It has been a ver special weekend visiting SEGOVIA and TOLEDO with these two couples from Philadelphia. With a tight agenda we were visiting the cities, learning history, some shopping and some kosher local food…. a great combination.
Abarbanel House was also in our itinerary and we all enjoy with crossed stories.
Hope to see you soon here.
A judge in Barcelona has sentenced a young man of 22 years to four months in prison, special disqualification for the right of suffrage and about 500 euros fine for having painted a Nazi swastika at the door of a synagogue in the Catalan capital. The sentence nevertheless agrees to suspend the sentence of deprivation of liberty, if the defendant complies with a series of rules of conduct. The first: not to commit crime for two years. And the second, more in the way of education, condemns the young anti-Semite to participate in a human rights course aimed at full respect for equality and non-discrimination of people, especially for anti-Semitic reasons, and to be taught By the Department of Justice of the Generalitat. These courses should include visits to the synagogue, to know the reality of the Jewish people and “break prejudices and anti-Semitic stereotypes,” according to the ruling issued by the TSJC.
The events occurred on December 28, 2016. The young man who has been convicted acted with a woman “unidentified” according to the sentence, “moved by their animosity and willingness to humiliate the Jewish people.” They approached a synagogue in Barcelona and with a spray, while the young man carried out surveillance work, the woman drew a swastika at the door of the temple and sprinkled with red the mezuza, the small receptacle located on the right side of the entrances of all House that professes the Jewish religion. The young man has been convicted of an offense committed on the occasion of the exercise of fundamental rights in his way of injuring the dignity of people for anti-Semitic reasons.
The depressive Madrid of the first 40 was also a Madrid of secrets and intrigues, spies with monocle and clandestine activities. Under its privileged geographical situation, holding the interests of Nazis and allies, stories of alternative diplomacy are hidden; Double side of the exclusive Embassy. This confectionery of the Paseo de la Castellana, which brought together aristocrats, ambassadors and intelligence agents around tea, pastries and surveillance, closed its doors 86 years later.
The distinguished and exclusive British appearance of the place, founded in 1931, colored the city’s leaden landscape. It was the obsession of Margarita Kearney Taylor, owner of the same, who from the beginning tried to turn the area into an approximation of the elegant neighborhoods of London, such as Mayfair or Belgravia. Then, with the outbreak of World War II, he strove to give refuge and departure to those fleeing from the German Gestapo and SS.
The confectionery, also converted into a restaurant, was named “Embassy” because of its proximity to several embassies, especially the British and German embassies, the latter located a few steps away, next to the “Friedenskirche” IBM building. Their interests converged on the exclusive premises, witnessing a tense and superficial calm.
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The Nazi deployment, led by Paul Winzer, head of the Gestapo, and Hans Lazar, head of propaganda in Spain, increased control and pressure in the area with the connivance of Francisco Franco. Germany, in this sense, even came up with an invasion to satisfy its strategic pretensions in the conflict. Kearney Taylor, along with the British ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare, turned his place into a refuge to alleviate the persecution suffered by anyone who was against the interests of the Nazis.
Embassy’s basement, which housed an oven for confectionery cakes, housed thousands of undocumented immigrants who received food, attention, and some money. It is estimated that the British embassy spent more than 1,000 pounds a day to undertake such an undertaking, which was eventually interrupted by several closures of the premises. Marguerite’s mood, Irish of elegant but firm appearance, did not waver.
Regarding the Jews, Embassy was constituted as their salvation and opportunity of flight. Franco never undertook a policy of persecution against them, but anyone who entered illegally into Spain was subject to arrest and deportation. About 30,000 people were evacuated, despite the harassment of the German embassy.
Casa Sefarad-Israel hosted an event organized by the Association of Friends of Israel. The event was attended by personalities such as Israel’s Ambassador for Spain and Andorra, Daniel Kutner; The Secretary of State for the Middle East, Manuel Gómez-Acebo or the mayor of Jaén, Javier Márquez.
It was an attempt to give an account of the work done during the last year and to present two more associations. The event was enlivened by the musical intervention of Dani Toledano, Víctor Monge and José Antonio Cano “Chiki”. Juan de la Torre and Eva Garcia-Ron, co-founders of the Association of Friends of Israel in Spain, presented the participants, after reviewing the activities they have organized throughout 2016. Juan de la Torre thanked the newspaper LA RAZON the possibility that they have been given to publish in our blogs.
