we call my sister miriam which one are you uh this is me here this is me um i mean i have so much stuff i mean this is my my graduating class from high school i mean you can see i have the pictures these were all the girls wow this is my dress for my graduating class that was 1972.
uh you know um this was my great friend she unfortunately passed away but she was the daughter of our sephara rabbi who who uh led the orthodox synagogue and even though we were a community of maybe 200 families at that time we had is an orthodox synagogue that was mainly sephardi that had a mole and a shorthand uh which when i came to dallas i were charged that when my son was born in 1980 i couldn't get him oil to do his circumcision so i had to hire somebody from tyler texas and then for my second son in 1984 i had to hire a mother
from houston because we still didn't have a moral in dallas until 1985 when rabbi scholl arrived in dallas it's incredible i couldn't believe it that in a town like mine with 200 families we couldn't you had it we had just about everything that we needed i mean it was it was an incredible and today the two synagogues still stand tall in barranquilla we still have a jcc and we still have the school i'm not sure that the school is 100 jewish but it's still called colegio reunion and they still teach all the jewish religion and everything and um and we still have uh our conservative
synagogue plus chabad we have a very strong rabbi khabad rabbi in barranquilla as well so jews are very accepted in baron kia yes you know my father used to have a joke that he used to say that when you when you asked a non-jewish person how many jews were in barranquilla they would tell him a million because if you went to a restaurant or if you went to a uh to an event or a concert we were all there so they thought that we were very very uh a long time and of course our community was pretty much everybody was very well off i mean
you know we never knew that we were uncomfortable there were a few people that didn't have means there were people that were very very wealthy and there were people that were okay but we never knew that we were missing anything here everybody took care of each other and uh we had uh uh the ladies in the community had a a group that was called costureo which means the sewing ladies but then when we all started having bar and mitzvahs and weddings these ladies turned around and started doing catering so when we would have weddings or bar mitzvahs these ladies would prepare the buffet decorated and
everything and they only charge for the cost of the ingredients and the money that they collected they would give it to the poor people and the poor schools and um i can tell you when i got married they were we had 600 people all the food and everything all the desserts were made by the jewish ladies in the community it was incredible and so for everybody else i mean i can show you my mother's cookbooks i mean i have four uh notebooks of um recipes that it this was so-and-so's recipe this was so-and-so recipe everyone has a parenthesis that has a name you know we
need some of those because we're collecting some recipes i'm going to show you i mean my mother i mean everything was cooked from scratch i think the freezer in my house was bigger than the freezer in uh that a refrigerator because our the temperature was so hot we lived in 100 degree weather that if you left the milk out for a little bit it would go bad it would ruin so if you open cereal it would get soggy so everything was put in the freezer and because we didn't have that many restaurants of course things have changed today you have great restaurants and great everything
but when i was growing up it wasn't like that so all the mothers had to learn how to cook and everybody cooked incredible and they were frozen meals because if my dad had uh uh an executive that came to visit um he would call mom i have so-and-so coming for dinner and my mother will pull out the lasagna or we'll pull out whatever and dinner was served um what about who made the challah we have okay so i'll tell you the story you just interviewed sophie poglia yes so sophie's grandparents were of german descent they were bakers they were bakers and they had the best
bakery that there was in the world so we always went on friday to buy fresh bread from oma and oppa and uh and they had breads that were typical of colombia and hale and everything and that's where everybody went to buy the bread but you had a baker in your family too but that was close i mean it was just my grandfather at the beginning and then um i my grandfather's brother i think married somebody that was not jewish and so um my father always kept the connection with them they were not raised jewish but my father always kept the connection with them and actually
some of them worked and my father's company where my dad worked to keep the relationship going architect no that was my uncle my father was the ceo of a company called fabrica de lasas vanillon that was owned by a sephara the jew named leon bijio b-i-g-i-o and 49 of the company was owned by monsanto so uh they they did a the threat for the nylon remember the baby dolls and the nylon so they did everything from the from the plastic chips to create an island all the way to the thread and then from the thread it will go to one of their other companies in
bogota where they would stretch their island and make fabric and they make a baby dolls remember the baby dolls and then from the waist of the plastic of the of the primary materials they made combs so it was a very successful company that my father ran for about 30 years until he retired wow do you want to show and you want to take your laptop and show your the shriner yeah so my father was amazing in barranquilla he was all the way up to 33rd degree and i have here his costumes my father used to belong to the lion's flap at the you name it
