Discovering Panama’s kosher delights
Where food meets tradition in a tropical paradise
“What brings you to Panama?” I asked four guys whose boisterous chatter caught my ear at a neighboring table at Adama, a kosher steakhouse in Panama City. In their 20s, they were all wearing kipot, skullcaps, signaling centrist Orthodoxy.
“The food and the monkeys,” one piped. “We’re here for a bachelor party,” chimed in another.”
“Enjoying the food?” I asked, though the answer was obvious.
“Panama has the best kosher food in the world, and everyone knows it,” declared Chad Weinstein, from Lakewood, New Jersey.
The claim might be hyperbolic, but kosher consumers from all over America seem to be flocking there to check it out.
“We don’t have a lot of kosher restaurants in Memphis,” said Lisa Kaufman, who I met in the elevator of our hotel. She was vacationing with her husband and two other couples. Back home in Tennessee, the Kaufmans don’t eat in non-kosher restaurants, which leaves them few to choose from. “To me, traveling is about being able to eat!”
Howard and I enticed Chicago friends Tamar and Uri Heller, who similarly knew nothing about Panama’s reputation as a kosher food paradise, to join us. When we went in February, we were clearly riding the wave.
Mike and Atara Kentor of Pittsburgh first went to Panama in 2019. According to Atara, at the time there were 15 kosher restaurants. In January 2025, they went back with their daughters and their families. For Atara, it was a dream to go back with kids and grandchildren, a dream long held because it took years to “find a window when everyone’s schedules matched.” In the end, it was well worth the effort. “The beaches, the canal locks, the Old Town, the Embrera village,” she recalled, referring to an indigenous enclave, “everyone had a ball.”
Today, according to Ceci Katz, proprietor of Panama Kosher Tours, there are 40-plus kosher restaurants, cafes, bistros, coffee shops and carryout caterers in and around Panama City, with a Jewish population of 15,000-20,000. It is estimated that a whopping 90% of them don’t eat non-kosher meat and keep other rules of kosher practice to varying degrees.
The reason for the proliferation of kosher eateries traces back to the influence of one man, a Jerusalem-born rabbi of Moroccan descent who was sent to Panama in 1951 to head the Sephardi congregation, Shevet Achim.
Not enthralled at first with the assignment, Rabbi Sion Levi ultimately served as Sephardi chief rabbi of Panama for more than 50 years. He is widely credited with inspiring a wave of increased religious observance that continues today.
Max Harari, a third-generation Panamanian of Syrian descent, and a community leader, asserted that his family, generations ago, became more observant because of Levi. “Everyone did,” he shrugged. “He made it cool to keep kosher.”
When he got to Panama, Levi encountered a community that was long on Sephardi cohesion but short on observance of Jewish dietary laws.
David Cohen, 23, a recent graduate of Yeshiva University, who served as our guide to local synagogues, proudly affirmed that his father learned many Jewish traditions from Levi. Standing in the magnificent Shevet Achim main sanctuary, within the Centro Communitario Shevet Achim complex — which comprises Jews from Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries — Cohen regaled us with lore of how Levi cajoled Jews to stop eating non-kosher meat. “He would go into non-kosher restaurants where Jews ate treif, wearing his kippah, and say to them, ‘Shabbat shalom’!”
Ceci Katz, who was influenced to become observant decades ago by Levi, said “he made it clear that he wouldn’t officiate at a bar mitzvah or wedding unless everything was kosher.” He also got the teachers in the Jewish schools to encourage kosher practice among students, she said, and children brought the message home to their parents.
As more Jews started keeping kosher, kosher restaurants popped up to meet the local demand. “The kosher food scene was created to accommodate the community. The more teshuvah,” she said, using the Hebrew term for return to religious practice, “the more restaurants.”
