Sofia Poliak
Sofia Poliak was born and raised in Barranquilla, a port city on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Her paternal grandfather, Moises Naimark, came from Poland in the early 1930s seeking a better future, followed about two years later by his wife, Chawa, and her two sisters. On her mother's side, her grandparents Willy Bloch, a baker, and Meta left Germany in August 1938, obtaining a visa because Colombia was seeking bakers. Both families arrived knowing almost no one, spoke only Yiddish or German at first, and were met at the port by members of the small Jewish community. Moises built a furniture business called Florida, and Sofia's father, Jaime, born in 1935, left school at sixteen to help support the family and eventually founded his own furniture business.
Sofia grew up in a tight, loving community of roughly two hundred families, all centered on a single block that held the synagogue, the social club, and the Jewish school. She came to the United States for college, first attending the University of Texas at Arlington for two years, then studying occupational therapy at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, earning her degree in 1977. In Galveston, one of only a handful of Jews on the island, she met Jorge, a medical student from Argentina, through a mutual acquaintance. They married in Barranquilla on December 25, 1980, and settled in Dallas, where Jorge was completing his residency.
In Dallas, Sofia worked at Golden Acres and later in her husband's obstetrics and gynecology practice for twenty-nine years. The couple raised three children, Michelle, Jenny, and Aaron, all of whom attended Solomon Schechter, and now have several grandchildren. Michelle became a physician specializing in pain management and physical medicine, and Aaron pursued an orthopedic residency. Now retired, Sofia and Jorge share a passion for tandem bicycle riding, touring places such as Morocco, New Zealand, and Chile. Deeply family-oriented, they gather relatives for holidays and summer reunions, and Sofia carries forward the resilience of her grandparents, teaching her children the importance of Jewish tradition, tzedakah, and tikkun olam.
Repairing the world through charity and remembering the family's survival remain central to Sofia's outlook on Jewish life.
Full Transcript
i am interviewing sophia poliak for the one story at a time project viva shalom celebrating latin american jews in dallas good afternoon sophia well good afternoon panda will you please tell us where you are from originally i'm from barranquilla colombia south america and talk about when and why your family originally immigrated to okay my originally my grandparents came from germany and poland uh my grandfather from poland uh they came early 1930s because the situation was awful uh where they were from and he was looking for a better future he had just gotten married and he heard about names yes my grandfather was moises nymark and
my grandmother was eva abba or hawa okay his first name is moises m-y-m-o-i-s-e-s and his last name nymark n-a-i-m-a-r-k and he came from poland and uh he married my grandmother it's uh in spanish it's eva neymar eva but it's really java c-h-a-w-a that's how they spelled it uh and the last name she was once w-o-n's uh maiden name and married nightmark n-a-i-m-a-r-k they came my grandfather came first in the early 1930s looking for work his uh my grandmother had there were three sisters and she was the youngest uh their names were esther uh hunchey and then my grandmother is hava para brazili esther hance and
hafke they used to call her hafke that was her yiddish name they got married the three of them got married in poland and their husbands went to colombia immigrated to colombia first looking for a better life for themselves as jews and prosperity and they came why come on yeah and not sure about why colombia on that on the side of my father i'm not sure exactly why they went to they must have heard from somebody or the port was open where i'm from in varankhiya we have the puerto de colombia which is a uh and a port where you know ships would arrive i'm from
the car it's on the caribbean coast i am from the beach and we have a big port it's called and that's where the immigrants were coming from from all over the world that would arrive there and from there they would emigrate to all different places so maybe an opening came up for them that they were able to arrive in colombia i'm not sure that was in the early 1930s very early 1932 maybe um and then he came my grandfather came first and his brother-in-law's and then after about two years they made enough money to send to poland for the sisters to come to colombia and
then they came um and they started yes how did they make their money they started making the clippers they just went selling whatever they could throughout the whole first they had to learn the language because they spoke polish and they spoke yiddish they just booked you know yiddish monks themselves and uh when they arrived there were a few jews and i think mostly like syrian jews uh already in barranquilla very very sephardic community but it was very very small they arrived you know years two years before i think um and they must have had help from people uh no idea but they survived they were
