Ceci Katz
Ceci Katz descends from families rooted in Aleppo, Syria on both sides. Her father's family immigrated first to Palestine and then to Panama, where her grandfather served as a shochet and community leader in the province of Chiriqui, and where her father, the youngest of eight siblings, was born. Her mother's father came directly from Aleppo to Panama to build a commerce business, later traveling to find a Jewish bride and marrying her grandmother Cecilia, for whom Ceci is named. Ceci grew up in Panama's small but tightly connected Jewish community, attending the Jewish day school, joining a Zionist youth group, and living a Torah lifestyle as second nature.
Ceci's mother moved the family to Dallas when Ceci was about ten, encouraged by her brother who had come for work. The transition was difficult for Ceci, who was accustomed to a unified Jewish community where everyone attended the same schools and lived nearby. She found Dallas Jews spread out and its customs unfamiliar. She moved back and forth between Panama and Dallas through her teens and college years, studying in Austin and at a local university, before meeting her husband, a Californian who had also lived in Dallas and Venezuela. After marrying, they lived in the Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles, where their daughter Frida was born, then returned to Dallas after 9/11 affected their business.
In Dallas, Ceci and her partner Ruthie launched a kosher catering business almost by accident, beginning with a Rosh Hashanah gathering and an architecture event. It grew from corporate accounts to community work such as brit milah celebrations and school and synagogue meals, eventually earning commercial kitchens at Texas Torah Institute and Akiva Academy and approval from Dallas Kosher. Ceci credits the business's success to hard work, passion, and God. Deeply committed to her faith, she became Shomer Shabbat and drew inspiration from strong women in her family, including her mother, her grandmother Cecilia, and her aunts. She hopes above all to remain united with her children and grandchildren, wherever life leads.
Full Transcript
hello there good afternoon my name is joe reingold today is tuesday march 3rd 2020 and i'm interviewing ceci katz for the one story project viva shalom good afternoon sassy hi tell us a little bit about your origin where your grandparents were from if you know where your parents grew up and then where you grew up in a little bit about your early life so my grandparents from both sides of my family are from aleppo syria um from my father's side they have immigrated my grandfather yahuwah last name she married into the avali and so yehuda and sarah were born in aleppo syria in the early 1800s then my grandfather moshe abadi was born in aleppo syria but they immigrated to palestine and in the 1900s my grandfather was born like 1867.
in the 1900s um they immigrated from like my grandfather came to panama my my my grandfather who was the shoheid in one of the provinces in paramount and he was also he used to lead the services they used to call him so he wasn't a certified rabbi but he was the haha or the rabbi of the community in one of the provinces in panama called chiriki and that's from my oh and he married my grandmother in israel who was his first cousin and he brought her with my aunt sarah and my uncle leon to panama they were born in israel and then the rest of
his children who are eight and one of them is my father who's the youngest were born in panama in shiriki so then that's where my father's side how did they pick panama from israel uh you know what panama was a trade the panama canal just opened it was a trade opportunity you know israel was not jewish i mean it was a jewish land but it wasn't under jewish control so um i don't know why they left i know that there was a lot of money to be made in panama i'm not sure why my si my my side of the family from my father's side
left i think it was because of the prosperity of panama and so he came he brought his wife and two kids and then the rest of my family was born in panama all my uncles and aunts there's four four and four so my father had a total of eight siblings so that family is pretty much rooted in panama with now my my grandparents have great great great grandchildren in panama it's amazing like from all the roads my mother's side of the family my grandfather the hameem came directly from a level syria like he went from aleppo to panama with his brother shinomu to basically do
start commerce and make money when he was ready to marry he wanted an olympian jewish girl so he flew to mexico and somebody pointed out at my at a baseball game they pointed out my grandmother sepi which i'm named after cecilia in spanish 17 in hebrew or in arabic it's short it's a like a nickname for esther and they showed him oh that's uh you know jose ashar's daughter over there and he liked her and then he went to talk to my great grandfather and basically said i want to marry your daughter and they got married two weeks later and they were married all the
way until my grandfather passed away they you know we celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary it was amazing anyways he flew my grandmother well first to brooklyn when they first got married because um since he had an import export business in panama with his brothers he was a buyer in new york and then they would buy for panama and so he lived in new york for about 10 years and my mom and my uncle and my aunt they were all born in new york when my mom was around 10 they moved to panama so my grandfather went to panama first when he got married he moved
