Mother to Daughter

For hundreds of years, beginning in the eighth century, Spanish Jewry flourished under Muslim rule. But with the slow reconquest of Spain and Portugal by the Christians, that period came to an end. Wealthy, accomplished, and learned Jews were persecuted and then expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, culminating in a final expulsion in the late 1400s. Others converted to Christianity to escape death or expulsion, though for many, it was an insincere conversion.

From there, though, came the conversos or crypto-Jews (often called Marranos disparagingly by the Christians). These Jews continued to keep the Torah and mitzvos while outwardly presenting as Christian. In response, the Church sponsored the creation of the Inquisition, a tribunal designed to hunt down anyone suspected of being a secret Jew and to torture them into confessing, then burning them at the stake. This continued into the 1800s; the final accusation and trial happened in 1818.

In Spain and Portugal, tens of thousands of secret Jews maintained their religion. Others looked to the Balkan regions and the lands of the Ottoman Empire and even the New World (Latin America) to escape the scrutiny of the Inquisition. The Inquisition was a constant, ever-present terror, etched into the DNA of these crypto-Jews. Even today, many of their unknowing descendants still carry on that fear.

“My grandmother, my aunties, my mom, they all passed on to me that I shouldn’t point at the stars,” Hannah Eyal, a native of Portugal, told Family First. Years later, she was looking through old Inquisition documents describing a case where a family was brought before the tribunal because a neighbor accused a child of pointing at the sky on a Saturday evening.

Growing up, Hannah had no idea that she was Jewish. Her family was Catholic, though not particularly religious. But she was a spiritual child, desperate to connect to her faith. She struggled deeply with a disconnect that she always felt with Catholicism, and as she grew older, she turned to other outlets: yoga and meditation. By 25, she was on her way to Nepal and India to find the spirituality she was searching for.

Instead, she found Israelis back from their army tour, including her future husband. She joined him on a trip to Israel. “My first experience here was so overwhelming that I just felt like… oh my goodness, I’m having a psychological event,” Hannah recalls. “I felt immediately linked to the place.” Her friends wanted to show her Israeli culture, but Hannah was drawn to religious locations. They urged her to see Tel Aviv, but she wanted to go to the Kotel. “And I just felt it. I felt home.”

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fter the trip, she sat with her family in Portugal to share her experiences with them. When she began speaking about the symbolism of the Magen David, her mother turned to her. “She tells me, ‘You know, when I was a child, my first necklace I ever had was one with a star like this.’ ” Hannah froze. Wait. Where is this coming from?

She had never been taught the history of the Jews in Portugal. She had only a vague understanding of the Inquisition. But she knew her family customs. She remembered the fear when she would point at the stars or the way that her mother would sweep away from a doorway. Her family would say a special blessing on the first fruit of the season.

Along with the customs came the fear, still lingering deep in the subconscious of so many Portuguese. “The first time I started to speak about Jews, [my grandmother] pushed me inside, fearing the neighbors.” Hannah describes it almost as a feeling of gaslighting, where the reality of crypto-Judaism is so clear but still so aggressively hidden by the people who carry on the customs. But she thinks that this link to the past is also stronger than anyone might expect.

And strangely, it wasn’t all the children in Hannah’s family who were warned against pointing at the stars. Only Hannah, the sole girl of the group, was taught the secrecy and the fear.

This oddity comes up in interviews with other people who believe they’re descendants of crypto-Jews as well. The customs that are passed down, in many cases, are ones specifically tied to a woman’s traditional role in the home. They’re related to cooking, to cleaning, to Shabbos licht and hafrashas challah. The trinkets and secret objects that are preserved are necklaces and earrings. In Genie’s mother’s house, she found a box full of antique recipes developed to look like nonkosher food, including a sweet bread dish that mimicked pork chops.

“By 1590, the responsibility to pass everything down was incumbent on the woman,” Genie told Family First. “It became exclusively matriarchal.”

