Full Transcript
joe reinbold again and i am interviewing natanyaker and today is sunday november 15 2020 so i want to start with good afternoon let me let me hear about where your country of origin was and how your family got there and what what else you know about your grandparents and your parents living there okay i was originally born in south america and colombia in the capital botan my father came from romania in the 1918 1920 right after the water after the war my grandparents obviously live in romania they were really during the holocaust they kept all the kids or their kids were able to come out
uh two uncles went to new york one and went to israel and another one went to new york also so they basically survived and the reason why they survived is because they came to uh either united states or latin america to make money to send back home because that was in those days what the jewish kids did like the mexicans do today coming into the country to help the family and that's the reason why they all survived they came earlier my mother parents my grandparents were in poland and uh they used to supply meat to the polish army so my grandfather knew a lot of
people uh of influence in the military and they started telling him in 37 that the nazis are coming my uncle uh also was a businessman and i had a bad experience with one of his employees and called him dairy jew the nazis are coming to kill you so they made the decision right then and this was uh the beginning of 39 before the before the invasion of poland and they just took a boat and left and that was the last boat that left poland the last one after that they didn't let them go anymore so they they were lucky they all survived but my grandparents
from my father died in the holocaust so my my my mother my my father came first came to peru he was 14 and he came with an ankle of his and then from peru they went to venezuela from venezuela to colombia they were just looking whatever was uh ambiance to do business and their business were just selling schmattis in a horse carriage or in a mule going from one house to another my grandfather the only way that they were allowed to come to colombia to get the visa it was if they were going to work in the farms and being farmers and the shopkeepers in
poland they were allowed to come in as long as they went to a small town they went to town about three hours away from the second city medellin but the jewish community managing it wasn't very big but like anything else they always trying to help the fellow jews they were able to get them out of that small town after three months they paid the authorities so they started in meridian and then they moved to bogota they moved from bogota to meredith depending on the situation economical situation or the type of business they did and that's about so that's where you were born in bogota correct
i was born in bogota and then my parents moved to medellin so i grew up in medellin which is very infamous obviously for the dog cartel right but it's good now um and i went to school there we were about a thousand jews the synagogue was conservative but we didn't really have a very strong teaching we did bar mitzvah we all did bar mitzvahs and bad mitches but after that you didn't have that much religion education but we started going to this synagogue we we all fast we kept the holidays we kept the shabbat and then i went to medical school there in energy and
when i finished they were it was vietnam so there were a lot of need for doctors in the states and i remember somebody from harvard history professor was a doctor came to recruit doctors in colombia to be brought here so they just recruit the first 20 of each one of these schools and convince us and we just the majority of us came to america and then we just stayed here what city did you come to first i came to miami first i did an internship there because i couldn't speak english i still cannot speak perfect according to my wife but i can't i can't i
can understand okay yeah and then from miami i went to burton in new york and i did general surgery first and then i did three more three more years of plastic surgery i made rachel when i was in my plastic surgery training and then in a blind date and then my daughter was born in in 76 77 77 78 we came down here and i had asked your wife um if you had considered other cities and she said yes so tell me about that what was that like trying to decide on where to go well it all depends on where we have friends or relatives
so my first choice was miami obviously coming from colombia a lot of latins there i went down there to visit and there were too many plastic surgeons for my taste and my practice was very high as compared with other areas like dallas and fitness so then we looked into phoenix a good friend of mine was there i like the idea of phoenix but then rachel's brother lived in dallas and i had a cousin the pediatrician living in dallas too so when we came to visit dallas we just liked it my cousin said that the whole year is beautiful it was september so he told me
the whole year is like this she's obviously was trying to get me here so we decided to come down plus there was a lot of spanish community and i knew that would be helpful for my business did you know anybody else here besides your cousin and rachel's brother when you moved here nobody nobody else everybody just came and made the decision and start going and you set up your own practice right away yes yes i wanted to go to plano because it was a i could tell there was going to be something and there was only one plastic surgeon out there another jewish guy but
the road between campbell and part where it was stony road that was not even quite uh between between campbell and yeah so rachel said we're coming to new york and we have to drive in stones so i stay in richeson uh in arapahoe floyd there was a bunch of jewish pediatricians there that my cousin knew so they they didn't have space uh even planet didn't have any space for doctors it was just being developed so i got an office 650 square feet and i was able to put that three little examining rooms and small operating room and a couple of years later some of my
