Joe Saraviego
Joe Saraviego's family story spans several countries. All four of his grandparents were born in Turkey, in what is now considered Istanbul and its surrounding areas. In the 1920s or early 1930s his grandfather set out for the United States, stopping in Cuba to visit a relative, and ended up staying there. His grandmother followed, they married in Cuba, and both of Joe's parents were born on the island. His father came from a very small town where Joe's grandfather ran the town's general store, and as a young boy his father was sent to boarding school, riding the bus each week and longing to return home. When the family left Cuba after Castro came to power, they had to leave their possessions behind, and Joe's grandfather famously hollowed out the soles of two shoes and filled them with diamonds to carry what wealth he could to the United States.
Joe's father lived in the United States while attending Georgia Military Academy in Atlanta and North Carolina State University, becoming a permanent resident in 1961 through political asylum granted to that wave of Cuban immigrants. His mother came to Dallas after standing in the immigration line in Miami, where she was given a small sum of money and a plane ticket because her brother was already living there. His parents knew each other through the Sephardic Jewish community, and when his father finished college he came to Dallas, reconnected with Joe's mother, and married her. Rabbi Klein of Temple Emanu-El stepped up to marry them when they could not afford a wedding, a kindness that made the congregation especially dear to the family.
Joe was born at Medical City and grew up in Dallas, playing neighborhood sports and attending Akiba, ISD schools, and private school before graduating and heading to college in Arizona, where he studied mechanical engineering and business. He joined his father's machinery business, which his father had started as a young man. He met his wife Lauren Umansky at a wedding in December 2002 and knew right away she was the one; they married in Washington, D.C. The couple settled in Dallas and remain active members of Temple Emanu-El and the JCC, where Joe still sees people he grew up with. He speaks with great pride of his marriage and of raising their two boys, describing Dallas as a very large small town and one of the most welcoming communities anywhere.
Full Transcript
good morning good afternoon my name is joe reingold and i'm here interviewing joe sobriego today is thursday august 2020 and joe it's a pleasure to have you here welcome welcome thank you for having me yeah yeah tell us um a little bit about your background start let's start with if you know anything about where your grandparents were from where they lived what they did for a living and then your parents and then we'll we'll worry about coming up to your age your your time a little bit later yeah so um all four of my grandparents were born in turkey um kind of scattered out in
various what is considered istanbul now but different suburbs of istanbul and um in the i would say in the 20s or early 30s my grandfather made was on his way to um was trying to get to the united states and he had a relative in cuba and he stopped in cuba to say i guess to stay with him for a while or or for like a better term say hello and he but his his destination was america and um once he got to cuba he kind of got stuck there he was very young um uh got on the ship by himself and and ended up
in cuba um my my grandmother uh shortly after that followed and as i understand the story they were married in cuba um and my my parents were both born in cuba and when castro came along in 19 he came along in 59 but things got a little bit more difficult in 60 61 um until my parents came to the us permanently my dad what he was living in cuba but he was actually my grandfather was able to send him to boarding school in the us so my dad was physically living in the us but he's still a resident of cuba um but my dad came
became you know came to the u.s permanently in 61. where did they send him what school was it what state he went to georgia military academy in atlanta oh okay and then from there he went to north carolina state university was it did he did he do the road to um citizenship early on uh he did i think i'm i'm a little fuzzy on how all that happened um but i think early on it was not like it is today and and they were um they basically got political asylum because of everything that was going on in cuba and that wave of cuban immigrants was not a very i don't think it was a very
difficult process okay um you asked about my grandfather and what my grandparents did for a living my dad um was from a very very small town called in cuba um i actually went to visit a few years ago and when he says small it's very very small um no paved roads anything like that and my grandfather owned a store in the town it was the town convenience store i call it convenience store because it's the size of a convenience store but it was a department store it was where you got everything and uh my grandfather was very industrious and and he decided to be you
know it was worth living in a small town to to have a business where basically everybody came to him and and there too my my dad when he was a very young boy i'm talking seven eight years old he was sent off to he was sent off to boarding school in cuba um for his education and and uh would come home every weekend and you know something that when we were there that struck me you know my dad's kind of one of those tough guys and never seen him cry a whole lot um maybe once or twice when you know his parents passed away and
then the day that he was telling me the story that you know we're sitting on a bench in this town in cuba and he would tell me you know this little town you look at it it's really nothing there's nothing here but every time i would get on that bus to go to school i remember crying the entire way to school and on the way back i just remember being the happiest boy ever um just because i got to come home and see my friends and see my family and all that kind of stuff so um like like i said my grandfather owned a store
and very interesting story that i kind of glossed over was when they came from cuba my grandfather uh you know they basically the options stay in cuba and give everything you earned to the government or you can leave leave everything you owned to the government but you gotta you gotta leave here with the clothes on your back you can't take anything you own with you so my grandfather went to a shoemaker and had this shoemaker hollow out the soles of two shoes and he went and bought as many diamonds as he could and filled the soles of shoes with with diamonds and and basically got