my father was involved i mean uh so how do i turn this around to show the the uh how do i show it around uh is there a flip i don't know well but anyways uh if you see behind me here that's my father's 33rd degree of the mason and this is the 32nd degree here and then he was also you know when you're amazing on your 32nd degree you can become a shriner so you might be familiar with the hat this is my father's shriner hat and his and his necklace from the 33rd degree show these and tell about that oh well uh my
husband uh is not only a physician but he is very involved in wine we have a very big wine collection so um we do a lot of charity work here in dallas we give dinners to many associations and practically all the jewish schools we give a dinner every year to levine academy that just happened uh last week we give a dinner to akiba we give a dinner to green hill school because my grandchildren go there we give a dinner to temple emmanuel because my grandson goes there and we also are very involved with the american heart association and with living for zachary uh we've been
very blessed and we like to give back otherwise i'm very active with chabad i am i'm a big supporter of chabad because my father was a big supporter of habat even though we are not orthodox or anything like that but we are conservative jews and um they take off sex they take everything as long as you pay no i'm kidding true as long as you give yeah okay well i guess we can wrap this up and um um do you see all your traditions carrying on in your kids and your grandkids yes yes i um um my my uh my my kids uh all of
them married jewish so they all follow the jewish traditions and um they they are conservative jews a little bit on the reformed side but they they follow tradition which is the important thing for me they're all traditional they all want their kids to learn about judaism and um and we keep following uh you know as as we were taught by our parents and our grandparents so you've enjoyed your years in dallas texas this is home i am a realtor in dallas uh who do you work for i am my brokerage license is with alibeth oman and associates i've been working for them for 12 years
before that i worked for harry bach a buckendorf and before that i worked for another um israeli um company diamond importers until i had children and then i was blessed to be able to stay home and raise my children and then i went back to work and i enjoy it very much how do you like uh selling real estate i love it i couldn't be happier now i mean real estate in dallas is crazy now and you know we have a lot of families jewish families coming in from uh california i have clients from arizona now moving to dallas that their children are going to
go to akiba uh they have nine kids among them so i'm happy to keep the jewish connection with my clients uh that's something that it was embedded in me from my dad uh even though he was not religious he always went to synagogue friday and saturday and was very very very loved in the community i mean anybody would remember most sponsoring actually um when he came to miami he was one of the big persons involved in chabad in miami uh helping raise money for the bal harbour school and then when he came here he was the body of robert dubrowski until the day he passed
so i'm it's embedded in my in my blood well we're very lucky to have you here annie and um you and pedro are wonderful members of the dallas community and we appreciate so much you telling us about your life um uh as a latin american jewish person and and family in dallas texas and we look forward to many more things that you will be doing here i'll just give you a little snip about pedro because i don't know if you're catching so pedro was born in mexico city from um his father came from ukraine when he was four years old came to mexico his mother
his name was abraham his mother aetna was born in the united states her mother left russia at 17 years old and arrived in philadelphia and married a jewish world war one veteran that unfortunately passed away when she was when my mother-in-law was a year and a half old so after the war um as we used to call her she found two sisters in mexico city after the war so she packed up philadelphia and moved to mexico city and she married two more times didn't have any more children my mother-in-law was um uh her uh her only daughter and i can tell you that the biggest
influence in the life of my husband was bobelia his grandmother on the mother's side our daughter leah is named after her and she worked all her life in whatever she could do but she worked my father-in-law um went to work for uh his father chris had a a clothing uh factory that was called um oh god i forgot the name now but they used to do leather jackets and shirts and that company didn't survive after the grandpa passed my father-in-law had a brother and a sister and pedro uh grew up also in a jewish school actually that it thought it was called the idi and
the idi went it went from kindergarten to high school and they talked yiddish so they learned to speak and write in english as well like a lot of the other people that are here in dallas and uh so in my emperor was also part of the boy scouts and also part of the they had a group of intelligentsia that worked to protect the jewish people that was very hush i don't know too much about it but i can tell you he was part of that uh group they had a lot of money him they had a lot more things that we had in colombia as
far as youth activities because we were much more limited with the youth activities but he did have and he has a brother that lives in mansfield texas um he's retired mansfield and close to arlington mansfield yes mansfield what did i say whatever and um he has that's his name is aaron then he has and he had two daughters then uh nancy uh the sister uh she still lives in mexico and she has three children and then the youngest sister elena i made a liat to israel she's been in israel at least 10 years and she has a son and a daughter that's well i know
pedro is a wonderful neurologist and he's had a terrific career and y'all are a wonderful couple and we appreciate everything y'all have done for dallas and we love dallas this is home well thank you i'm glad to be part of it love you so much bye you