they were hard workers in two years after my grandmother came i think um my grandfather got money from his brother-in-law and he started a furniture business what was the name of the furniture business like florida but it's really spanish florida he had this uh just a very small furniture store where he had all just maybe one or two employees who actually learn yiddish because that's all my grandfather spoke and eventually these employees from barranquilla that you know they had no idea what a jew looked like ended up learning yiddish because i had a communicated with my grandfather uh and he kept that business um until
they had they had three uh they had two sons and a daughter my father was the oldest his name and his name is jaime j-a-i-m-e and then a year late my father was born 1935 and then in 1936 they had jacobo j-a-c-o-b-o and then in 1939 they had elena which is h-e-l-e-n-a so they had three children uh when my father was 16 years old he stopped going to school and he started supporting the family he went and held my my grandfather with the furniture store and then realized he needs to do something bigger and then he started his own and kind of helped my grandfather
but pretty much went independent and what was the name of his business which is still now my my son my uh brother has the business now and he made it into a gigantic yes yes yeah now it's an institution in in the whole in colombia it used to be just barbara and now my brother made it expanded and he really expanded it um and but they had a hard life they had a very hard life because my grandparents uh i i called them aguelito from my dad's side and they really they had no support they had it to my abuelita had the two sisters but
besides that that was it uh then some cousins arrived they were able to help some cousins that can't that came so they had a little more you know i have some pictures of the whole family that they built in barranquilla well let's see the picture and point out the people okay it's gonna be you have one picture with everyone yes yep is that a book about the furniture store yes no this book this book it's a book that they somebody published in colombia and it's about the first immigrants to uh the jewish immigrants very nice and in it it highlights both of my grandparents are
highlighted here so it's uh lives that are well established that's what that means and you can only buy it in colombia yeah uh-huh yeah that's all the the that's the history it's the jewish people that are right very nice okay i'm gonna show you 95 my from the nightmare side we have this is uh moises my mark this is my grandfather that came from poland and he was born in bishkoff on july 14 1904 and he died in barranquilla may 23rd 1993. wow so that's how i link to my mark and we have here in here we have aguelito an aguelita my mark and this is my aunt amayato and then here up top we have my grandparents with my parents in my aunt and down here this is a very special picture because in this picture we have the three sisters the three brother-in-laws plus my my grandma my grandparents oh manopa from germany plus two cousins like distant cousins that they were able to come to barackiah that they were saying from the holocaust they were able to come to barranquilla and this is how i grew up this
is my family this is all my family my all my relatives that we are still very very very close we have a group of gerida familia like dear family that involves all the grandchildren the children and grandchildren from these families right here so it's very it's still going on we still we are we're all over the world there's nobody tell me what it was like for you growing up in bergkey okay this is from one side then i'll talk to the other okay side but growing up in barranquilla was idyllic really was a beautiful beautiful community that they built he was i mean remember that
it's a family it's a it was built in the ninth late 1930s early 1940s so it's really just either political survivors and the ones that were able to escape right before you know the earl late 1930s early 1940s that's how the community started and it started we had one synagogue one club you know social club and one uh school all within the same block so growing up we did not socialize with anybody that was not jewish it was just the jewish community 100 percent i never socialized when anybody our hebrew school had not jews a lot of them because you couldn't support the school we
were only maybe maybe 200 families maybe or less that's how i grew up where everybody knew everybody but we were friends in school but once we socialized it was only we jews what was the name of the synagogue the school central israelita philanthropico which is the philanthropic jewish community and the school was collegio evreo union the jewish school the unified jewish school do you still have family in yes raising the furniture store well we still have i saw my brother my oldest brother max i'll show you uh what about my brother yeah okay i got for my parents i have max which is my oldest