The first association presented to the two hundred people who filled the halls was the Andalucía-Israel Friendship Association. A long run that was run by its president, Erik Domínguez, deputy mayor of the municipality of Guarromán, and the councilman of the city of Seville, Rafael Belmonte. His aim, he said, is “to foster relations between Andalusia and Israel, to value the Jewish legacy in Andalusia, to combat anti-Semitism and Judeophobia and to honor the memory of the Shoa,” said Domínguez, who also pointed out that Andalusia and Israel “Share their love of culture.” In addition, Domínguez wanted to make clear that the BDS association, which advocates a boycott of Israel and its products and companies, can not be accepted by any public administration, since the Spanish Constitution “does not discriminate on grounds of origin.”
The Israel-Spain friendship, like an old and large leafy tree
For his part, the president of the Basque Association of Friends of Israel (AVAI ILEE), Jon Gotzon Laburu, toured the history of the friendship between the Basque Country and Israel and initiatives that have been carried out, such as calling To a “Plaza Sefarad” square, as well as having a souvenir for those “Basque heroes who helped save Jews”, in whose memory there is even a commemorative plaque in the port of Haifa.
“Putting a flag of Israel in an act in the Basque Country is not easy,” he explained to the audience, who interrupted this degree in Information Sciences and a master’s degree in Business and Communication Management on numerous occasions.
The Israel-Spain friendship, like an old and large leafy tree
The Secretary of State for the Middle East, Manuel Gómez-Acebo, affirmed that “the relationship between Spain and Israel is not only the relationship between two governments, but that it is between societies” and called them “rich and varied”. He also pointed out that “they are sometimes overshadowed by the more political aspect of the matter”. For Gómez-Acebo “there is still much to do, especially to make themselves known to each other.” Thus, the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicated that “in Spain has to shed more and more the image of Israel as a democratic country that is.” He also recalled the regional forum of foreign ministers that took place in January in Barcelona, attended by 43 countries, including Israel. “In Spain we continue working for the idea of respect for the memory of what Sefarad was,” he added.
Israeli ambassador Daniel Kutner said: “Friendship with Israel, which spreads throughout Spain, is like a large, ancient tree. It has roots that at first glance can not be seen, but it also has a trunk Strong and large and small branches. It is a tree to be taken care of, to provide water and fertilizers. “
The excavations at the site of La Mota, the interpretation center of Jewish culture on the Camino de Santiago and the proposal to design a Sephardic cultural itinerary in the province of Burgos are the three major initiatives in which Castrillo Mota works Jews, and that tomorrow Monday will present to the Spanish Jewish community in an act organized by Center Sefarad-Israel. The objective is not only to publicize the projects, but also to gather the necessary support to develop them.
The Mayor, Lorenzo Rodriguez, recalled that the Jewish community in Spain is very “deluded” by the proposals of the Burgos municipality, since they mean recovering the past of the Jewish people in Burgos. “We have taken the projects very seriously,” as Ángel Palomino, director of the archaeological site research and value project, and Gonzalo Villarreal, architect in charge of the Sephardic memory center, demonstrates.
The center of the Sephardic memory would require an investment of around 500,000 euros
Both will be in the meeting tomorrow, which will take place at the headquarters of the Sefarad-Israel Center in Madrid, from 19:00. Manuel Moratinos, responsible for historical documentation, will also be present. Castrillo Mota de Judíos wants to give a boost to its projects in 2017, so that among its objectives is to begin, at least, the works for the creation of that center of Sephardic culture on the Camino de Santiago, whose investment will be around the 500,000 euros.
The City Council already owns the home in which the center will be installed, and knows what it wants to do. Most of the intervention will focus on the façade, which will be restored. The interior will be left as it is, although it is musealized. The most important thing is to have the financial funds to start it, although Rodríguez hopes to start the rehabilitation this year, even if it is with own money of the City Council and the Cultural Association Mota de Judíos.
“We depend on external aid,” he acknowledged, so they do not leave an opening date, although the mayor acknowledges that they would like to have it running by 2019. Meanwhile, Castrillo has work to do in the archaeological site of ‘La Mota’ , Which has 80,000 square meters of land for excavation. This year will begin the third phase of the excavations, which will count on an aid of the Provincial of 20,000 euros, which the City will complete with 9,000. And the Junte is expected to collaborate as in previous years, with 30,000 euros.
