At his first lunch with New York Jewish leaders, Jose Valencia did something far from kosher. He ordered a bacon cheeseburger.

“They told me, ‘No, you can’t have that,'” Mr.Valencia recalled. “It was the beginning of my education.”

That was more than a decade ago. He has since made a giant cultural leap – as well as a geographic one – from his hometown, the steamy coastal city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. This summer, he became the president of the New York Association for New Americans. On a recent morning, Mr. Valencia, an immigrant who still speaks English with a lilting Spanish accent, laughed at his initial ignorance of Jewish customs.

He can now break down the laws of kashruth with almost the same ease he rolls off statistics on the thousands of immigrants he has helped during more than 14 years at Nyana, the largest Jewish refugee resettlement organization in New York.

Founded in 1949, Nyana began with a two-year mandate to help resettle Jewish survivors of occupied Europe. But the refugees kept coming, and the organization broadened its mandate to assist immigrants from more than 100 countries with services from English and computer classes to psychotherapy.

While the population served is no longer limited to Jewish refugees, Mr. Valencia, who at 50 has the stocky, bowlegged build of a soccer player and the same boundless energy, bristled at any question about whether the organization’s character will change with its first gentile at the helm.

“We were founded under Jewish auspices, we are now under Jewish auspices, and we will always be under Jewish auspices,” said Mr. Valencia, a Christian who describes himself as “not a religious type of person.”

Taking the helm of the agency, which employs more than 150 people, is a role Mr. Valencia could not possibly have envisioned for himself when, at 17, he boarded a plane headed for New York.

“I came in on a Friday and Monday I was working and I haven’t stopped since,” Mr. Valencia said proudly, drawing firm circles on the Formica table in his office overlooking Battery Park. “We came here knowing that whatever you wanted to achieve you could get, you just needed a lot of hard work.”

Mr. Valencia joined his parents, who had left five years earlier to raise the funds to bring their 10 children to America, in a Greenpoint apartment.

After six months working in a metal parts shop and taking all the free English classes available at community centers and churches, he enrolled at Queensborough Community College. Working at the same time, he rapidly progressed, learning English from translating his textbooks with a dictionary.

At the same time, he somehow found time to woo his wife. Also an Ecuadorian immigrant, they met in Greenpoint when he was 18 and she was 16. Two years later they married. Nearly 30 years later they are still married, but now live in southern New Jersey.

Upon graduating with a degree in economics from CUNY’s Baruch College, he knew he had to make a choice between serving a corporation or the general public. He chose the latter and has never looked back.

What’s most important to him about working at Nyana is not its tradition as a Jewish resettlement organization, but that it’s the place where he can affect the lives of tremendous numbers of people in need. “The social rewards here are amazing,” Mr. Valencia said. “At the end of the day you know that you saved many lives.”

In 1990 after 10 years at the city’s comptroller’s office, where he had climbed the ranks from staff accountant to bureau chief, he knew he wanted a change. An opportunity opened at Nyana as an accountant. Success notwithstanding, he said he always felt like a “social worker with a CPA degree” until he got to play both the financial and social services role when he was promoted to chief operating officer at Nyana.

Although he is now president of Nyana, he still sits in the same office, where the walls are lined with testimony to his history at the organization. Above his desk, “welcome” is written in Hebrew, a gift from when he first arrived. Next to the window, hangs a framed picture of the Old City in Jerusalem from a trip there in 1998, the one gift he bought himself. And across the room is a framed swatch of red satin with dozens of signatures and messages – a gift from the Vietnamese community, Nyana’s first major resettlement of non-Jewish refugees in the mid 1970s.

During Mr. Valencia’s tenure at Nyana he helped resettle 250,000 Russian speaking Jews, 4,000 Syrian Jews, as well as thousands of other refugees from other countries. Mr. Valencia’s role is both on the financial side and coordinating services that range from assisting with job placement, teaching how to navigate a supermarket, to fighting a deportation order in court.

Now, with the stream of Jewish refugees entering this country dwindling, it has diversified its mission to serving general immigrant communities.

Mr. Valencia has been innovative in meeting that challenge. Nyana now has a business model for computer teaching, a mental health clinic, a substance abuse program, as well as citizenship classes, and legal services. (“You need to be entrepreneurial nowadays,” he says.)

At the same time that Mr. Valencia has embraced the Jewish community, he has remained active volunteering in Hispanic organizations and hopes to transfer some of the lessons learned in the Jewish community to his own.

“I admire the Jewish community for the concept of community and the values of giving,” Mr. Valencia said. “When you come here you can achieve anything you want if you work hard, and immigrants do that. Once you do that you’ve got to give back.”