brother max m a x married to dolly d-o-l-l-y and then i have my brother david who's the youngest and he lives in panama and this is bibi uh his wife she's from panama and then me and then jorge my husband and uh so these are my siblings and what's the name of the furniture store and the furniture store that's the one my brother took over from my father and when my father had he had like two little hamas then my brother when we all came to college in the united states and when he came back he was full of ideas modern ideas like you know
this is in the 19 early 1980s late 70s 1980s and he had all these ideas to implement and it was very hard for my father to kind of let go and accept new ideas finally he relented and he let my brother kind of take over start kind of like starting anew and uh my brother you know brought in all this you know modern ideas and made from two stores into now it's it's all over colombia it's it's just colombia colombia and and panama um what college did you go to i went to uta first yeah for two years and then i went to uh university
of texas medical branch in galveston for two years and when did you get a degree and i got a degree in occupational therapy and when i went to galveston it was in 1977 uh there were only two schools that offered uh occupational therapy it was either denton or galveston and i feel galveston is like barranquilla it's the beach so you can't go wrong so i went to and when i got there people looked at me they didn't know what to make of me because first of all i spoke spanish and nobody on the island spoke spanish back then nobody spoke spanish they didn't know where
colombia was i mean barranquilla for them that was so foreign now when i told him i was jewish that was like on a different level they it was just you know fast for 40 years and nobody speaks spanish there now but you know nobody speaks english there it's all spanish now but back then i was the only one in the island that spoke spanish pretty much the whole school medical school nursing otp i mean all americans all those all-american um [Music] and uh but okay um did you ever go back to columbia uh yes i go i went every year when i had michelle on
journey my girls wait hold on a minute you didn't ever go back to live in colombia well once i came to united states once i came to school i went to galveston and when i was in galveston there was a girl from new york going to school a jewish girl that i met i think was at a porn they had something there were maybe five jews in the whole island and um i went to inquire and this girl from new york that was going to medical school there we started talking and when i told her that i'm jewish and i'm from colombia she said well
there is a guy here in med school who is from argentina and he is george i said ah interesting and that was it well she got a hold of that guy who then to my dorm to find out about me to inquire about me uh when he came the first time i wasn't there but all my suitemates i we were two four there were six of us there were five there and not me i wasn't there so they told her to come back and when he came back i was there we met we started dating and i never went back to colombia okay so i
got married got married i would stay okay where where did you um when did you get married i got married december 25th 1980 in in barranquilla we went back to uh because my whole family is there uh we went back to barranquilla to get and then we came back in england where in dallas you came yeah we came to george was already doing his residency in dallas so we came to dallas and i started now i started working i worked at golden acres which i loved and uh but then i got pregnant and had tell me about your kids and then i had michelle was
born in 1982 and where's my michelle here well this is the more recent one okay in here and here is michelle who got married she went to uh school she married jeremy and then they have jamie who's named after my my dad and my dad passed away just like less than a year before michelle got married so my dad got to meet jeremy uh then they had jamie and then they had lola and they live in madison michelle um wisconsin yeah madison wisconsin she works there she's a physician what kind of physician is she she is a pain management she does physical medicine and rehab
and she specialized in pain so she is she works at the faculty and what kind of um doctor is jorge your husband uh husband he's an ob gyn he practiced by himself i worked in the office for 29 years and done now we just travel uh so that's it and then we have here this is jenny this is our middle one that's jenny married to chase burger and they have two kids they have jake and they have chloe where michael and chloe and they live in florida so miami in miami let's see we have our grandkids i'll show you my grandkids this is the same
day it was taken this is exactly the same day in i think it was in january in february this are in obviously madison wisconsin and this is florida so yeah great so you have four grandkids four grandkids and then let's see and this is my whole family oh god dancing but we have we do have aaron aaron is our baby and what is aaron doing now he is a orthopedic resident in ohio where in ohio and toledo ohio he's um he's doing his residency he's finishing his first year he only has four more to go let's see everyone these are my parents so annie my