to new york then he went back to panama so my grandfather is one of also eight which also has deep he brought all his family from syria all the way to panama and we have also the branches of the homsani rooted you know very strong in panama you know that he also brought his parents um ezra and um beautiful or linda in spanish and so they have my great-grandparents have the roots of in the branches of eight great-great-great grandchildren that are all in panama we all know each other that we're family it's it's just unbelievable and my also from mexico has her olympian roots because
my great-grandfather came from aleppo syria to mexico married my great-grandmother masala he's a child she's hungry and they're in mexico and they had seven siblings my grandmother had seven siblings which none of them are alive anymore my last uncle alberto just passed away a month ago he was the last of the siblings but they were amazingly beautiful and happy and loving and anyways i'm not sure if you want to know so much it's wonderful but um it's really an amazing family the mexican family and uh anyways was that paused anyway so that's that's my background i'm a syrian panamanian jew okay and what how was
your how was your schooling how what did you enjoy what kind of interest did you have growing up there well in panama where i'm from most of the jews go to the same school i mean back then there was only one jewish day school so the jewish people really didn't have an option to go anywhere else they just went to the jewish day school and we went to the jewish youth groups and we were one community whether it was ashkenazi zephardic i mean of course the safari syrian or whatever you're going to call us if we're safari they were the dominating community force in padam
but we lived among the ashkenazim and we lived among you know a lot of different communities turkish lebanon and egypt but we didn't really separate the community everybody was a jew there's not a lot of jews so you know you'd rather marry one of these not like when we came to america then i realized that our customs were different and uh and i didn't understand that they were different jews because we were the dominating community it's like if you put one of the ashkenazi jews in panama and they're like wow i didn't know that jews did this you know so it was a beautiful community
a lot of beautiful people growing up the rabbis are still like um some of the the teachers that were there some of them are still there it's amazing they you know my mother had some of my teachers she also went to the same school and you know it's just generation through generation and also one of the rabbis that taught my me mishna which is amazing i love connections one of my he passed away rabbi doge we used to call him rabbi deutch i'm sure it's dutch but because that's and he was my missionary teacher and my son now in this in the present well he
his grandchild was in my son's yeshiva and there was that connection when he came over and he was you know raleigh deutsche you know grandson sitting at my table and then when he graduated last year his mother made it a point to come over to my house to meet me because of the fact that not only touched me but he touched my grandmother and a lot of people in panama this rabbi touched so basically the connection that extended to dallas through rabbi doge is amazing and there's a lot of connections like that in panama you know from this community we're all really connected to a
lot of things in the world a lot of people a lot of jews a lot of everything so were you in any jewish youth groups or jewish classes or anything besides your hebrew day school yeah and i was in a jewish group called nuert noir macabre panama it was amazing it's it was divided by by age groups and you became it was a very zionist group you became a team and a group and united together and walking together in the vanguard of judaism and the jewish people and the israel and it i think it gave us a lot of of ruach for judaism to bring
it into the diaspora of panama because panama is very uprooted in the jewish community so coming to dallas it's pretty much like being in the diaspora of panama not the diaspora of israel it's very it was a very hard transition for me in that sense yeah what did you do after high school um after high school i actually i went to mexico for a couple of months i lived with one of my relatives and i came back to dallas i was back and forth then i went to college in austin for a couple of like three years and after austin i came back to dallas
did one year here at utv and then i went to panama to live right after um i i always was attracted i mean i didn't i didn't do all of my years of school here my my mother moved here when i was 10. she said we were only staying here for a couple of years so after two years i said okay we're ready i'm ready to go back so my mother said we're staying and i said i'm not so i grabbed my bags and i went to move with my father and my and his new wife my stepmother was currently married to him um and uh you know i lived in panama as a teenager thank god and kept planting my roots there and then i did finish high school here the last two years of high school i finished them here and then i went on to do the
american style of the college thing and then i went back to panama and i stayed there for a couple of years and then um i don't know what happened but i moved back my mother's here so i moved back to dallas and back to panama dallas and one of those back and forth i met my husband who was also back and forth because he's from california so he also was brought here as a teenager and he didn't like it and he went back to california and you know to live with his grandparents a couple of times back and forth back and forth you know goes