In March, Rodríguez will return to Madrid to discuss the organization of a trip to New York
In this new phase will continue working in the synagogue, always following the indications of the research project of Palomino. The ultimate aim is to put into value the site where the Castrillo origin lies as a refuge for the Jews expelled from Castrojeriz. The latest initiative to be presented to the Jewish community is the project to create a Sephardic cultural itinerary in the province, which is still in its infancy, but which would be willing to collaborate around fifteen municipalities.
Travel to New York
The presentation will also serve to raise economic support, and to advance in the trip to New York that is being scheduled for upcoming dates. Lorenzo Rodriguez explained that in March they will have a specific meeting at the Sefarad-Israel Center to address this issue, but it is intended to be able to travel to the United States to present the Jewish Castrillo Mota initiatives to the American Jewish community. There would be a delegation led by the mayor, the architect and the archaeologist, in addition to the Sefarad-Israel Center.
The municipality wants to become an international benchmark for Jews, so this year, they will have contact with Israel. They will visit the country and, at the same time, will host a meeting with the town of Kfar Vradim, with which they twinned last year. The cultural proposals of this 2017 will be complemented by a summer course on Jewish culture and tradition, in collaboration with the Sefarad-Israel Center and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the traditional concerts, also in the summer months.
The Archbishopric of Toledo will not give up, for the time being, the Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca – one of the most visited monuments in this city -, to the Federation of Spanish Jewish Communities as it has requested. A petition that the Spanish Jews have been formulating since 1992, when the Vatican ordered the then archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Marcelo González Martín, to start talks with the State of Israel that did not fruition.
The last contacts between the current archbishop, Braulio Rodríguez, and the president of the Federation of Spanish Jewish Communities, Isaac Querub, were in November 2016. Since then, Querub has been making public statements claiming this historic building built in the century XII.
The Archbishop of Toledo has settled the matter on Thursday with a communique in which it suggests to the Jewish Community to go to the State to request the transfer of another important synagogue of Toledo, the one of Tránsito, very close to the one of Santa Maria the White.
Tickets, Franc and women of bad life
The Archbishopric of Toledo also wanted to clarify that this synagogue, transformed into a Christian temple in the fourteenth century, became part of the assets of the Catholic Church in 1929 during the reign of Alfonso XIII, reason why denied that it was General Franco Who gave it to her. In addition, the church hierarchy of Toledo declines to maintain the ownership of the synagogue for a collection purpose.
The entrance costs 2.5 euros but various groups and tourist agencies benefit from discounts. In addition, according to archbishopric data, the income obtained serves to maintain the synagogue itself, to pay for works in other temples and to pay religious figures.
The Santa María Blanca Synagogue, which over the centuries has also been used as a refuge for women repentant of their bad life, barracks and warehouse of the Royal Treasury, will remain a tourist attraction more than Toledo but in the hands of the Church , Not the Jewish Community. Curiously, it was Muslim and non-Jewish masons and masons who built it.
From a young age, the writer and researcher José Ignacio Carmona already felt Jewish, despite being raised in a Christian Toledo family. He lived in the neighborhood of San Antón, where a Jewish cemetery was discovered in 2013, the Cerro de la Horca. Coincidentally or not, Carmona feels that memory, something that reflects in his book “Toledo. Jews: curiosities, myths and enchantments »(Editorial Dauro).
-What will the reader find in the walk that he proposes for the Jewish Toledo?
-This book tells, for the first time, the story told by the Jews themselves, with themes unknown to the general public, such as the role they had and, specifically, the converts in the discovery of America. In addition, certain winks appear to a Toledo customs, such as that made by researcher Luis Rodríguez in his monograph «From Salamanca to Toledo with Lazarillo de Tormes», where he makes an imaginary journey of the protagonist of this novel through the streets of the city. There are also other typical characters of the time, such as the buldero, who sold the bull of the Holy Cross, or the greaser, a healer allowed by the Inquisition.
-What is true in the typical image of the Jew magician or alchemist?
