For me, Shabbat will always be known as "Friday Night." While some of my (few) Jewish friends growing up in Bogotá, Colombia had Shabbat dinner, in my family, it was simply known as Friday night dinner-la comida del viernes por la noche. I don't know why it was never known as Shabbat dinner. Perhaps it was my grandmother's way of wanting to be a part of the country where she was born - born to Polish and Romanian immigrants, and married to a Russian immigrant. Maybe it was a way of rejecting some of her traditions and starting new ones, connecting with the language of her country. Even though her parents raised her in Yiddish, she spoke Spanish in her house. Yiddish was only spoken as a secret language, when she and my grandfather didn't want the children-my mother and her two brothers-to understand what they were saying. When she became a grandmother, she rejected the traditional "bubbe" all her peers used, and asked that I call her by her first name, Lia, creating her new and own tradition.

Born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, Tamar Selch moved to Israel in 1989, where she became an archaeologist and art historian, a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Haifa University, as well as a curator at the Israel Museum's department of archaeology, While there, she also participated in several archaeological excavations. She now lives in Evanston with her husband, Zach, and their children, Jordan, Lila, and Thalia. They have been members of Beth Emet since moving to Evanston in 2006.