back and forth me and my husband met and we dated and then i don't know what happened and he got transferred to california for business and so we kind of broke up and i went back to panama and then my husband called me and he's like i'm still thinking about you and blah blah blah and i said you know if you want me come and get me and he flew to panama and he asked for my hand in marriage and that's how i came back to the united states and where did you both settle when you first came back we first when i first married
we lived in l.a and my daughter frida was actually born in santa monica and but we lived in the pico robertson area where the jewish people lived but my doctor was in santa monica and and then after a couple years um 9 11 happened and the businesses were going down and my mom was in dallas and my mom said come and you know i have a duplex you could stay here until you guys pick up and so we decided to you know come back to dallas and settle here where he used to live here and i used to live here so it wasn't foreign how
did your mom make the decision to come here when was that and what was dallas like in your impression when you first came here okay so when my mother decided to leave she had gotten divorced from my father i think she was divorced maybe three years into it and apparently it was one of the first divorces in the jewish community and the community wasn't they didn't really know how to take it and i think that she needed to get out and my uncle joey homsani her brother he went to ut austin and then after ut and he's american of course because he lived in he
was born in new york so he went to ut austin after ut austin he came to dallas for two years to work at uh mutual of omaha right next to akiba right in front same building right in front of the medinas in insurance he's an engineer and he told my mother he's single so i'm sure he had a lot of fun so he told my mother come there's a community this is nice blah blah blah so we came so my mother grabbed her bags and trusted my uncle and she came to dallas and two years or one year into us being he went back to
panama so i mean but there was a time where all of her siblings came to live in dallas but then they all left and my mom stayed so my my impression of dallas was very i didn't understand it i didn't understand what to do my mother my mother came to the jcc the first thing she did and said where are the jewish day schools and they said there's no jewish day schools so my mother put us in public which we've never been used to being with you know not jewish kids i mean back then there were non-jewish kids in our school but they were the
minority and it was only because it was you know the government the military you know for us to have a jewish day school we had to allow non-jewish kids in school that was part of the panamanian deal to let them have the so we so i did have the minority of my class was not jewish which i still have a relationship with them and everything but it was a jewish day school so we knew who the jews were and we knew who the non-jews were we went to school me and my sister we didn't know who the jews were we didn't know anything um it
was passed over and i met this little jewish girl and i started following it was passover she was eating everything in the line and i came back to the house and i told my uncle joey was with us at the time because we just got here and then i said i think that the food at the school is kosher for pesos because she was eating everything and my uncle joey said i have to let you know something about the jewish people of the united states they don't follow everything and i'm like what what do you mean it's pesach you can't eat that the jewish community
here was a very hard community to understand because nobody lived near each other everybody was spread we became members of the jcc me and marcy my sister marcie we used to come to the classes we used to do karate and stuff like that twin twin activities and it was nice but the jcc back then was empty it wasn't it didn't have a lot of life a lot of jews didn't really participate it was like it dwindled down that i didn't know where the jews were like my mom would ask where the jews was like oh all the way through preston well prison is a very
long street um when data came to dallas i mean chabad was here and it was great but really when data came to dallas and started their key roof program is when i started noticing that communities through torah started building and that's how the communities in dallas started becoming stronger maybe they were always there but if you're not old dallas you're not going to know the system in panama everybody lives and they'll go to the same schools they'll go to the same schools they we're all living in the same area here that wasn't around the only religious place was to ferret israel now we weren't religious
back then but we had torah values that's the difference in the olympian community is that a lot of us grow up with torah as a lifestyle not even knowing that it's torah like it's not that we study or anything it's just we live torah like normal you know we know about meat and male can we know about that we're not supposed to write a shabbat and we're not supposed to even if we don't do it we know we're not supposed to do this and we're not supposed to do that we're supposed to do this oh and this is how we do this and this is
