Political turbulence can sometimes give a previously unacceptable idea a new chance at acceptance. For Jews living in Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet Union and their island government’s changing opinion of their faith created just such an opening. In her documentary short The Believers: Stories From Jewish Havana, filmmaker Bonnie Burt hears from a variety of Jews about their post-Cold War lives in the Cuban capital city.

“Now, people want to return to their roots. They want to find themselves,” says Abraham Brezniak, a Jewish resident of Havana. “The spiritual part of a person has needs. They want to learn about their relatives. They want to know what they were.” Despite the material shortages wrought by the end of Soviet support to Cuba, the end of the years of plenty is also an end to the enforced religious vaccum – a vacuum now being filled by “reborn” Jews.

In 1959, at the dawn of communist rule, there were roughly 15,000 Jews living in Cuba. In the three decades that followed, party allegiance and religious observance were considered incompatible. But the fall of communism in Russia triggered an era that Cubans call the “Special Period.” During this time, communist party membership requirements regarding religious belief were gradually relaxed. Seeing this ideological opening, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee began sending religious materials and advisors to Cuba in an attempt to reinvigorate a fading community of less than 1,400 Jews.

Burt journeys to Havana to interview local Jews in 1994, five years into the Special Period. She films excited activity over the local rebirth of the faith, but also the daily hardships of life under a national economy on the brink of collapse. A halt in Soviet material subsidies means that food, gasoline, electricity and medicine are all scarce, and Burt’s subjects are forthcoming about the negative impact these shortages have on their lives.

She asks a doctor, a Jewish convert, if the criticism-laced comments she is making about life under the communist system could result in the loss of her job. The woman shrugs her shoulders and replies that it could. When Burt asks if this possibility scares her, the doctor’s response is one of weary indifference. “To tell you the truth, not anymore,” she says. “I’m afraid of standing every morning in my kitchen and saying, ‘What am I going to cook today?’ That’s what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of getting one of my children sick, and get to a hospital, and nothing for them there.”

That lack of fear in the secularized world of the communist state is complimented by the religious optimism that Burt documents among a group of Jews re-learning their faith. She captures images of Friday night worship where, despite lack of gasoline for buses and cars, the faithful somehow manage to travel from far and wide to pray at Havana’s handful of synagogues. They pray, dance and sing songs, living the humble lives of believers.