This does make sense. It was far more difficult to be a practicing Jewish man. Tefillin, minyanim… there were so many ways to implicate a man as a crypto-Jew. But every household lit candles when it got dark, regardless of religion. How was anyone to know if a woman would secretly slip into a closet on a Friday afternoon, just before sunset, to light hers?

The woman was the manager of her home, and the one to raise and teach her children. The woman understood that the Jewish line would continue through her, and so the unbroken Jewish connection depended solely on her. And so it did, grandmother to granddaughter, generation after generation.

So it still does, far more often than most would expect.

Searching

Genie had a friend from Nicaragua, another woman who traced her family back to the same village as Genie had traced her ancestors: Fermoselle. On her deathbed in a hospital in Nicaragua, her friend’s Catholic grandmother informed the family that they were actually Jewish. She had her daughter unclasp a gold ball that she’d worn around her neck on a chain. When the sides of it were squeezed and then pulled apart, they revealed a Magen David.

It all went back to Fermoselle. For Genie, uncovering her past became a part of a quest for validation. Genie felt as though a 500 -year wrong needed to be righted. Her ancestors who had been forced to hide their Jewishness needed their legacy acknowledged. She spent years tracking her family back generations, and found that both her maternal and paternal line took her to Fermoselle, Spain, right on the border of Portugal. Her ancestors’ last names kept changing, but they were distinctly converso names, and the family records showed a remarkable number of cousin intermarriages. There was even a priest in every generation — a common safeguard, Genie discovered, because he could oversee the marriages to make sure that they were halachically sound. Her research was impressive, but there was still no explicit Jewish connection. Not one person in her family tree had been recorded as a victim of the Inquisition, and Fermoselle didn’t seem to have a documented Jewish history. Only two secret Jews had ever been exposed from Fermoselle, and neither was from Genie’s family.

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his search for evidence is one that plagues many descendants of crypto-Jews. Maayan David and her husband planned to convert to Judaism together, but the rav was insistent that she look into her family history first. “Are you sure your wife isn’t Jewish?” the rav asked her husband, over and over. He had seen enough converts with a similar family history to Maayan’s to suspect it.

Maayan reached out to her family, back in Tunisia, who were able to trace their family back six generations. They found a Jewish-Italian name along the way, and when she spoke to her grandmother, her grandmother had vague recollections of being Jewish. But there was too little data to rely upon, and she underwent a conversion.

In Honduras, Adriana Medina* struggled with the lack of records as well. “I came out of a fundamental Christian school in sixth grade as a resolute atheist,” she told Family First. “It wasn’t until college when I started questioning if I was against all religion or just Christianity.” She felt an emotional and intellectual pull toward Judaism right around when she was researching her family history. But she couldn’t go back more than a few generations — many records were erased or burned.

Adriana’s family had strange connections to Jewishness regardless. Her grandmother had used Ladino words on occasion instead of their Spanish equivalents. (Ladino is to Spanish what Yiddish is to German — a Jewish language with Spanish origins.) Her mother had gone to the Kotel to pray for a daughter, and had slipped Adriana’s name into the cracks of the Kotel as part of her plea. There had been tiny traces of some Jewish ancestry deep in her history, but she doesn’t rely on them during her conversion process.

“I’m very conscious that I do have to convert and that it’s not immediately granted to me,” she said. “And I don’t think it should be, because it’s not a light decision. Finding these links solidified that this could have been a lost family legacy. And if it was, then it’s up to me to rescue it and give voice to those in my familial past who were forced to give it up. And if it’s not, then I’m just forging my new path ahead.”

But in some cases, the evidence is so clear that there are no questions. Joe Maldonado was born and raised in New York City, a very religious Puerto Rican Protestant who found himself drawn to Judaism even in his teenage years. “And I didn’t know what it was. But I used to, at that time, wear a cross with a Star of David,” he says. “I had that attraction, but I didn’t understand where it might be coming from.”

His parents urged him to go to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where despite feeling like a fish out of water, he learned, over ten years of medical school and residency, about the laws of Shabbos and kashrus.