how we do that but it's not taught to us that this is torah this is just something that i grew up with that was instilled in my life and when you come here and there's we didn't know where the community i personally didn't understand the community my sister joined bbyo and she had a great time since i went back to panama to live i didn't really join bbyo i just went like at the end of it and when i when i went back when i came as a teenager my last two years of high school i ended up becoming friends with the mexican with the
mexican community the jewish mexican community that just moved to dallas and we were on the same boat because we all we all related to each other we all kind of had the same lifestyle jewish day schools jewish youth groups we didn't understand the american system and we all joined maybe well a lot of them did stay in bbyo all the way me and my girlfriends we joined bbyo we were like we don't understand this what is this about we just sit there and do nothing i mean i'm sure it's a great program but we come from a totally different world and so i didn't i
didn't proceed with bby or my sister went all the way like she she got into it she went to the conventions this and that i remember that the mexican group threw a gentleman called moshe started like a maccabi style with the zoa masala coa right here on saturdays we used to meet and we got a group of children together and we we were doing good thoughts like in panama and mexico groups age group wise we were madrid we remember him i even brought some friends of mine or like that were not even latin that were american to be a part of it um some israelis
were part of it that the ghanis were a part of it you know neil degani rosie the ghani they we were all a part of this masada zoa thing which was a concept from latin america from the norman cavi and i think they have a nuance and they have a magazine they have two groups over there one is nua and the other one is makawi and they have scouts and they have other groups mexico is a larger community for than panama back then well even now but back then panama was very small now we have three-day schools and and uh you know a yeshiva and
ebay iaco so we we have like a lot and the day schools go all the way to 12th grade it's not like only middle school what else dallas was hard but like i said dada came brought torah and built a community with the community came the kashrut with the community came a lot of other things which have put dallas on the map for jewish communities which is a good thing but back then it was nothing no i mean i'm sure it was beautiful for the dallas communities that grew up here that know dallas but for a jewish latin syrian girl because the got like my
friends the ashkenazi mexicans and everything there's a lot of them that stayed and they integrated very well well i think it's also because the ashkenazi world is their world and this isn't our world this we're syrian jews is it totally different than moroccan totally different than persians so that's how come i think it cost me a little bit more than others how did your husband integrate into the sephardic world since i'm sure he was not raised to party was he no listen my husband was he was brought up very reformed so he didn't really have a lot of background thank god he did go through
jewish day school like one semester or one year or something so he said that he was raised like he around israeli zionist people that were teaching him torah in the sephardic way so he got a little bit of that he also lived in venezuela for three years in his childhood so he has a little bit of latin flair um but he was very attracted to my family whenever we went back to visit and very attracted to the olympian community and so he's because he used to die you know when he goes to panama he dobbins with them he mingles with them and he was he
got really attractive to the olympians community and he's read a lot of books about adam sowa and the ishibot and everything and the great rabbis and you know the great the rabbi that was heading panama ciolevi he was which means he studied partners with obadiah josef which is the great rap which was the great rabbi of israel for a long time and levy was named great rabbi of panama by obadiah i mean we come from a very high level community and my husband was very attracted to that is very attractive that he still reads about it he loves our food i i cook i used
to i don't do it anymore but when i first got married syrian food every shabbat i don't have the time anymore so i do most of the stuff for my catering and unfortunately in dallas a lot of people don't ask for syrians so we learn how to do moroccan [Laughter] tell us about how you got started with your business oh my goodness our business was from shaman our business it was not something we planned at all me and my partner ruthie she was doing rosh hashanah in her house and i went to help her and started doing all these little things then my sister was
an architect came over and she said this is amazing i'm having an aia the american institute of architecting an aia event for 100 people and i really would love for you guys to cater it and we only have a thousand dollars and me and ruthie like a thousand dollars wow sound like a lot and we did it and everybody was impressed and they hired us again and not only that um not only the aia hired us again but home depot and the city of dallas we were cooking out of our house the city of dallas home depot univision the television place we had a lot
