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In March 2008, Jersey City couple Raylie and David Dunkel were spending a week in Cuba on a tour arranged through Catholic Charities of New Jersey.

"It was a life-changing experience," Raylie said. "The Cubans are warm -- they love life."

During their travels on the island, the couple spotted a group of young Americans interviewing and filming Cubans. Their leader was Milos S. Silber, a native Brazilian who came to the United States to study filmmaking at New York University.

Silber and his crew were spending three months in Cuba to film a documentary on the Jews remaining on the island.

Raylie, who happens to be programming chairwoman for HudsonJewish, a nonprofit group founded to nurture and promote Jewish life in Hudson County, seized the opportunity to invite Silber to show the completed film to a Hudson County audience when he was ready.

And he agreed.

A year and 10 months later -- on an evening in late January -- Silber traveled to Temple Beth Abraham in North Bergen to screen his film, "Los Judios de Cuba" ("The Jews of Cuba") for an audience of about 65, including some native Jewish Cubans who were, naturally, curious about the filmmaker's perspective.

One focus that Silber said he purposely avoided was the island's political posture.

"When I went to Cuba, I decided to put politics to the side," the 23-year-old Silber told the audience. "Cubans tend to be very nationalistic about their country."

But the subject he really wanted to explore in his documentary, Silber said, is "about the future of Judaism in Cuba," which, through his lens, is both sobering and optimistic.

During the three months he spent on the island, Silber amassed 35 hours of actual footage, comprised of interviews with some 20 subjects, which he then edited down to a 43-minute film in Spanish with English subtitles.

Among the folks the filmmaker didn't interview -- though not by his choice -- were representatives of the island's single Orthodox shul. "They weren't interested in talking to us," he said.

The documentary's first public screening was in June 2009 at the Westchester Jewish Center in Larchmont, N.Y., before 250 spectators.

The resulting product drew a glowing testimonial from June Safran, executive director of the Cuba-America Jewish Mission, a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting with the revitalization of Jewish life in Cuba and to working to improve the physical and spiritual wellbeing of the Jews of Cuba and the new Cuban Olim to Israel.

Safran had this to say about the finished product: "From the exciting opening music and scenes of Havana, through the many interviews and community scenes, I was entranced by this informative documentary that brings to life the vibrant Jewish community of Cuba."

The film's narrative explains how Castro's ascent to power in 1959 triggered a mass exodus of many of the estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Cuban Jews who had put down roots on the island.

"Ninety percent of the Jewish community fled overnight," Silber explained, although, ironically, "a lot of the revolutionaries who fought alongside Che and Castro were Jews."

Now, the film relates, there are perhaps in the neighborhood of 1,500 Jews left, spread across the nearly 43,000 square miles of the island. They are a tiny minority among an island-wide 11.2 million people.

What followed during the period of the Castro regime were "years of silence" and "no religious tradition," as one longtime Cuban Jew put it, in a society where the deity became subservient to the state.

"God didn't exist in this New Man," he said. And this New Man in a so-called workers' paradise "had no fear of persecution in a socialist country."

And so, those Jews remaining simply "forgot the practice" of their faith.

Their connection to Judaism became quite tenuous.

Allan Alfonso Siegelbaum, a young Cuban interviewed in the film, said that while he recalled his maternal grandparents being faithful to the Jewish traditions, "my dad isn't Jewish and my family is not observant."

"A lot of the Jewish community there is composed of mixed marriages," Silber told the audience. "And a lot are trying to reconnect with their Jewish past."

One example of that effort depicted in the film is a tiny Jewish community in Cienfuegos, a seaport town along the island's southern coast, about 160 miles from Havana.

There, since 1993, Rebecca Langus has rallied nearly 30 Jews for monthly Shabbat services and periodic special events, like Jewish holiday commemorations and even Jewish dance festivals, at her home.

Langus says she remembers how her mother "observed Judaism, kept kosher, and practiced Jewish rituals," such as saying the candle blessing as part of welcoming the Sabbath.

Sometimes, she says, the Cienfuegos contingent will mix with the Jews of nearby Santa Clara or make the trip to Havana, where the Patronato/Beth Shalom Synagogue was revived about 10 years ago. Silber said he was surprised to discover a Jewish presence even in "very remote" parts of the island, where he found "smaller congregations -- and that's what touched me the most" -- given their relative isolation in a country still suffering from a primitive transportation system.

Perhaps the key figure featured in the film is Adele Dworin, president of the Jewish Community of Cuba and unofficial historian of the Jewish presence in Havana.

"I waited 89 days to interview her," Silber said. "She kept putting me off until the day before I was to leave Cuba." Then, she finally relented, he said.

Dworin, who was raised in an Orthodox household that spoke Yiddish, says that when she was a young girl growing up in Havana, which then had as many as five synagogues, she enjoyed the company and friendship of many Jewish girls her age.

Unfortunately, the revolution ended that as many of her friends left Cuba with their families, leaving a huge void in their wake.

Dworin credited her predecessor, Dr. Jose Miller, with planting the seed for Judaism's gradual recovery on the island. Miller presided at the rededication of the Patronato combination Jewish Community Center/synagogue/library/pharmacy.

In recent years, however, Dworin said the island is experiencing a bit of a Jewish re-awakening with outside groups like the Cuba-America Jewish Mission, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Canadian Jewish Congress, and B'nai Brith serving as a lifeline on various fronts, from Sabbath and holiday candles to boxes of Passover matzah.

After the screening, two Cuban-Americans in the audience offered kudos to the director for an accurate portrayal of conditions facing Jews trying to recapture a "lost" faith and culture in today's Cuba.

John Batista Goldstein, of Queens, N.Y., who left Cuba at age 5 in 1965, said: "The Cuban Jews need a lot of support and the United States should stop its economic boycott of Cuba." He said there are shortages of food, shoes, and hygienic supplies on the island and, for the Jews in particular, "they need challah, Torahs, Israeli flags, and Stars of David."

Another Cuban emigre, Enrique Levy, a retired chemical engineer who lived in Camaguey, Cuba's third-largest city, until age 18, agreed that the Cuban Jews need assistance and that he brings medicine and syringes, along with boxes of Hanukkah candles, on his periodic returns to the island.

Levy applauded the Jews of Panama for sending aid packages of food, clothing, and other items.

Levy offered this historical footnote: In 1991, Cuba changed its constitution to say that the country was a "secular," rather than an "atheistic" state, thereby relaxing somewhat restrictions on organized religions, including Judaism. That paved the way for the beginnings of a Jewish revival.

"In the past 30 years, the burners have been out but the pilot is still lit," Levy said.

Three years later, Levy said, another sort of milestone was set when Castro and Israel's chief rabbi shook hands on a deal that would allow Cuban Jews to emigrate to Israel "on three conditions: first, that a census be made of the Jews in Cuba; second, that only one, two, or three families could leave at a time; and third, Castro allegedly insisted, "when they land in Israel, I don't want them seen on TV dancing the hora."