The sizeable uptick in kosher tourism, though, which began three or four years ago, was a response to increased marketing of Panama as a kosher destination, by several companies, and the word started to spread. And, ironically, COVID helped. In 2021, Ceci’s company hosted its first Passover program, with everyone renting their own homes — “bubbles” — with kosher-for-Passover catering provided. After that, she initiated programs coinciding with breaks from America yeshivot. This year, she’s hosting a Passover program in a hotel on the “Pacific Riviera,” outside Panama City.
Jews first came to Panama in the early 1500s, when Spanish and Portuguese Jews fleeing the Inquisition arrived with Spanish explorers. A community began to develop in the 1820s, when Panama declared independence from Spain and allied with Colombia. Lured by the development of the trans-oceanic railroad, the California Gold Rush, and later by the construction of the canal, Jews migrated from the Caribbean and South America in search of economic opportunity. After World War I, Jews fleeing instability in the Middle East joined them, with Ashkenazi Jews fleeing Europe coming in the 1930s.
Pittsburgher Paul Barkowitz recalls his own family’s migration to Panama in the 1950s. After World War II, his father went to college on the GI Bill to become a schoolteacher. But salaries in the South, where they were living, were so low that he took an offer to move to Panama in 1955, when Paul was 3, to teach in what was then the Canal Zone.
“It pained my parents to know that their kids would be growing up in a non-Jewish environment, but my dad was committed to providing for us Judaically,” Barkowitz said. His father eventually became principal of a junior high school in the Canal Zone, while starting a Hebrew school and giving free bar mitzvah lessons.
Paul moved to the States in 1970 to go to college and has lived in Pittsburgh with his wife and family since 1995. Referring to his fellow “Zionians,” he said, “I still love the sense of community and mission we shared. Directly or indirectly, we were all there to get the ships through the canal.”
Today, Panama has a population of more than 4 million and the largest Jewish population in Central America. In addition to Shevet Achim, there is a large Ashkenazi and Chabad synagogue and community center, Beth El, and a Reform congregation. Jews are well-integrated into the country, which has had three Jewish presidents in the 20th century.
Antisemitism, by all accounts, is low. Max Harari said this is because of the work “our parents and grandparents did” to establish good relations. Israel is a paramount community concern. Panama’s voting record on U.N. resolutions regarding Israel has been generally favorable or muted with abstention on some issues. Jewish children attend Jewish schools, and communities tend to keep to themselves. “We know our place here,” said Harari, who does not wear his kippah out of the house. “We don’t flaunt our Jewishness.”
“The food was excellent, better than I expected,” Tamar Heller said. She and I were both charmed by Lula Casco in the Old Town, a vegetarian-friendly meat taverna, serving up Israeli street food with a Panamanian vibe.
My husband loved Spice Market on Via Brasil, featuring a fusion of Japanese and Thai. I can’t forget the real ice cream on chocolate lava cake following abundant servings of delicious ceviche, creative sushi, tuna tartar and more. And the bill, with drinks, before tip, topped out at a very reasonable $100 per couple.
Much as he enjoyed the dining, Howard, who served as president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh for 24 years, before helming the Jewish Federations of North America, was equally — if not more — impressed with the achievement in community building and what it produced. “It was inspiring to me to see what one Jewish leader can do and what can grow from that.”
Having become more observant thanks to the power of a teacher, Uri Heller, past president of the Lake Shore Drive synagogue in Chicago, echoed a similar sentiment. “It’s so impressive to see that phenomenon play out on a communitywide scale. I’d like to be able to have that impact.”
As for her favorite dish, Pittsburgher Ayelet Knoll, 13, the granddaughter of Atara and Mike Kentor, awards the honor to the mushroom truffle noodles — “it was a mix of fettucine alfredo and mushroom truffle sauce” — at Kava. But food-wise there were no surprises, she said, since she was expecting the food to be good. What was most memorable, said the eighth grader at Hillel Academy, were the geography, the terrain, the weather, the language and the culture.
“What was most interesting was the country itself!” PJC
Beverly Siegel is a writer who splits her time between Squirrel Hill and Chicago.
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