of corporate accounts and we were all doing it out of ruthie's house because i wasn't married and she was she had a house i was living with my parents with my mom and then after that we stopped doing it because i got married and she had a baby and i left dallas and um and then when i came back to dallas from california our friends started to have babies and they were starting to call us for the brit milan and so me and ruthie started up again but this time instead of doing corporate we started doing community like read milan and and then some of
our friends were in levine academy so they called us to do their um their pta lunches or dinners and that torah used to call us for the shabbat dinners for the community but every time we did something we had to like carry all the stuff all the all the ingredients and everything and me and ruthie would do everything and then afterwards me and ruthie would wash dishes and we did everything and i didn't know how to sleep and she didn't know how to mop so i wouldn't mop and she would sweep it was like we did everything until one time we decided she's like you
know what maybe this year we should hire help just to wash the dishes and clean the floors and then after after that event that uh that we hired hope we looked at each other's like what were we thinking that we didn't do this before me and you washing dishes and mopping the floors so anyways i told ruthie one day i said ruthie because we started getting really busy from a lot of people a lot of communities we've done you know and we used to have to go to each you know to each synagogue to cook with our ingredients it was getting hard i said touristy
one day i said you know if we don't get a kitchen we're not gonna grow we need to like figure out how to get a kitchen and she's like and she told me she said we will get a kitchen when the right time is to get a kitchen three months later to the date i'm not kidding three months later after i mentioned that to ruthie i remember we were in the car in dallas imagine we were in the car in davenport texas torah institute the yeshiva that my son attends to they called me because they were starting a new yeshiva they i mean they were
they were out of ohio but they were starting a new building they built a new building for yeshiva and they needed somebody to run their kitchen and i said well i need if you're gonna let me run the kitchen i need you know i have a catering company and they said yes of course you that's why we called you because we heard you were a caterer and so that was our first commercial kitchen and of course we weren't on the va we were not under the va so we tried to get under va's but since it was a small kitchen it was they didn't approve
us so we weren't really able to sell a lot of things to the community but it was like mostly local families that were wanting food etc and we still had to if we wanted to do about event we still had to rent out the or hatora kitchen back then it was a community kitchen which was but but you know people were starting to get to know as we would do things of the yeshiva etc so we that was our first commercial kitchen i was able to sign up for my vendors i signed up tti for their vendors and at the same time i said okay
since you're signing tti sign up my company all the vendors u.s food say uh fact that it was twin state poultry i mean every time i had to sign up tti for something i would sign up my company i got my health permit i got my my handling food permits i got all everything was under control like for me to work at tti so i think three years after that akiva academy approached us that they were looking for a new caterer and we got interviewed and i was able to tell them you know when they were asking all these questions i was like well here's
my handling permit we have this vendor we have that vendor we have that vendor it wasn't like i was thinking that we were gonna be interviewed i just wanted to have my own vendor so i don't have to take from texas torah so like if i need to buy meat i'm going to buy it with my account not with texas stores account but it just so it worked out that hashem was planning for us to have this so we can move up to another kitchen which we did thank god we're very thankful that keep academy opened the doors for us and um and after a
while we were able to have the of that the ba of dallas the dallas kosher approve our kitchen and we hired and by the hashem this wasn't from us this i mean it was just word of mouth we never advertised nothing when it was just word of mouth word of mouth they liked us they hired us they liked us they hired us it was unbelievable and it's all from hashem i mean it's like i can't tell you that i built the business because i feel like he gives it to us and we do as much as we can we work hard we have passion we
love what we're doing we love to do this for the community and we we have a lot of passion in how we create and everything because we love it and we're very happy to help attend to the community and be of service to the community but we can't do that if hashem doesn't send us for nasa so it's really a combination of hashem us i am very thankful to hashem for giving us this business that was that has been very successful more than we thought thank god and that's how we started this business it was through do you think you'll stay here or do you
want to go back to panama you know i want to go where hashem is going to take me my daughter moved to israel and i just have to take it year by year and see where hashem takes my family because my goal in life is to be united with my children and grandchildren and if they're not going to be here i'm not planning on staying in a place by myself to go visit my grandchildren i i pray to hashem that my children stay together i mean i know that my daughter went to israel and maybe one out of three i can take but i don't