Joe recalls a time back in the late 1970s when he was in college and headed out to the Mid-Manhattan Library to do some research. “I got off at Grand Central, walked out, and a guy grabbed me and said, ‘Come, you must put on tefillin.’ ” Joe had no idea what he was talking about. He saw the man’s RV with Hebrew writing on it, peered in the window, and saw a man inside with a little box on his head, bobbing back and forth. “I’m like, okay, this is a cult.”

To defuse this obviously absurd situation, Joe offered to take some reading material into the library with him. “I’ll read it over, and if on the way back, I decide to stop in, I’ll stop in.” He agreed that he’d return before sundown if he was convinced, went inside, and opened up the reading material. “And I realize, oh, this is hilarious. This guy thinks that I’m Jewish! Whatever possessed this man to think that?”

At the same time, he began doing exhaustive research into his mother’s genealogy.

Along the way, he was approached by another researcher who told him that his mother’s name was a Sephardic Jewish name. “I immediately responded to him and said, ‘No, we’re Spanish and we’re Italian, thank you very much.’ He said, ‘Well, they may have lived in Spain and they may have lived in Italy, but they were most likely Jews.’ ”

Joe began looking through old records and discovered a cousin who had already traced their family tree back to the 1500s. He found something odd there: a preponderance of cousins marrying cousins. At first, he thought that it must be about holding on to their wealth. Then, he began tracking where they were traveling and discovered that they were the standard Jewish migration routes after their exile from Spain.

The suspicion began to crystallize. He called his mother. “Mom, did you or your grandmother ever light candles on Friday night?” No, they hadn’t, but his grandfather would light a candle on the anniversary of the death of his parents. His mother used to sweep toward the center of the room. His great-grandfather kept planks of wood in the attic for coffins so the dead would be buried within a day, and then the whole family would sit for seven days and say the rosary prayers, even though they weren’t religious.

His mother wouldn’t eat eggs at anyone else’s house because they hadn’t been checked for blood. She didn’t mix meat and dairy. “But if you asked her, she would never say that it was anything conscious. It was just her repertoire of dishes.” She had meat recipes and dairy recipes; they didn’t overlap. In her home in Puerto Rico, her grandmother had a special knife used for slaughtering chickens in a specific spot.

Joe was dumbfounded.

His friends shrugged off the revelations. “They were saying, ‘Joe, if you discovered that you were Norwegian, would you learn Norse and become a Viking? This is ridiculous. You don’t have to do anything about it. It’s just information.’ But I felt this was different.” His Protestant background meant that he had spent his childhood learning that one day, G-d would gather up the Jewish people from all over and that the Lost Tribes would come back. And Joe was very religious. So this felt more significant to him.

It also felt like an existential crisis.

Joe found other Puerto Ricans with the same Jewish ancestry, undergoing the same experience. At one conference in Israel, clarity began to settle over him. “I felt a very deep spiritual sense that I needed to come home. That it was time for me to do this.”

After some time, a friend connected him with a rav who could help him begin the conversion process, Rabbi Peretz Steinberg. Rabbi Steinberg brought him to the Skverer Rebbe, who listened to his story and saw the evidence. He recommended conversion papers, because it would cause fewer questions for a Jewish world with little experience on the return of the Bnei Anusim, but was clear from the start of the process: “This is not a conversion. This is a return.”

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return. For Genie, who had already converted and was living a Jewish life, that return would take a literal meaning. Without any documented evidence that Fermoselle, the village of her ancestry, was a Jewish one, Genie would have to go there herself and find it. Together with her husband, Michael, and a friend, they set off for this tiny, quiet village.

Shabbos in their hostel room was an eerie affair. Each time they davened or sang, the lights flickered; but when they ate or talked, nothing happened. “We… knew, with increasing certainty, that in 500 years this was the first time Shabbat was celebrated openly, and with joy, in that town,” Genie writes in her memoir, My 15 Grandmothers. It felt as though the souls of her ancestors were with her that day.