an airplane and came to the us with the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet so where did you grow up i grew up here in dallas born in medical city still live five miles from from where uh where i grew up most of my life so so tell us how did they make the decision to come here how did that happen so when um when everybody left cuba and ended up in miami you basically stood in line and as i understand it you stood in line and when you got to the end of the line they would tell you they would
say do you have a family in the u.s and my mom had a brother that was living in dallas and they gave her you know a small sum of money i think it was 20 or something like that and a plane ticket to come to dallas and my dad who they knew each other through the jewish community because my dad who grew up in this very small town university does my mom who grew up in a small town called my mom's town being much larger than my my dad's but still a small town the jewish community kind of knew each other especially the people that
came from you know similar that had a similar path so as i mentioned before my my mom's parents my dad's both turkish and there was um there was events or things that they tried to do in order to get the families together so that they could marry off their children and so my my parents weren't part of that but they knew each other from that from that um those those relationships between the families so my dad my mom used to say well my dad was in military school my mom used to send my dad the stories that i've heard that that she would send him
love letters dallas and perfume as a very young girl you know 11 12 13 years old and my dad always just never thought anything of it but then when my dad graduated from college and he found out that my mom was here and there was some other relatives here my dad um came to dallas and met up with her and showed me there after they uh they got married what was your mom's uh how was her journey here her family how did they get to dallas and why uh her brother her brother was the only one that was here um i think he just left
cuba kind of earlier than the castro thing happened and um i really don't know the answer to that i think he just had an opportunity he probably knew somebody that could get him a job and and you know i think that's what you did back then so do you have any relatives still in cuba that you know we have some distant cousins like my dad's um my dad's first cousin um was he recently passed within the past couple years and um so his kids and and so some second and third cousins but nobody that we have really you know if if you um if you
stayed in cuba you were considered you know for for the castro regime and this particular cousins of my father's um actually did work directly for the castro regime and became you know uh a leader in in the communist party and so my dad and my aunts and uncles that all abandoned uh cuba um were considered traitors so that the relationship kind of severed at that point and um so the relationship between the families was not was not very solid um in later years obviously as everybody got older and maybe wiser um when i went to cuba to visit you know i wanted to go to
cuba to see it obviously and also i wanted to be toured around by my parents i didn't want to be toured around by a tour guide that would show me all the historical sites and i wanted to see where my parents came from and uh so i uh went with my mom my dad one of my sisters and my brother-in-law lauren and i had small kids at the time you know a couple years old and it just didn't seem right um it was a little nerve-wracking to take them with us so they stayed behind um but we were there for a week and we toured
around and we actually did have lunch with my dad's first cousin okay have they ever been here have they tried to come here to visit um i think his daughter actually lived in new york for a little while she was on uh she was a musician i think and she was touring around and um but if you leave for a purpose such as that and you try to stay i think it's it's it was a negative impact for the family that that's still at home so she ended up going back okay so let's backtrack for just a minute and tell us a little bit about
your life growing up here in dallas what kind of activities did you have how was your schooling what things were you involved in so growing up like i mentioned i grew up um in dallas played played all the sports um it was a real neighborhood kid loved to play with kids around the neighborhood grew up going to several schools i had some learning disabilities that i think were not quite as well understood or accepted back then and so i kind of moved around schools thinking that the schools were the problem when i was really the problem um or just hadn't found the right solution um
i went to akiba until third grade and then after that went to um the isd schools and then ended up in private school for a while and graduated from pierce and then from there when went on to arizona [Music] temple emmanuel hebrew school uh one thing i'd like to mention is one of the one of the things that's really near and dear to our heart here in dallas is temple emmanuel because from cuba um they had a hard time finding a rabbi that would marry them because they didn't have the money and rabbi klein from temple manual stepped up and basically did whatever he had
to help them and married them attempt at a manual and so grew up going to temple manual still members there today okay you mentioned arizona i assume that's where you went to college i did okay can you tell us a little bit about what did you study in college and what kind of work did you do after college so i studied mechanical engineering and um business uh at arizona um after school uh my dad my dad when um he was a young man in his early 20s started a business building machinery and one of you know he had always kind of raised me uh in
that environment and around heavy tools and and and heavy machinery and and he really wanted me to join his business i had some other aspirations or thoughts of what i could do and um he convinced me he was very he still is a very convincing man and uh makes me like the right thing to do is join the family business and so that's that's what i what's been doing here okay so we heard from your wife but now you tell us how did you meet your spouse your wife where did you decide to settle to live well what did she tell you i can't tell