-In the book I make a correction to an idea of mine earlier: the concept of magic was born in the School of Translators of Toledo. In particular, this concept comes from the School of Baghdad, where Greek science, Hindu astronomy, Persian astrology or the Alexandrian geography. All these heterogeneous matters converge in a single knowledge and bring the Arabs to the Iberian Peninsula, where there was a cultural vacuum. This resulted in Toledo in the fifteenth century, there were alchemist circles.
-What historical character of the Jewish Toledo would highlight?
– For example, Yehudah Halevi, who was the first poet in Castilian language. But with Toledo as a stage, I emphasize the struggle between the Trastámara and Pedro I of Castile that caused a slaughter of about 1,200 Jews, considered a “shoa” or holocaust by the Jews themselves and that supposed the origin of the synagogue of the Transit. The Castilian king allowed the Jewish community to lift this building by this tribute of blood, hence the walls are full of praises to Peter I.
“In the study of the Jewish world, why do history and legend often mix?”
– First, because the weight of this collective imagination in a society of continuous suspicion, with the persecution of the Inquisition, makes us not have record of what happened in reality. In fact, in the literature of the time he always associated the Jew with the magic, caricatured him wearing the hood, the tabard and a candle at night. Thus comes a time when reality is blurred, an image to which the Jewish people themselves, perhaps the most cultured but also the most mythomaniac, contribute.
-Attending to the legends that appear in his book on the Jewish world in Toledo, with which one of them stays?
– I remain, especially, with one, the Child of La Guardia, which is universal and Lope de Vega took it to literature. The legend tells the death of a child at Easter at the hands of the Jews. Even in this town in Toledo, it is still taboo to talk about being Jewish. There is also Sara’s and the flower of passion, which speaks of the impossible love of the Jewish Sara with a Christian that ends with both dead. Once buried, their bodies give rise to the plant with the same name as the title of the legend.
One of the arches of access to the neighborhood of the Jewish Quarter of Toledo
One of the arches of access to the neighborhood of the Jewish Quarter of Toledo Óscar Huertas
-Is there much to discover about the Jewish world in Toledo?
-Toledo, instead of turning it into a theme park for tourists, it would have to be updated and put into the 21st century through innovative projects that reveal their roots and history, such as scholarships and exchange programs for young university students, for Example of the Jewish world.
-What does Toledo mean for a Jew?
-Toledo is so important because it is the Jerusalem of Sepharad. The center of spiritual gravity moved from the East to our city with a Talmudic school. In addition, it should not be forgotten that Jews are the most indigenous community of the Iberian Peninsula, as there are real testimonies of the Jewish presence in the first century, about AD 60 or 80 AD. Of the many myths that exist, it is even spoken of that Jews of Israel arrived after the first destruction of the Temple of Solomón. In fact, the oldest remains that remain in Toledo are the necropolis of Pradillo de San Bartolomé, in the vicinity of the Cristo de la Vega, and the Cerro de la Horca.
-Why your interest about the Jews?
– I lived precisely when I was a child in a house on the Jewish cemetery of Cerro de la Galca, and from childhood I always said that I wanted to be a Jew, although I was raised in a Christian family. Incidentally, when the archaeologist Arturo Ruiz Taboada began to study this place, texts appeared on tombstones reminiscent of the famous “stone of remembrance” of the Jewish diaspora. In this way, a circle would be closing in which I, as a descendant of “anusim”, that is, a converted Jew, I feel depositary of that memory.
http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2017/02/14/actualidad/1487073379_668229.html
The archbishop of Toledo prefers to remain silent. The official response of his diocese at the insistence of EL PAÍS is: “The archbishop considers that, for the moment, he should not make any statement on the matter.” The “subject” is the property of the Santa María la Blanca synagogue in Toledo, which today belongs to the Catholic Church. Church law states that the ultimate decision about what to do with the synagogue depends on the diocese, headed by Archbishop Braulio Rodríguez Plaza.
The Jewish community of Toledo built Santa María la Blanca around 1300. A century later, in 1411, St. Vincent Ferrer removed it during a massacre of Jews. Toledo had other synagogues, but Santa Maria la Blanca was the Mayor. The Jewish community is now calling for its return. “In the 21st century, in a country like Spain, a symbolic return of that good plundered to the Jewish community would be nice,” says Isaac Querub, president of the Federation of Spanish Jewish Communities.