Less encouraging were the next days of investigating. The village was old, almost untouched by time, and the people were elderly and reticent. “No,” they told her each time she queried. “There were no Jews here.” Finally, Genie’s search took her to the main church, where the town historian sat at the entrance. Genie inquired again about the Jews of Fermoselle.

“There were none that I know of,” the woman said, “But you’re welcome to tour the church.” Genie asked about a synagogue. “No, there had never been one.” She asked about Jews again. Nothing. Genie was about to walk away, defeated, when she turned around.

She thought to assure the woman that she wasn’t here to try to reclaim family homes or property; she only wanted to know her history. The woman saw the tears in Genie’s eyes and suggested another guide. Genie hugged her, and the woman was startled.

As Genie departed, she called after her, “What was your family’s name?” Genie gave it to her, gave her dozens of names from her family tree, but the woman wasn’t satisfied. “Do you have any other name, any special name that your family was called? A nickname, perhaps?”

Genie remembered tiny script on the top of one paper where her grandfather had written another phrase, one she said now. “They called us los Bollicos,” she said.

The woman’s face lit up. The two of them, frozen on the church steps, stared at each other. “There was a synagogue,” she said quietly. “I know who lives there. I will call you.”

She brought them to a house where an elderly woman agreed to give them a tour of her house. The homeowner took them to a garage. Genie saw a spiral staircase leading downward from there, but the woman was reluctant to let them go there. It was just storage for her wines, she insisted. Finally, after a long tour of the rest of the house, she opened the latch and led them down.

In the center of the old underground basement, there was a rounded spout and a hole carved into the wall. They had found what had once unmistakably been a mikveh. Later, she found a tunnel system below the village with many secret doors, sealed off over time. An elderly man she never saw again took her to a second underground area, this one with a space for an aron kodesh. An entire hidden chapter of history took form on a forgotten page of a book that no one else had opened, centuries of stories told at last.

The Fear Runs Deep

Portugal’s story of expulsion was different from Spain’s. After the Alhambra Decree in 1492, forcing all Jews out of Spain, many went to Portugal rather than to convert to Christianity. But only four years later, the king of Portugal, Manuel I, married into the Spanish royal family. As part of the marriage agreement, he ordered all Jews expelled from Portugal. But Manuel I was reluctant to lose the economic value Jews provided his country, so he made it almost impossible to leave. They were allowed to flee via only one port, and the Jews who came there were forced to convert instead.

“Portugal became a real prison for Jews,” Hannah Eyal says. Today, she lives in Israel, reclaiming an ancient heritage with pride. As a child, she had no idea that this heritage was hers.

“Sometimes I have this feeling that if someone like me, just telling my story, would get on Portuguese TV and tell my story, there are so many people who are going to connect with it,” Hannah says.

She sees this with the war in Israel right now. “I lost many friends and I… understand the fear and layers of anti-Semitism, but suddenly, you have people who are non-Jewish fighting hard and being pro-Israel without any explanation. They don’t see it. But I say this can’t be just the activism of a righteous person wanting to defend Jews. It’s something else. It’s people who feel it deeply in their hearts. This is how they’re channeling it.”

Like many crypto-Jews, Hannah is the sole member of her extended family to make the return. As much as her family might be interested in her journey, she has traveled it alone. She’s had support — her family keeps a kosher kitchen for her in Portugal, and the Rabbanut made her formal conversion process one where she felt that her identity was respected and honored — but, “We are usually very lonely in this.” She feels as though she’s a curiosity to her extended family. “Just left peaceful, calm Portugal, and went to Israel, that crazy cousin of ours.”

Adriana’s family isn’t averse to the idea of Jewish ancestry, but they quail at the thought of seeing Judaism observed openly. At the university where she teaches, she asked to opt out of a group prayer because of her ongoing conversion. “One coworker asked me to speak in my ‘witch tongue,’ by which they meant Hebrew. Another said she always thought Jews had horns. I distinctly remember rubbing my forehead when she said that, and she looked very shocked.” In Honduras, the Jewish community is tiny, and the few other people converting to Orthodox Judaism are all men. “I want to relate to other women who are like me, and it’s just not possible.”