neighbors move so then i took over and they practiced grew that way when you first came here what organ what organizations or what things did you get involved in what hobbies or what professional groups or any if any well when you're a plastic surgeon and you have a family you don't know nobody all you do is work you work seven days a week so we joined the jcc and we joined the synagogue but i personally didn't have too many activities because of that and it takes long time to build up a practice especially when you're a foreigner and you don't know anybody so i didn't
know where the income was going to come from so probably took me about 15 20 years to be the big practice and then i started enjoying life a little bit more uh but pretty much what rachel told you jcc and the synagogue and the federation obviously we always have been very strong supporters of the synagogue and the federation you know how the synagogue we are in the rabbi's uh monthly rabbi block monthly donations he is a great guy so we support him do you have any do you still have any family left in colombia and if so do you ever get to visit them i
have very little my family because during the drug war problems uh they all moved to israel about 20 25 years ago so my sister my mother and my brother with their families they moved down uh eventually my mother died about 10 years ago 8 years ago but my brother's still there on my sister my sister has a daughter who has five boys they're all going to the army two of them already my brother had four kids boys all of them went to the army so we contributed being foreigners but we went to israel and we got in they all thank god survive the wars have
they been here to visit any of them yes because the ground actually those are my grand nephews my grand nephews every year they come and visit next year they couldn't come because they copied uh but yes and we go to israel uh every couple of years to colombia we didn't go for about 20 years because the but uh in the last 10 years we've been there twice and a lot of fun it's very safe today a lot of following in in the investments a beautiful place in the coast [Music] that's about the times we have gone okay tell us about some kind of work or
a project that you have done that's very important and memorable to you that you've accomplished in your life in my profession sure okay well basically uh what i enjoyed the most is taking care of young kids who have deformed noses or ears or faces uh cleft palates and then you make them normal again is to me the best accomplishment i've done or including breast reduction in young girls that to me is my biggest accomplishment the way i have taken care of my patients through the years yes of course my marriage was a great accomplishment too that's a great accomplishment yes um so we like to
hear from people just briefly what was dallas like when you got here and how do you see it now sure when dallas was in his 70s late 70s was basically a small cow town when we were in new york they prepare us and says what the hell are you gonna do you're gonna have to be riding in horses and use boots that's about it uh and it wasn't like that dallas was more a little more cosmopolitan than what we thought but the growth has been incredible incredible so explosive you got to play no frisco then you go to south lake is it's just really a
huge difference from the point of view judaism also has increased tremendously there's a lot of orthodox synagogues a lot of reform synagogues it has grown a lot i think in those days between fort worth and dallas we were maybe about 60 000 jews it has grown a lot right did you have you joined any uh organizations more recently i know you didn't have time early on when you got here but have you joined anything since not that i think if we just continue with the jccc and the federation and the synagogue uh yeah but as i said we're very strong supporters of habit right that's
pretty much it okay and so this is i love this question um do you have any role models in your life well yes i do the live one that i that i have is vivina i think he's a very smart man he's a good orator he has taken israel at the very difficult times and he's been able to keep it going and going and look what happened now we're making peace with the arabs that we haven't had in 2000 years so yes i think i mean it's he's controversial but to me the guy is a hero as good here was his brother who would kill
him in tubby and uh a dead one always i have a lot of respect for teddy roosevelt again because his accomplishments because he was a non-nonsense man and he had tremendously this country just the fact that he created all the national parks uh that he told the spanish from cuba he gave us the panama canal so that that's my promo very good do you have any regrets at all leaving colombia and coming here to the united states no no i think america has taken good care of us you can profess your relation in here you could profess it down there too but there was no
jewish sky down there it was very small where we grew up so no i don't have any regrets okay that's good is there anything else to actually acre that you'd like to add to the interview no pretty much i think you guys are doing the right things it's a nice thing to keep is for the future for future generations i imagine that's what you're doing it for yes yes right well it'll be on our website and you'll get a copy of this so you know certainly can pass it down and show it to your family and that's one of the good things about it so
thank you very much we appreciate your time today for the grand grandkids hopefully one day they know their nose very very good okay thank you very much okay thanks a lot okay bye