With silence, the archbishop has enough to keep things as they are. The Jewish community has little choice but to insist on a gesture of the Church or a multi-party negotiation with the state. The courts are not possible because the present Jewish community is not heiress of the historical community toledana.
The message of silence from the archbishopric was accompanied by this other excuse, which seems to take away symbolic weight from the Jewish petition: “Today, Santa Maria la Blanca is not a church or a synagogue. In it there is no official worship of any confession. It is a historic building that the archdiocese cares for, preserves and maintains. ” The temple is today a tourist monument and is desecrated, but sporadic acts are performed that do not involve mass.
The proof that the diocese of Toledo knows that it has something delicate in hand is a recent legal management. On July 18, 2012, Professor of Law at the Universidad Complutense Francisco García Fernández requested a copy of the inscription of the synagogue in the Registry of Toledo. Two days later, hardly by chance, the parish of Santo Tomé, owner of the property, donated it to the archbishopric. “He gave the synagogue to the archbishop because he who receives a donation becomes a ‘owner of good faith’, but it does not apply because the final owner remained the same: the diocese,” Garcia Fernández believes.
Gerardo Ortega, the parish priest of São Tomé who donated to the Registry in 2012, says he does not remember anything: “There has been no legal movement. Santo Tomé has never owned the synagogue. It is impossible for the minor to donate to the elderly. What is parish is always diocesan, “he says. Ortega knows that the request of the Jewish community is not new. There was at least one – more private – in 1992. “Occasionally a desire arises because it brings them a very special memory,” he admits. But it can not be done any more, according to his opinion: “It can not be of the Jewish world because of who it is. It is so. “
Ortega does not give much value to the request for return: “The Jewish community who is? That entity has to be addressed to someone, but not a newspaper buzz. I do not know if the archbishop has received anything. ” The archbishop has in fact received no one. Querub has requested an official meeting by letter. They have not yet answered him. In November 2016, Querub coincided with Rodríguez Plaza in one act. At the beginning of his speech, Querub referred to the archbishop: “An intelligent and influential man with whom we have so much to talk about.” Those things are still not spoken.
The Spanish Church is not unanimous. Cardinal Carlos Osoro, archbishop of Madrid and vice-president of the Episcopal Conference, sees a need for a gesture with the Jewish community: “All the efforts we make are few. The gestures that come to us and help us are good. Of course I see it well. Santa María la Blanca has to be a meeting place, “he says. The celebrated interreligious dialogue needs more than words, according to Mayte Rodríguez de Lara, director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Studies: “In all my years of work for dialogue I have never heard a voice of resentment towards any Jew about expulsion Or religious persecution. We can not turn the dialogue into pure formalisms without endowing it with meaning. “
A monument that collects
Santa María la Blanca is the third most visited monument of Toledo, after the cathedral and the church of Santo Tomé, where is El Buenco del Buen Orgaz, by El Greco. In 2016 the synagogue received 405,928 visitors, according to archbishop data. The entry costs 2.5 euros, and you have to subtract the 5,317 people who came for free and those who bought a bracelet for 9 euros that includes 7 monuments of the archbishopric, including the synagogue. In 2014, year with the latest data, 59,600 bracelets were sold. If we look at the growth in sales of the bracelet, perhaps have sold about 100,000 in 2016. The paid visitors in the synagogue could be around 300,000. If so, the exclusive income would be around 750,000 euros per year. The money is divided between convents, a diocesan fund to help other churches and the salary of the maids of the place. The money has not gone clearly to the maintenance of the building. The new lighting costs 125,000 euros and 80% has paid Iberdrola. The last great restoration of the synagogue was between 1983 and 1994 and was paid by the Ministry of Culture. The architect Francisco Jurado was in charge of the work: “There were humidities that went up the columns and deteriorated the capitals. When it rained you would put your hands on the pillars and the water would fall. It had a pavement, “he says. Interior of Santa María la Blanca before its restoration of the 80s Image courtesy of Francisco Jurado Interior of Santa María la Blanca before its restoration of the 80s / Image courtesy of Francisco Jurado The synagogue was renovated and saved, but its historical relevance remains without Put into value. Today there is hardly a poster with a little eloquent chronology. Visitors roam the ships without direction. “Diocesan museology is poor,” says Santiago Palomero, director of the Museo Sefardí de Toledo, which includes the other great synagogue of the city, Tránsito. “They’re not counting. It is a site with a historical relevance and they are not interested in anything. There is a lack of care, “he adds. At the entrance there are more posters about the peculiar Fraternity of Santa María de la Mañana than about the synagogue. A Japanese visitor mistakes the arrow for a lateral “exposition” with the entrance of the synagogue and wanders the courtyard looking for the door. The Fraternity is a mixed community of ten members founded in 1999 by the current archbishop, Rodríguez Plaza, when he was a bishop