Returning home

Two dozen Crypto-Jews tour Jerusalem, exploring the heritage that remained a secret for 500 years

By GIL STERN STERN ZOHAR
man dances with torah palma de majorca_311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
man dances with torah palma de majorca_311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Half a millennium after the start of the Spanish Inquisition, which attempted to purge the country of non-Christians, two dozen descendants of Conversos (Crypto-Jews) known in Hebrew as anusim (those compelled to convert under duress), visited Jerusalem this week as part of their ongoing effort to shed their Roman Catholic veil and openly return to Judaism.
For the tour’s organizer, Sonya Loya of the remote mountain town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, the mission is one of correcting a historic injustice, she said.
“We’re not Marranos,” she said, rejecting a derogatory Spanish term meaning pigs. “We’re Jews.”
Loya, a glass artist who creates Judaica using dichroic glass developed by NASA to shield its space shuttles, compares her art with its hidden and embedded Judaica motifs to the story of the persecuted descendants of Sephardim who fled Spain and Portugal in an often vain attempt to hide from the Inquisition and its fiery public trials where heretics were burned at the stake.
As detailed in books like Cary Herz’s New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory and Stanley Hordes’s To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, many ended up in the backwaters of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, including places that today are in the American Southwest, as well as Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico and Brazil.
“For 500 years we survived by hiding in secret,” says Loya.
“Today we’re coming out. The descendants of Crypto-Jews are in the millions.”
In an emotionally charged lecture held at the Fuchsberg Center for Conservative Judaism in Jerusalem, Loya – the founder of the Bat Zion Learning Center in Ruidoso, thanked Rabbi Stephen Leon of the Bnai Zion Synagogue in El Paso, Texas, for his steadfast work in bringing Crypto-Jews back to their ancestral faith.
Located not far from the sluggish Rio Grande separating Mexico, from the United States, the synagogue became a magnet for those troubled by furtive memories of secretly lighting candles on Friday nights and eating flat bread in the spring.
For Loya the “journey” began when she was 18, in 1978, and ended in her “return” 27 years later. She is now planning to immigrate to Israel, she said.
Applied anthropologist Malka Shabtai told the Latino anusim of the larger picture of lost Jews returning to the Jewish people today – a project inexorably tied up with organizations like Kulanu and Shavei Israel founded and chaired by Jerusalem Post columnist Michael Freund.
Seven thousand Bnai Menashe are en route from India to Israel, she noted, adding that 450 lost Jews from Equitos, Peru, are already here and a further 700 are waiting to come.
“There is a common thread among all of them. Somewhere in their spiritual existence there was something strange. They went through a very difficult process to find their way to Judaism and to Israel. The days of the return to Zion are here. This is the time that was written about in the Bible,” said Shabtai.
Prof. Michael Corinaldi spoke of the recent decision of a rabbinical court in Bnei Brak recognizing the Chuetas of Palma de Mallorca, Spain, as Jews because they have married endogamously for more than six centuries since being compelled to convert in 1391.
“No more Marranos!” he told the group. “Today we are proud to call all of you ‘Jews’ – full stop,” he said to loud clapping and a chorus of amen.
“We’re waiting for your aliya.”
Loya’s week-long tour included a Tisha Be’av service, and a concert in Ladino. •