Even as a child, Ariel Trujillo thought it strange that his father would travel long distances to the one store in all of Colombia that carried Manischewitz wine. His father was a civilian attorney and judge attached to the military, and the family moved around quite a bit. But his father would always make certain that he could make his way back to the little store tucked away in the capital city of Bogata so that he could buy his Manichewitz. His grandmother was blue-eyed, his father was light-skinned and blond, and he himself was several shades lighter than most of his friends.
But you “just didn’t ask,” he states. “It wasn’t discussed. It never occurred to me to try to find out more.” Looking back, however, he sees more signs that things were not all they appeared to be. He knew his father was born in the port city of Barranquilla on the Caribbean side of Colombia, where other immigrants came in from Eastern Europe. “My father’s birth certificate does not list his religion, which again was quite unusual, because everybody else was simply Catholic.”
His father’s parents passed away, but his father still lit candles on a regular basis, drank his special wine and would sometimes yell at his children in a way that made them “think he was possessed! It was a language we had never heard before,” Ariel grins. Now, he’s pretty certain that ‘crazy’ language was Yiddish. The family never did much to recognize the Christmas holiday. Their tree was always the smallest, and they never held a Christmas celebration in their own home. “I thought about it, I guess, but who were you going to question? It was just the way things were.”
When asked if his name “Ariel” was common in Colombia, he immediately responds, “No, not at all. In fact, I would be teased about it.” Later he learned his grandmother’s name had been Abigail, and he is convinced that – as the first son in a Jewish family – he was named after her.
Ariel recalls his father took extensive steps to make sure that Ariel could get into a military-run school. While these schools still participated in the Catholic holidays, there were more opportunities for general education. Ariel attended mass as a requirement of the schools, but he never felt connected. “I never went to another mass after 1984 (his last day of school there),” he says. Ariel went to dental school at Boston University where he earned his Doctorate of Dental Medicine and met his wife-to-be, Alissa. She came from a secular Jewish family; her grandparents had been devout, but her parents had rebelled, so Alissa had little Jewish upbringing. When they decided to get married, they talked about what was important to them. There was no question in either of their minds that Judaism would need to play an important part in the rest of their lives. They were married in upstate New York and then moved to Boston so he could finish his schooling; Boston is also where their first daughter, Sofia, now 10, was born. With his certificate of Advanced Graduate Study in Periodontology in hand, they moved to the Phoenix area, where he took over Arizona Periodontal Group in 2004.
Their younger daughter, Hannah, now 7½, was born in Arizona. The family joined Congregation Or Chadash of the Northeast Valley, where both girls are receiving their formal
Jewish education. “I’ve never doubted for a minute that I have Jewish roots,” Ariel comments. “I believe there is a genetic memory – it’s in my bones. I feel totally comfortable in this world. I feel like I’ve done this before.”
Arizona Periodontal Group, 602-995-5045, www.azperiogroup.com