of Salamanca. Shortly thereafter, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares, then Archbishop of Toledo, gave them “the spiritual responsibility of the synagogue,” according to his founder, Brother Abraham de la Cruz, and “made me make an exhibition throughout the synagogue on panels” . The synagogue was filled with pictures of a presumed mystical value, but not historical. “It does not seem to me that exposures of dubious quality help keep the synagogue materials intact,” says Paloma Acuña of the Royal Toledo Foundation. A few years ago, the exhibition left the temple to its current side room: “The archbishop renewed our contract but in the small place for reasons that only he can explain,” Brother Abraham says. The role of the Fraternity there is to speak of the Unity between the Church and Israel. Although rather its aim seems to attract the ethereal sympathy of Jews towards the Church: “We have often heard Jews say in our exposition that if this vocation exists it is because the Messiah was born. Many are crying, “explains Brother Abraham. The Fraternity does several prayers in the synagogue at Jewish festivals, but it has no relation with the Spanish Jewish community. Toledo today has no Jewish community of its own. The synagogue has historically been Church and State. After its time of synagogue, first it was oratorio and soon I convent for repentant prostitutes. In the nineteenth century passed into the hands of the state and was military arsenal and treasury store. The Monuments Commission restored it in the nineteenth century and tried to get the church to use it again. Finally, the regime of Franco was the one who returned the synagogue to the Church in 1939 with the excuse of “lacking the State of means for its maintenance”, according to a decree that quotes Palomero in his doctoral thesis. An extraordinary gesture in PalermoThe return of a Synagogue of the Church to a Jewish community is extraordinary because, in addition to the implications of the religious gesture, the medieval synagogues that remain in the hands of the Church and that some Jewish community claims are scarce. In Spain it only happens with Santa María la Blanca. There are other synagogues with value – the Transit, also in Toledo, and the one of Cordova, that are of the State – and one in Segovia, that underwent a fire in 1899 and is inside a convent. “The petition of the Jewish community of Santa María la Blanca is a great opportunity for the Spanish Church to rethink its attitude towards the Jewish people,” says Rodríguez de Lara.This January in Palermo (Italy) a remarkable gesture has taken place . The small community of a few dozen Palermitan Jews -expelled also in 1492-had been seeking a place of worship and study for eight years. The City Council had offered them an unfeasible place. In July 2016, the president of the community, Evelyne Aouate, went to see the new archbishop, Corrado Lorefice. “After 20 days he called to tell me that he was willing to offer us what he had asked for: an oratory in the synagogue area of the old Jewish quarter “Says Aouate. Above the destroyed synagogue of Palermo, the church of San Nicolò di Tolentino was built. Next to it there is an oratory that is now in disuse, which is the space that Lorefice has given freely to the Jewish community. “It is something extraordinary, very particular and not simple to obtain,” says Noemi di Segni, president of the Union of Jewish Communities of Italy. Apparently so far, Toledo will not revive a similar gesture. It is true that the repercussion would be different: the Toledo synagogue was the center of Spanish Jewish life. As in Palermo, the decision is in the hands of the archbishop. Higher in the Vatican, there seems to be little interest in interfering: “The Vatican does not get into those things,” says Cardinal Osoro. In Palermo, at least, it has not done so: “It is clear that the Vatican will have given its opinion,” says Pierpaolo Punhasllo, Rabbi of the Shivai Israel organization that helps communities in Italy. “But it has never come to me. My interlocutor is Archbishop Lorefice, “he adds. If there were any steps in Toledo, the formulas for ownership of the synagogue may not be a mere return to the Jewish community. Isaac Querub insists on clarifying three things: the initiative to propose is of the Church, the return does not imply economic restitution nor to keep the money of the entrances and the State should play a part.A ANNIVERSARY TOLEDANOToledo celebrates this year the 30th anniversary of Its declaration as a World Heritage City. There is no lack of convent stones, Jewish streets, cathedrals and mythical oils to remember. The City Council, in agreement with other organizations, has launched guided tours to the best known and most hidden heritage, with concerts of music and theater and exhibitions. The city of the Alcázar and of the marzipans, the Greco and the three cultures, will receive this year the visitors with an enriched program, where Santa María la Blanca will be obligatory stop. From the Real Foundation of Toledo, The two synagogues in the Sephardic Museum complex: “It is compatible to keep the synagogue open to the public, to perform Jewish liturgical acts and to join the cultural management of the Sephardic Museum to tell the history of the Jewish quarter,” says Paloma Acuña. Money, for Acuna, would not be a problem: “The revenues would still be there. If so much money went to each convent, the state can commit to continue to send it. “The proof that nothing is impossible is that there has already been a Jewish wedding in the synagogue. According to two sources, a Jewish couple rented the temple for a while, hid the cross in the central nave and sought a progressive rabbi – who put few hits – to take advantage of a place of so much symbolism.