mark which is funny blow b-l-o-c-h funny block deny mark and this is jaime my dad j-a-i-m-e and your mother is still living my mom is still leaving yes and let's see in colombia she lives partner and then part in miami yeah where is my picture i'll show you oh and um tell me um did a lot of people from the jewish community in colombia come to the states first for college okay yes we are practically the first generation because my parents are first generation but they were born my dad was born 35 my mother was born 39 the next generation they had kids all the
people in that age that had kids they practically all went to college abroad mostly united states um that was the majority because education wasn't that good in colombia and all being good jews education was number one has always been in our community education is has always been number one they want the kids to always do better than the parents so if they could they sent all the kids away to college in the united states uh so we all my brother came to ut our university texas in arlington he's two years older than me so that's why i was able to come to arlington because he
was already there when i got there so we were together for two years for a year and a half in college and then when my brother my brother is david is the youngest one is uh when he was he starting to go to college most of the kids were going to boston to school to bu boston university so that's where he went he went to boston university where he met his wife from panama central america um she's from the support where ashkenazi the majority in barrackia were tell me how welcoming was the jewish community in dallas when you and jorge moved here as newlyweds we're
pretty busy working and uh we didn't really socialize much at the beginning because all george was working 24 7. so we really didn't have time so we pretty much socialized with people that we knew from before that were from either colombia or or mexico that we had met before uh americans not until i had kids did i start meeting yeah i started your job yeah through a salomon schecter pretty much or you know your kids went all the way through didn't they yeah my kid went all the way through all three did this bill went through eighth grade in salomon schecter and uh yeah and um tell me what are the customs are there any customs that are very different in colombia versus dallas texas in the jewish community same holiday same everything everything is pretty much the same pretty much just we were growing yeah growing up we were very there was we're not kosher anything like it was very hard oh for my mom's side they were more religious my mom's side came from germany they left germany august 1938.
three months they were christians they were the last ones pretty much how did they get out and that is a good one that's oma and oppa oma is meta m-e-t-a schnormann och is the last name in my that my grandfather oppa we w-i-l-l-y block b-l-o-c-h uh they really had a hard time because in germany uh in the ninth early nineteen thirty nineteen thirty two ninety or three that's it they couldn't go to school omar was very smart when she was going to school whatever they could pay because she was very smart and but after 1933 their life was miserable they couldn't do any they couldn't
go anywhere they couldn't work there was no income uh all the stores were being closed so they figure out by nine that like 1936 1937 they were starting to look you know how do we get out of here oma got married i think right before they left like 1938 probably beginning of 1938 they got married romeo got married and they were trying to find a way how do how to live how to survive and oppa comes from a family they're he from keeping keeping time not sure germany in germany and oma is from schmidheim in germany it's that's the by the blacks but the black
mountains um and uh oppa's family were bakers they're real bakers i mean they had they work in bakeries and they somehow they oppa found out that in colombia at that time the president was giving they needed bakers and they were giving visas for bakers to come to colombia so oppa applied and they gave them a visa to come to colombia now we have the papers from that but that's in in barranquilla so i don't have but there i've seen the papers from the government giving him visa because he's going to be open a bakery work as a baker uh and when they arrived in barranquilla
they knew nobody they came through the boat arrived by that time it was already 1938 it was probably august september the community knew that anytime a bar a ship would arrive maybe some jews would be coming so every time a ship would arrive there were some jews waiting for them not knowing them but but waiting for them because they knew that that's how they would come so they would arrive and when they arrived there were some people waiting you know and they they you already know who's the jew coming from the ship i mean uh let's see you can tell and the way they arrive
