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A new memoir tries to mend the pieces of the author’s broken Cuban-Jewish family
(JTA) — In her recent book, “The Object of Jewish Literature,” Jewish Theological Seminary professor Barbara A. Mann writes about how “literature deploys physical objects as emblems of ideas, emotions, and psychological dramas about the self.” In other words, “things” matter: Furnishings, clothing, food and, in the case of Mann’s study, the glued or sewn-together bundles of paper we call books tell the stories of the people who made, bought and used them.
Rosa Lowinger knows this from a lifetime of study of how things are made and how they fall apart. An art conservator who specializes in sculpture and historic architectural materials, Lowinger has written a memoir of her Cuban-Jewish family that uses such materials — marble, concrete, bone, plastic — as organizing principles. Each chapter of “Dwell Time” takes its name and theme from one of those materials to tell how her family came to Cuba and fled after the revolution, and what they found and lost when they settled in Miami.
She also examines with a conservator’s eye — appreciatively, but looking for cracks and flaws — her own shortcomings as a daughter, wife and businesswoman.
“Terrazzo is robust, but it yields easily to gouges and cracks from settling or expansion,” she writes in a typical passage. “It’s hard to fix without leaving enormous scars. It reminds me of my family, those Eastern Europeans who left for America and found themselves settled in the tropics, only to be forced to bust out of their foundation within a few decades. It’s true of my profoundly damaged mother, who had the spark of inspiration and presence of mind to know when it was time to flee the country of her birth, but has a way of smashing relationships to smithereens.”
Three generations of her family, beginning with her paternal grandfather Avrom Lövinger’s arrival from Cluj in northern Transylvania, lived in Cuba — which was still taking in Jews when the United States had closed its doors. Her Cuban-born mother, Hilda Peresechensky, spent her youth in an orphanage founded in the early 1920s as a home for poor Ashkenazi Jewish women. She attended a Jewish high school on a scholarship, experiencing periods of poverty that would haunt her the rest of her life.
The author’s father, Leonardo “Lindy” Lowinger, was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1932, and, putting aside his own dreams of being an architect, had a peripatetic career in the eyeglasses business as a salesman and occasional optician.
The Lowingers were middle-class Jews who by the mid-1950s were well-established members of Cuban society. Most of Cuba’s 20,000 Jews lived in Havana, a city, she writes, “that boasted Jewish schools, kosher restaurants, and three synagogues.”
After Castro came to power in 1959, he didn’t target Jews, but businesspeople like Lindy Lowinger saw a dim future under communism. In 1961, after a fraught flight, father, mother and young Rosa — born in 1956 — found a one-bedroom apartment in Miami Beach.
The exodus of most of the country’s Jews — and the Jewish history of the Cuba they left behind — has recently been the subject of several new books as a new generation of people with ties to the country make sense of their families’ stories. Aaron Hamburger’s “Hotel Cuba,” published in May, examines how his grandmother’s American Jewish identity was forged during a stint in Cuba in the 1920s. “Tia Fortuna’s New Home,” a children’s book by Ruth Behar published last year and distributed through PJ Library, tells the story of a contemporary grandmother facing dislocation for a second time after leaving Havana as a young woman. And AJ Sidransky’s “The Incident at San Miguel,” published in March, is historical fiction based on the real story of two Jewish brothers torn apart by the Cuban revolution — including one, like Rosa Lowinger’s family, who barely managed to flee.
As it did for many Cuban exiles, the exodus of Lowinger’s family left scars. She would later tell a friend that her father is “morose, suspicious, and we always have money problems.” Meanwhile, Hilda was beautiful and resourceful, but took out her frustration and disappointment on her daughter. “My mother’s punishments were laced with turbulence beyond her control, a violence born of pure rage at the world that had betrayed her, the sort of thing that feels like it will escalate dangerously toward irrevocable tragedy,” writes Lowinger. “Though her behavior appeared sadistic and designed to terrorize, I see now that she was simply drowning in her own suffering.”
It’s a generous view of what appears to be child abuse, but the description seems part of Lowinger’s project to understand her family members, like her conservation projects, in all their dimensions. “There was also active kindness, humor, and generosity in my family,” she writes. “It was hard to see it, just as it’s hard to notice anything but the dents and cracks and gouges in an otherwise beautiful sculpture.”
As a child, Lowinger attended Jewish schools and practiced what she calls “a moderate form of Conservative Judaism.” By the time she was a teenager, Lowinger could not wait to leave Miami, and took off for Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
Lowinger went on to land an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a fellowship at the W.F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and a job at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and later launched a number of consulting businesses. Among her career highlights was the conservation of the Watts Towers, the monumental folk art sculptures in Los Angeles, and relocating a 100-foot-wide mosaic from the façade of Houston Methodist Hospital.