http://www.diariodeleon.es/noticias/cultura/judio-leon-echo-triunfa-portugal_1137605.html
It is not new concept or type of adventures of the collective. ‘People from Leon around the world’ seems to have been at least since the Middle Ages, with landmark cases in which many of the many civilians who today are scattered all over the continent, outside the Lion that did not give them the opportunity to work and live , They can be identified. And one of these unique cases must be tracked as five centuries ago: his name was Juda Corcoz, was a rabbi and doctor, and fled a kingdom in which Christianity was on the way to occupy all the religious and social space to find shelter in Sabugal, Portuguese town located in the line with the present provinces of Salamanca and Cáceres, where he became a neighbor of the most respected.
Corcoz is one of the historical figures around which revolves a new thematic center for the recovery of the Hebrew memory of Sabugal, which will be inaugurated at the end of this month of February. The mayor of the town, Antonio Robalo, explained that through a European cooperation project 170,000 euros have been invested in this center, which is located next to the castle of Sabugal, in a historic building acquired by the Own Town Hall.
It is a house where their former owners, when they rehabilitated it a little more than a decade ago, discovered that it was inhabited by a Jewish family, since there was a stone cupboard that they used to secretly celebrate the practice of lighting a candle at night From Friday to Saturday, as the Hebrew tradition says.
It will be the House of Jewish Memory of La Raya, specifically Robalo, who wants this center to be a strategic enclave of Jewish memory and a point of union of tourists who arrive in the Iberian Peninsula to discover Jewish history. An objective similar to that of the Center of Interpretation of the Three Cultures that the Consistory Leonese began to install in the church of Puente Castro without that of today it has been able to give a definite impulse to him.
“Sabugal, on the line of the oldest border in Europe, was a privileged town for the flow of many Jews who were expelled from Spain after the Reconquest,” recalled Robalo. And so the new center hides a work of several years of research by Portuguese archaeologists and historians who dug in the archive of the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon to spin the first-person memory of the Jewish community that had this region .
And one of its referents has been the doctor who, as described in the documents, came to Sabugal from Leon along with other Jews “of modest condition” – as it is in the file – like Jaque Mel, that settled down in the Portuguese town of Tailors, or shoemaker Isaac Verdugo. Juda Corcoz, as well as a doctor, “was a figure of prestige and respect in his time”, acknowledged Sabugal archaeologist Marcos Osorio.
“It was clear that he was the leader of the community”, as he performed practices of the Hebrew tradition suitable only to rabbis, such as “circumcision of the frenulum in male babies”, he explained. The idea of this center as a reference point of Judaism is intended to complement, according to Antonio Robalo, as a place of historical recovery of names and events that occurred in Sabugal related to this culture and are not yet inventoried.
The two-storey building includes a museum project, already completed, where it will be possible to know by means of explanatory panels the intense relationship of Sabugal and of this whole border area with the Jews between the XV and XVIII centuries.
In addition, this House of Jewish Memory of La Raya will be integrated in the Jewish Network of Portugal, where there are some referring villages like Belmonte, also near the border with Salamanca – specifically, near the area of Ciudad Rodrigo -, whose Jewish Museum Receives an average of 80,000 visitors each year.