you that it's privileged um we met we met at a wedding we met at josh stern and hillary chrysler's wedding at the westin galleria um it was december 29 2002 um and my my cousin is it was a groom's brother-in-law and he actually called and said you know i was at the rehearsal dinner last night i met this girl like you've got to be at the wedding be there you know dress your best because this is the girl you're going to marry and i i said well okay sounds super interesting what's her name and he told me her first and last name lauren umansky and
i said you know i think i went to college with her brother um and lauren's brother mike is very tall and you know he's very tall and i'm not very tall um and i said you know i know her i know i know mike and if she looks anything like mike i'm not interested hopefully he doesn't see this um but he's already heard that story and uh um so we i went to i went to the wedding and when we were at the ceremony we were at sheriff israel and i saw this beautiful girl walking down the hallway and immediately i knew nobody had pointed
her out nobody told me what she looked like nothing and i when i saw her i was like wow she's gorgeous and that's got to be so i saw her in the hallway it was for me it was love for a sight um and then we left and went to the party after we got to the party um my cousin came to me and goes hey i want to introduce you to that girl i was telling you about and he walked me right up right up the line which was the overall i hadn't seen in the hallway and we talked for a little bit and
then uh the rest is history we decided to settle in dallas because you know i had she had moved around a little bit here and there i was she was in graduate school and i was already involved in my family business and pretty well on my way and pretty dug into dallas and so she she came here right after she graduated from uh gw and um you know one thing led to another we were we were engaged within i think nine months after we met and then we had like it was about a year and a half engagement and then we got married in fairmount
in dc since you were born here what kind of changes have you seen from dallas the city civically jewishly anything that you can describe from when you were young until now as a married man um i think that dallas is i don't know i can speak for sure for now for the for what's going on now i think dallas is one of the most welcoming communities um you know lauren's involved in real estate and she meets a lot of people that come here from other cities and states and the inclusiveness that is dallas is second to none um i think that you know when new
people come to dallas um there's just so many open arms inviting people in and you know introducing them to other jewish families and inviting them to shabbat dinners that um i don't know if that means if that was as if it was the same you know 20 30 years ago um the the jewish community has definitely gotten and again i don't know if this is just because i've gotten older and i've met so many people throughout the years um but for me it's very interesting because a lot of the people that i see at bar and bought mexico's or weddings um or at temple or
wherever at the jccc are people that i grew up with you know go to the jcc and run into laura seymour who was the camp director when i was a camper actually she's you know the camp director for my kids i don't know if that answers your question but but you know it's kind of like when you see a kid growing up every day you don't watch them really grow but when you don't see them for a while you can see a major difference so i guess i've seen it you know throughout the years and i've seen it i've seen dallas as the city grow
and become much more vibrant and um more of you know i think it's always been a major city in the us but i feel like lately it's it's become more of a what you know what i it used to be new york la i think dallas is kind of in that mix it's a it's a i've always told people it is a very large small town that's a good description yeah and are you and your wife are you separately involved in anything civically and or jewishly besides temple emanuel um lauren is much more involved than i am um she's you know she's the best social
butterfly that i know she you know she can work a room with the best of them so um she's involved she's on the uh jccc board and the temple manual board um we're involved a little bit we have a lot of friends and and i'm very close with rabbi debrosky at the bottom dallas but we're not members um just because we we associate more with temple manual but i would say the answer to that is jcc temple manual is okay what would you consider something that you are very proud of in your life there's lots of things i i think that um you know one
of the things i feel like one of the most important things that you can do in life and one of the things that we talk to our children about regularly is you know choosing the right partner um and i feel like i've chose the right partner lauren we've we have two boys um that you know we watch them interact with other people and and in certain situations and just super proud of you know i think typically you'd say i'm super proud of my children but i'm super proud of us for for how we are raising them um and i i give lord a lot more
credit than i do myself um but i i think you know we we say that our family is like a little special thoughts a little you know you put too much of this in a little too much of that in it and it throws off the flavor but our little fortune is pretty special that's wonderful is there anything else joe that you would like to add that we haven't mentioned or that you'd like to put into this interview um not that i can think of okay well we're proud that you grew up here and have a good perspective of the whole thing really so i
thank you very much for your time and good luck with everything thank you very much appreciate you guys taking the time okay thank you for what you're doing this is super important i don't know that i'm super important but you know i know there's a lot of wonderful people in dallas that their stories uh definitely need to be told and and carried on throughout the year so thank you for watching tell people please that it's not just native born dallas sites that we're interviewing we interview anybody that's lived here for a while we're more than welcome to do we're happy to do that so okay
wonderful all right thank you so much you