let's see oprah how did your grandparents meet each other in germany that uh i'm not sure okay that's okay but when they came um they were able he oh he finally opened the bakery in colombia in colombia first he would sell whatever he could sell and they had a little carriage with a horse and then they opened a little bakery where he would provide you know bake the bread and put it in the little horse with a little trailer in the back and he would sit there in the carriage and he would bring the bread you know the bread all over and he was so
good that he did really well he was able to expand the bakery it was the bakery and the house attached all of it attached the house and then yeah the same everything was just just there and he did very well that's it where in the world it's uh i'll show you my grandpa i'm very lucky that well i have no no great grandparents but this is this is willie blog he's the baker he's the baker will you block the baker and this is pretty much uh where is it oh here wait pull the page back yeah yeah that's oma and oppa that's when they first
arrived almost in colombia yes yes yes very nice and this is a picture this one here before right before they left germany both sides of the family let them read the words underneath your fingers yeah yeah so this is all the family both of their families when they uh left they had like a little get together and did you want to talk about these this is the only thing that i have my grandpa uh oppa from germany he was pretty and this is what he brought with him on the boat on the boat his shofar and he would play them for he brought two of
them yeah he brought i have them i took them both uh tell me about your uh i just want to mention your hobby you and jorge your hobby with tandem bike riding all over the world hobby now since we bought a tandem a bike for two we bought it in 2 19 1991 we bought the tandem at the end because we were gonna start the girls were already big they were almost ten and seven so we could go the two of us and we bought a nice stand them but what happened was that a couple of months later maybe two months later i found out
that we were gonna have another baby that's aaron so we couldn't ride the bike so he sat there and instead it was used by george and the girls he would take the girls biking all over just in dallas once we retired now many many years later we've taken up on riding our uh tandem all over the world so that's our main main hobby is we take the bike apart put it in two suitcases and we go on trips we go to morocco and new zealand and we were in chile with the most beautiful trip and we came back march 15th 2020. all right that was it that's it and we're done with the trips and hopefully we'll get going again okay well i'm going to wrap it up and i want to know um what tradition you have now um do you get together with your entire family once a year we try with our family which is the girls narrow we try as many times as we can to get together uh now with the pandemic is different so we go right now we're gonna go in the summer and we're all gonna meet in aspen and spend a week together we always try to we we always have either
pesach here in the house but this year no no we couldn't um only michelle came from madison because they drove down here because she had they had vacation jenny couldn't drive it's for miami it's just a lot yeah just too much normally we get together either for rosh hashanah the whole family or for yom kip or or for pesa the whole family and then the summer we try also to have everybody together now from my extended family my my mom and my siblings would also try to my mom turned 80 in 2019 and we all got together my well this is my extended family right
here that was a wedding this was this is a barbecue this is a bad mitzvah this is the one that i have and that's my siblings with their kids our kids my kids on in it was when my dad was alive you know and um we do try to get as much as we can we're very family-oriented is there anything you want to wrap it up with and say about the jewish community and how it's been wonderful to you and how your kids continue your traditions and the yeah the jewish part is really important for us we always stress it to the kids we send
them to uh jewish day schools and we always told them our grandparents suffer so much so much that we have to continue the tradition because then we're not going to let them win we're not going to leave evil cannot win so we want to always we always say we continue the traditions you're a jewish it doesn't matter what happens around the world just remember you're jewish and you're always helped we're at sedaka and helping it's our tradition of the world yeah yeah repair the world that's what we believe in and that's what we preach to our kids and just just be happy my grandparents were
always happy they suffered so much but growing up i never knew that you know they didn't really talk a lot about the past they were my grandma they were so happy that he somebody said anything bad happened to you they would have said no because they had a family going on they didn't have you know everybody perished in the holocaust from like the germany side everybody perished except then because they survived but they were happy they were happy well thank you very much for sharing your life story with us sophia poliak it's been a pleasure thank you so much appreciate it okay