Lowinger would eventually marry and embark on a series of professional and personal journeys that would take her to Los Angeles, Israel, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina. And yet, rarely at home in the cities she lived in, she was constantly drawn back to Cuba, mostly by its vivid but crumbling architecture but also by “the cloying nostalgia of Cuban exiles” that she once tried to escape.
“That place where I was born and that my parents left behind is forged from African, indigenous, Spanish, Chinese, French, North American, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic cultures,” she writes. “People who were fleeing from and coming toward. Builders, planters, innovators, tinkerers.”
Her mother, still alive and in her 90s at the book’s end, remains a huge presence in Lowinger’s life, a conservation project the author is never going to complete
“Try as I might, I can never get my mother to understand that conservation is not about repairing what is old. It’s about sustaining all fabric of human endeavor, what people treasure, where we live, and what we honor, no matter when it was made.”
“Dwell Time”’ takes its title from an art conservationists’ term meaning how long it takes for a cleaning product to do its work. Lowinger calls her book a “love story” to the profession of conservation, but it is also a guide to examining the Jewish past, understanding loss and appreciating the ways people and individuals can emerge stronger and sometimes more beautiful after decades of wear and tear.
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Under US Pressure, Syria and Israel Inch Toward Security Deal
Members of Israeli security forces stand at the ceasefire line between the Golan Heights and Syria, July 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Under US pressure, Syria is accelerating talks with Israel for a security pact that Damascus hopes will reverse Israel‘s recent seizures of its land but that would fall far short of a full peace treaty, sources briefed on the talks said.
Washington is pushing for enough progress to be made by the time world leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly at the end of this month to allow President Donald Trump to announce a breakthrough, four of the sources told Reuters.
Even a modest agreement would be a feat, the sources said, pointing to Israel‘s tough stance during months of talks and Syria‘s weakened position after sectarian bloodshed in its south inflamed calls for partition.
Reuters spoke to nine sources familiar with the discussions and with Israel‘s operations in southern Syria, including Syrian military and political officials, two intelligence sources, and an Israeli official.
They said Syria‘s proposal aims to secure the withdrawal of Israeli troops from territory seized in recent months, to reinstate a demilitarized buffer zone agreed in a 1974 truce, and to halt Israeli air strikes and ground incursions into Syria.
The sources said talks had not addressed the status of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in a 1967 war. A Syrian source familiar with Damascus’s position said it would be left “for the future.”
The two countries have technically been at war since the creation of Israel in 1948, despite periodic armistices. Syria does not recognize the state of Israel.
After months of encroaching into the demilitarized zone, Israel abandoned the 1974 truce on Dec. 8, the day a rebel offensive ousted Syria‘s then-president Bashar al-Assad. It struck Syrian military assets and sent troops to within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of Damascus.
Israel has shown reluctance during the closed-door talks to relinquish those gains, the sources said.
“The US is pressuring Syria to accelerate a security deal – this is personal for Trump,” said an Israeli security source, who said the US leader wanted to present himself as the architect of a major success in Middle Eastern diplomacy.
But, the source said, “Israel is not offering much.”
The offices of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who has been leading the negotiations, did not respond to Reuters questions.
A State Department official said Washington “continues to support any efforts that will bring lasting stability and peace between Israel, Syria, and its neighbors.” The official did not answer questions on whether the US wanted to announce a breakthrough during the General Assembly.
TRUST DEFICIT AT TALKS
Israel has voiced hostility to Syria‘s Islamist-led government, pointing to President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s former jihadist links, and has lobbied Washington to keep the country weak and decentralized.
But the US has encouraged talks – keen to expand the countries that signed peace deals with Israel under the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first administration.
Exploratory contacts began in Abu Dhabi following Sharaa’s April visit to the Emirates, which have ties with Israel. The two sides then met in the Azerbaijani capital Baku in July.
Days later, discussions were plunged into disarray when Syrian troops deployed to the southwestern Sweida region to quell sectarian violence between Bedouin and Druze militias. Israel said the deployment violated its enforcement of a “demilitarized zone” and bombed the defense ministry in Damascus. Sharaa accused it of seeking pretexts to interfere in Syria‘s south.
A US-brokered ceasefire ended the violence and, a month later, bilateral negotiations resumed in Paris – marking the first time Syria publicly acknowledged holding direct talks with its longtime foe.
