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.
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.
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.lucenahoy.com/articulo/ocio/abraham-haim-conferencia-judios/20170208104352037860.html
Only three months after his first official visit, Dr. Abraham Haim, president of the Council of the Sephardic Community in Jerusalem, returns to Lucena to deliver the speech Spain and the Jews: encounter, disagreement and reunion. An event, which will be attended by the manager of the Network of Jewish Quarters of Spain, Marta Puig Quixal, and which is held at the Casa de los Mora, from 20:30 on Monday, February 13.
Fran Carrasco Guijarro, advisor to the Jewish Delegation of Tourism and a hairdresser linked to Rasgo – a certification of distinction sponsored by the Spanish Jewish Network – will present Abraham Haim, who also holds a degree in History of the East Media by the University of Tel Aviv and in Language and Literature by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Carrasco pointed out that the lecturer “brings Lucena to Jerusalem in a cultural and academic way and this is very important for us to have this link because we can create very important ties, tourism and academics.”
Manuel Lara Cantizani, councilman responsible for Tourism and Culture, thanked the Popular Party, represented at the press conference by its consultant Pedro Arroyo, “its support for tourism initiatives regarding the Jewish past, which puts the City Council in contact with people Very important of world-wide level “and that they add” constantly “to this type of projects.
The socialist mayor said that in 2017, the Delegation of Tourism “has very clear that the activities are to be structured with a new objective, not only generate visits, but improve infrastructure and generate a new product, making space, new contacts and open to the Not only through the Jewish Network, but also through the Integral Plan of Tourism – recognized by the Andalusian Administration for its excellence in management – within its line linked to the Jewish world. ” He also said that “soon” will be announced an event included in the program Enrédate of the Junta de Andalucía and that will be combined with the third tasting of kosher products.
Finally, he commented that in the ordinary plenary session of this month of February will propose the reactivation of the technical table of the Jewish world to which will be invited, among others, to José Antonio García Suárez, coordinator of Your History; The official chroniclers of the city, Francisco López Salamanca and Luisfernando Palma Robles; Fran Carrasco, Mario Flores, representatives of the political groups; And the territorial delegate of Tourism, Culture and Sport in Córdoba, Francisco Alcalde Moya.
The Burgos municipality of Castrillo Mota de Judíos, which in 2015 got rid of its surname ‘matajudíos’, promotes a project to create a Sephardic cultural itinerary that makes Burgos a tourist reference for the Jewish community and values the shared history and Heritage and cultural heritage.
The province has a very extensive and interesting Jewish past, which can be a great tourist attraction, said the Mayor of Castrillo Mota de Judíos, Lorenzo Rodríguez.
In the municipality is worked to recover the settlement of La Mota, place to which the Jews expelled from the near village of Castrojeriz, origin of the town and its name.
On the other hand, in Castrojeriz remains of the synagogue and the walls remain, while Belorado stood out for its great Jewry, the same as Burgos or Miranda de Ebro.
Vestiges of the past of ancient Jewish communities are also found in Roa, Frías, Villadiego, Lerma, Aranda de Duero, Pancorbo, Pradoluengo, Medina de Pomar or Briviesca, for example.
For this reason, Lorenzo Rodríguez has proposed to these municipalities the possibility of creating a Sephardic cultural itinerary, as a “singular” tourist resource for the province of Burgos.
The aim is to become a benchmark of the international Jewish community, taking advantage of the thousands of Jews who visit Spain each year to visit prominent places in their community history.
The first meeting, of contact, was held days ago and was attended by fifteen towns, although they would be willing to join the initiative some more.
At the moment, Castrillo Mota de Judíos will be in charge of leading the project, accompanied by Castrojeriz and Pradoluengo.
The three localities will attend the call for aid for tourist infrastructure of Sodebur, the Development Society of the Province of Burgos, dependent on the Diputación.
It is to get economic support to elaborate a historical and archaeological project, explained the mayor of Castrojeriz, Beatriz Francés.
The most important thing is to document the Jewish past of the province and to define the preserved cultural and patrimonial resources, as well as the archaeological remains to be recovered.
Next, the tourist itinerary will be designed, marking each one of the historical or cultural landmarks, and will be promoted among the Spanish Jewish community.
The mayor of Belorado, and provincial deputy of Culture, Luis Jorge del Barco, bets to implicate in the project to the Diputación since it is a “challenge” for the municipalities.
De Barco recalled that the Provincial Institution studied a couple of years ago to develop a similar tourism resource, although the initiative did not materialize.
Now would be a good time to recover it, since the proposal of Castrillo Mota of Jews “is very exciting and accurate.”
Since the change of name in 2015, the town has strengthened ties with the international Jewish community and receives numerous visitors, who would be interested in knowing more about the Jewish past of Burgos.
Rodríguez has insisted that the province must recover its history shared with the Jewish people and put into value the inherited patrimonial and cultural wealth.
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.
http://www.laplazadelmercader.com/14-de-febrero-de-1349/
On February 14, 1349, the St. Valentine Massacre takes place in Strasbourg. Two thousand Jews were burned alive accused of spreading the plague.
It is well known that Jews have always been persecuted in the history of mankind. They have been blamed for the great misfortunes, besides being considered usurers, murderers of children and even antichrists.
Such was the case of the Black Death, which peaked between 1347 and 1353. It is estimated that the Great Death (as it was known before the 19th century) killed 60% of Europeans.
The answer you gave to this deadly epidemic? They accused the Jews of poisoning fountains and wells for the sole purpose of exterminating Christians. The evidence was found in the false confession under torture of a Jew named Agimet in 1348, who acknowledged having thrown a poison into the well from which the people were supplied, under the command of Rabbi Peyret.
This motive was sufficient to begin the persecution towards the Jews, who were exposed to all sorts of barbarities.
And so, on February 14, 1349, two thousand Jews were taken to the cemetery of the French city of Strasbourg, where they were burned on a wooden platform, in addition to imposing a law that forbade to tread that land for 100 years to Jews who They got rid of the murder.
The persecution spread throughout Europe, to the point that in Spain, any Christian was forbidden to associate with any Jew, whom they imprisoned, exterminated and expelled from all parts of the continent.