Joe has found many cousins through genetic matches and gatherings of returned crypto-Jews. In his immediate family, though, his return to Judaism was met with less enthusiasm. While his mother embraced the idea of Jewish heritage, his father has shunned it. “To this day, he prays that G-d will open my eyes once again to see the truth.” But he notes that his father is also undergoing cancer treatments right now, and he spends hours each day reading Tehillim. “I think G-d knows what He does at what point in people’s lives.”

Genie has always been surrounded by loving family, but she has also been alone. Her mother kept a polite distance from Genie’s religious journey, though in her eighties, one day, abruptly, she reached out to Genie’s husband and asked to see his rabbi. “She said, ‘I don’t want to die Catholic.’ ” Based on Genie’s research from Fermoselle, the beis din had already ruled that Genie’s whole family was Jewish, but the rav said that her mother would have to take it on formally by doing a mitzvah. It was Friday afternoon. That night, Genie and her mother lit Shabbos candles together. On Sunday morning, Genie’s father called to tell her that her mother’s Alzheimer’s had intensified, and she remained in memory care until she passed away. “That was the last thing she did. She died Jewish.”

Genie’s husband is a steady support, but her children remain Catholic. “My daughter has a four-year-old,” she told Family First. “This whole legacy, everything… it’s on the shoulders of this four-year-old. I’m just waiting.” Grandmother to granddaughter, as it has always been.

Laying the Groundwork

Genie’s quest to find her roots was long and arduous; for others, she wants it to be easier. Last year, she had a private audience with Pope Francis and got permission to access Inquisition records in the secret archives of the Vatican. This project is still ongoing given the difficulty in locating the records. She spearheaded a project that digitized all the Portuguese records as well, opening up access for anyone who wants to research their family history. A film has been produced about her journey, translated into many languages and shown around the world. This January, she’ll be going on a trip along the Amazon River, showing the film to the small Jewish communities there.

Eight years ago, Genie sold her company to devote her life to this mission. She spends much time teaching Latin America’s burgeoning communities of returned, often already halachically converted, crypto-Jews. In Armenia, El Salvador, there are 300 people and 70 children in the community. Genie has helped them kasher their kitchens and shuls. She’s a one-woman powerhouse.

“But what worries me,” she admits, “is that there’s nobody behind me.” Historians might study one crypto-Jew or another, but there is no one else with the scope and ambition that Genie has brought to the table. “I don’t need help, but I need someone to pick up this baton when I can’t do it anymore.”

Hundreds of people reach out to her each month. For Genie, much like the others, this isn’t only a personal journey. This is a search for truth for all those who have been robbed of it by history and circumstance. This is a way to bring people home.

Joe’s experience is the ultimate returning story. In 2015, as part of his conversion-return process, he had to observe all the Yamim Tovim. Tishah B’Av held a special significance for him, as it marked the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. That afternoon, Joe was at Shaarei Torah in Syracuse, and a young boy came up to him and asked if he wanted to put on his tefillin. “I wouldn’t know how to put it on,” he hedged.

“I’ll walk you through it,” the boy offered. He was the son of a Chabad rabbi, the two of them visiting the shul that Tishah B’Av. He helped Joe put on the tefillin and say the brachah.

“It was an incredibly powerful experience,” Joe told Family First now. He thanked the boy and told him, “This is probably the first time someone in my family has put on tefillin for hundreds of years. And it was your tefillin.”

“Well, I did what my father said,” the boy told him.

Joe went to thank the boy’s father. “Someone once tried to put tefillin on me,” he remarked, and he told him the story from nearly forty years before.

The Chabad rabbi listened, then asked, “When was that?” Joe told him the year and the location.

It was the Chabad rabbi’s RV.

“Anyone who doubts what Hashem is up to?” Joe says. “You can’t doubt. His purposes are eternal. And He will bring every one of us back.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 924)