think that i can separate the rest i mean if two want to go to israel maybe we're all supposed to go to israel maybe three marry here i stay here my daughter will just visit we have to see how life takes us i can't decide today what i'm doing tomorrow it's all in the hands of god it all depends about my children i'm not going to be i didn't live i didn't work this hard to be alone without my children my grandchildren that's my goal in life you've been here you've been back and forth to dallas for a long time um how do you see
the city changing how has it changed from when you first came here until now well there is more awareness of torum i mean one of those times that i moved to i became shabbat because my family was some of them worship which i've had so now i live with my grandmother cecilia who i'm named after and she was a very religious woman and and so i got attracted to torah the torah lifestyle that i didn't have in dallas and um my cousins were shomer and some of them were some of whom weren't but you know we would all get together at my aunt's house for
my father's side and even the cousins that weren't so much about they would go in the afternoon and we were all there together it was the most beautiful lifestyle and i was so happy to be a part of it then i moved back to my to dallas with my mom and it was saturday and my mom and my sister went they they didn't they weren't show her and i stayed by myself and i'm like okay well you know i'm not doing this by myself i mean i'm very honest i'm like this is not for me this is a family thing i'm not going to be
sure myself by myself to be bored so i said when the the day that i get married i'm going to be shocked about and so dallas has come a long way dallas has is growing in the awareness of torah and i'm very happy about that um there's a lot more to go the community of dallas needs to be taught doesn't need to be cross that one out please the community of dallas has a lot to grow in torah they can learn more they can grow more they can be more aware of i mean i have i i don't i don't like the separations of the
conservative reform and the orthodox i do not like that i like us to be all jews some of them are religious some of them are not some of them are in the middle everybody has their own growing path that's how i feel everybody is in their own level and we're all drawing and it's all about having a relationship with hashem i have my relationship with hashem you have your relationship with hashem and it's being aware that hashem did give us the torah for us to grow with him there's a lot of things in the torah it's not just about uh there's a moussar there's growing
within yourself doing good things doing tests and different kinds it all it's all good anything that you do and giving a little bit of him he wants you to like candles and shabbat do it for hashem he wants you know i'm not talking about going all the way to show me or anything because i know some people think it's hard and but dallas is starting to get a lot of restaurants and by the question of a lot of catering companies and we can facilitate a lot of the things that are jewish families jewish community needs to have a jewish way of life without sounding too
politically incorrect you can cross that one out too that's it's all right do you have someone that you would say you could point to and say they were a role model for you well my mother is a very strong woman and i love her she has you know been there she never gave up and my grandmother cecilia was also very strong woman she had a lot of insight that throughout the days i would say oh my grandmother used to say this oh my grandmother said that my aunt sada my mommy may they all rest in peace great women great role models my aunt sarah was
a pioneer in the jewish community of panama she would go and take kosher food to the to the there's sometimes like israeli women would come to panama and do drugs and then they would go to prison and she would go to the prisons to give the jewish community the jewish women the food she was in the hirakadesha she was my aunt sarah she just passed away in november and she would also be very involved with the government of panama trying to make sure that the streets are good that everything is planted raising i mean she was very involved with everything that had to do with
the community jewish and panamanian and also my aunt mommy um you know she used to she used to like do a lot for the community like she would go and every like rosh hashanah she would go and take the silver cleaner she would clean all the sephora toras from the from the one synagogue we had then when we opened the second synagogue she would go to the two synagogues and then it became like my cousins would go with her my you know all the great grandchildren and then now it became a community thing that everybody signs up to go clean the safer torahs and my
great my aunt mommy started that so like my family is a very rooted strong family in panama my mother's a very strong woman and she's one of my role models because she she did it herself she got out and she did it herself and she survived she's a survivor and i love her for that so i have to learn from many many women in my life many women in my life it's wonderful is there anything else sassy that you would like to add before we end at all it i mean you're good i'm good all right everything is good we're happy to have you wonderful
thank you you