When my husband Anthony and I arrived this summer in San Diego, where I now serve Congregation Dor Hadash, we didn’t yet have a place to live. Luckily our friend, the great teacher Henny Kupferstein, lived just a mile and a half from the San Diego JCC, which is home for Dor Hadash. She was kind enough to let us stay with her for a few weeks, until we found a place of our own.

The three parties involved — my family, Dor Hadash, and Henny — all have migration in our past. Anthony grew up in Northern California and I’m a New Yorker; as a rabbinic family, this isn’t our first move. Dor Hadash, San Diego’s only Reconstructionist synagogue, has also called a number of places home. And Henny has a remarkable story, born a Belzer Hasid in Borough Park and today called “Dr. Henny,” a PhD living in San Diego as an autism rights and anti-sexual abuse activist. Wandering Jews, all.

Our respective wanderings led me, in those first days in San Diego, to begin making a regular trip up Genessee Avenue between Henny’s place and the JCC. Each day, I’d traverse a majestic valley called Rose Canyon, the home of University City High School (“Lucky kids,” I thought, when making the journey). The valley wasn’t always called “Rose Canyon,” obviously, and long before high schoolers called it home it was inhabited by a group of folks the Spanish colonizers called Diegueños.

The name Diegueño is derived from San Diego de Alcalá, the Spanish mission founded in 1769, which also gives the city its name. A few thousand Diegueños are still around, but they don’t call themselves that. They are collectively known as the Kumeyaay. And their name for what is now Rose Canyon was Ystagua-‘Iilh Taawaa, a name that........

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