However, the atmosphere in the room was tense, with a lack of trust between the two sides, according to two Syrian sources and a Western diplomat.
Negotiators are following a phased process modeled on deals Israel reached with Egypt that paved the way for a landmark normalization of relations in 1980. That involved the return to Egypt of the Sinai peninsula, seized by Israel in the 1967 war.
Six sources briefed on the talks said Israel would be unwilling even in the longterm to return the Golan, which Trump unilaterally recognized as Israeli in his first term.
Instead, Israel floated a proposal to the US special envoy for Syria, Thomas Barrack, that it could withdraw from southern Syria in return for Sharaa relinquishing the Golan, the Israeli official said.
“Our feelers via the Americans suggest this is a non-starter,” the official said. Netanyahu’s office, Dermer’s office, and the US State Department did not respond to questions on the swap proposal.
A Syrian official told Reuters that Sharaa understood that “any compromise on the Golan would mean the end of his rule” and had told Barrack the security pact must be anchored in the 1974 lines.
While Sharaa is willing to accelerate talks with Israel to please Washington, he remains wary, according to a Western intelligence officer, the Israeli official, and Syrian source.
He has told Barrack that conditions are not yet ripe for a broad peace agreement. “The basic elements of trust are simply not there,” said the Syrian official.
A senior US administration official told Reuters that Trump was clear when he met Sharaa in May in Riyadh that “he expected Syria to work towards peace and normalization with Israel and its neighbors.”
“The administration has actively supported this position since then,” the official said. “The president wants peace throughout the Middle East.”
NARROW PATH FOR SHARAA
Realities on the ground have limited the Syrian leader’s options.
On the one hand, Israel‘s incursions and support for the Druze have hardened Syrian public opinion against any deal, a factor weighing on Sharaa, officials say.
On the other, Israel‘s land grabs in Syria pose a threat to Damascus, making a de-escalatory pact all the more important for Sharaa.
A Syrian military officer based near the border with Israel, who asked not to be identified, said Syrian army patrols in the south avoid confronting Israeli troops, who regularly raid villages and go door-to-door collecting household data and searching for arms.
In response to Reuters questions, the Israeli military said its operations had discovered “numerous weapons,” thwarted smuggling attempts, and apprehended “dozens of suspects involved in advancing terrorist activity.”
The Israeli military was operating in southern Syria to protect Israel and its citizens, the statement said. Israel has threatened air strikes on any significant Syrian military or intelligence presence near the border without its consent.
Israel uses its new post at Mount Hermon, which it seized after Assad’s fall, to surveil the region. Defense Minister Israel Katz said last month Israel would not cede the location.
Israel‘s military has imposed buffer zones in some neighboring countries following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, in which some 1,200 people were killed.
“As in northern Gaza and southern Lebanon, Israel is now enforcing a wider demilitarized zone in southern Syria,” Syrian security analyst Wael Alwan said.
DRUZE DEVELOPMENTS BOLSTERED ISRAEL
Israel‘s position has been strengthened by developments in Sweida, where Syrian forces stand accused of execution-style killings of Druze civilians. Druze leaders are calling for independence and a humanitarian corridor from Golan to Sweida – a challenge to Sharaa’s vow to centralize control of Syrian territory.
Two senior Druze figures, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said that since the Sweida fighting, Israel was helping unify splintered Druze factions and had delivered military supplies including guns and ammunition to them.
The two Druze commanders and a Western intelligence source said that Israel was also paying salaries for many of the roughly 3,000 Druze militia fighters.
Reuters was not able to independently confirm the munitions supplies nor the payments. The offices of Netanyahu and Dermer did not respond to Reuters questions on support for the Druze militia.
Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani dismissed the possibility of a humanitarian corridor at the Paris talks, saying it would infringe on Syria‘s sovereignty, according to a Syrian official familiar with the discussions.
Both sides agreed that stability in Syria‘s south was key to preventing a resurgence of covert agents linked to Iran, Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, or Palestinian terrorist groups – common enemies of Israel and Syria‘s new leaders. Israel agreed to allow interior ministry forces to deploy checkpoints in Sweida.
“Both parties are probing areas of common ground,” said the Syrian official.
Sharaa is keen not to provoke his southern neighbor, aware of how much damage its military can inflict, one close aide said on condition of anonymity: “Avoiding confrontation is central to his plan to rebuild and govern.”
Erdem Ozan, a former Turkish diplomat and expert on Syria, said Sharaa could accelerate talks to secure economic aid and reconstruction support from investors, Gulf benefactors, and Washington.
“Sharaa’s focus on economic delivery could push him toward pragmatic concessions, but he’ll need to balance this with maintaining legitimacy among his supporters,” Ozan said.
Concessions could include handing greater autonomy to regional groups, including the Kurds and Druze, Ozan said, as well as demilitarization near Syria‘s borders with Israel and Jordan.
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Qatar, US Near Defense Deal After Israeli Strike in Doha
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens as he speaks to media at Ben Gurion International Airport, as he departs Tel Aviv for Qatar following an official visit, near Lod, Israel, Sept. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard/Pool
Qatar and the United States are on the verge of finalizing an enhanced defense cooperation agreement, top US diplomat Marco Rubio said on Tuesday, after Israel’s attack on Hamas political leaders in Doha last week drew widespread condemnation.
“We have a close partnership with the Qataris. In fact, we have an enhanced defense cooperation agreement, which we’ve been working on, we’re on the verge of finalizing,” Rubio said while departing Tel Aviv for Doha.
Rubio met with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and discussed defense cooperation, Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson Majed Al Ansari said.
“This [Israeli] attack, of course, expedites the need for a renewed strategic defence agreement between us and the United States. It’s not something new per se, but certainly expedited,” Al Ansari said in a briefing after Rubio’s visit.
QATAR HOSTS BIGGEST US BASE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The attack in Doha was especially sensitive as Qatar is a close US ally and home to the biggest US military base in the Middle East. Qatar has been hosting and mediating ceasefire talks – alongside Egypt – since the Gaza war started nearly two years ago.
When asked about the mediation efforts in light of the Doha attack, Al Ansari said: “Our focus right now is protecting our sovereignty and we will not look into other issues until this one is resolved.”
The Amiri Diwan, or Emir’s Office, said in a later statement that the emir discussed with Rubio the future of joint diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza and release Israeli hostages held in the enclave, as well as Palestinian prisoners.
The two also discussed the repercussions of the Israeli attack in Doha, the Emir’s Office added.
TRUMP ‘UNHAPPY’ WITH ISRAELI STRIKE
US President Donald Trump said during a visit to Doha in May that Washington would protect Qatar if it ever came under attack. He said he was not informed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in advance about Israel’s attack.
Trump said he was unhappy with Israel’s strike, which he described as a unilateral action that did not advance US or Israeli interests.
He sought to assure the Qataris that such attacks would not happen again during a meeting with the Qatari prime minister in New York on Friday.
Rubio called for Qatar to continue its role as a mediator between Israel and Hamas to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza war, saying there was “a very short window of time in which a deal could happen.”
“If any country in the world can help mediate it, Qatar is the one. They’re the ones that can do it,” Rubio said while departing Tel Aviv for Doha.
Qatar called the Israeli attack “cowardly and treacherous,” but said it wouldn’t deter it from its role as a mediator, alongside Egypt and the United States.
Netanyahu threatened to attack Hamas leaders “wherever they are” during a press conference with Rubio on Monday, as the heads of Arab and Islamic states held a summit to back Qatar after Israel’s attack last week in the Gulf state.
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Israeli Military Targets Iran-Backed Houthis, Striking Yemen’s Red Sea Port of Hodeidah
Illustrative: Smoke billows following an Israeli air strike in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Israel said it struck a military infrastructure site in its latest attack on Yemen’s Houthi terrorists at the Red Sea port of Hodeidah on Tuesday.
The Houthis, Islamist rebels backed by Iran who control the most populous parts of Yemen, have attacked vessels in the Red Sea in what they describe as solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Tuesday’s attack came hours after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the port and a few weeks after a major Israeli attack that killed Houthi officials in August.
Al Masirah TV, a station affiliated with the Houthis, said that 12 Israeli strikes targeted the port‘s docks.
Two sources at the port told Reuters the strikes targeted three docks restored after previous Israeli hits. Residents in the area told Reuters the attack lasted about 10 minutes.
“The Houthi terrorist organization will continue to suffer blows and will pay painful prices for any attempt to attack the State of Israel,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a post on X following the attack.
The Houthis have also in the past fired missiles towards Israel, most of which have been intercepted.
Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Telegram that the group’s air defenses had been able to force Israeli warplanes away but provided no proof.
The Israeli military‘s statement gave no details of the strike beyond saying they hit infrastructure.
“The Hodeidah Port is used by the Houthi terrorist regime for the transfer of weapons supplied by the Iranian regime, in order to execute attacks against the State of Israel and its allies,” it said.