Tag: Jewish Spain

Ceuta(Spain) and the Shoah Remembrance

Shoa

Ángel Sanz Briz, Chiune Sugihara, Irena Sendler, Giorgio Perlasca, Aristides de Sousa Mendes and Gino Bartali. Names that, a priori, are not too well known but had a huge impact for the millions of Jews who were persecuted during World War II.

That is why last Friday Jan 27th on the International Day of Victims of the Holocaust, the Jewish Community of Ceuta wanted to remember the admirable work of those “anonymous heroes” who risked their lives so that others did not lose it. For most, what was done during those times of barbarism, represented the most important of their lives. But they did not pursue fame or recognition, only to help those victims of Nazi horror have a chance.

This was highlighted by Alberto Aflalo, a member of the Isralieta Community, and charged with reading the manifesto of homage to those victims. He did it during the emotional, simple, event held in the Plaza de la Constitución and which was attended by the accidental president of the City, Mabel Deu, the government delegate, Nicolas Fernandez Cucurull, or the senators by Ceuta Guillermo Martinez And Fatima Hamed.

Aflalo referred to the sadness of commemorating a day as the International Day of the Holocaust Victims. Mention the millions of people trapped in concentration camps simply because of their status, religion or gender. A map of more than 42,000 extermination camps along virtually the entire European continent.

Figures that speak for themselves and that, nevertheless, it is necessary not to let it fall into oblivion to try to avoid that something like this can happen again.

Asturias(Spain) remembers the Shoa

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judios-asturiasCandles and a concert to inaugurate in the Campo San Francisco the monument to the Jewish victims, next Sunday

The Jewish Community of the Principality of Asturias will inaugurate next Sunday at noon a new monument in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, after having to remove the one that was in the Winter park, destroyed by the acts of vandalism. It will be a monolith of four thousand five hundred kilos, from the Quarry of Arlós, and now it will rise in Campo San Francisco. At its opening there will be candles, prayers and a concert.
“It is a broad stone, narrower on top, uncut to convey the brutality of the Holocaust, which is an act that is beyond the understanding of the people, without any rational explanation, in which six million Jews were killed “Explains Oceransky. Now, he emphasizes, that monument in memory of the extermination will be present in the center of Oviedo and in its park more visited.


The monument, according to the spokeswoman of the Sephardic community of Oviedo, Aida Oceransky, has been funded with financial contributions from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, the European Federation of Progressive Jewish Communities, families from the community and people related to it.
Its inauguration is attended by representatives of the Principality, the Oviedo City Council, the Government Delegate and representatives of Israeli communities throughout the country. During the act six candles will be lit, to honor the victims, and upon finishing Hadasa Ramel, will play the violin “Praeludium and Allegro in the style of Pugnani”.
On January 27, the Jewish community organizes an event in the Auditorium, which will involve 978 students from high school and baccalaureate of all Asturias.

Bulgaria and the Shoa in the Sephardic Museum of Toledo(Spain)

Shoa

shoa-yadvashemThe Sephardic Museum of Toledo hosts until next Monday, January 30, the documentary exhibition “The power of civil society during the Holocaust: the case of Bulgaria 1940-1944”, an exhibition that was created on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Salvation of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II and was first presented in November 2009.

It has panels, facsimiles, photographs and text representing the development of events on the international scene throughout the years 1940-1943, the repercussion of events in Bulgaria, as well as the attitude of the authorities and the response Of the Bulgarian society, according to the Sefardi Museum reported Wednesday in a press release.

The exhibition, which can be visited until 30 January, was created on the occasion of the Holocaust Memorial Day –27 January – and between 2009 and 2015 has been presented in several cities in Europe and outside the European continent , Such as Warsaw, Prague, Copenhagen, Vilnius, Washington, New York, Toronto, Geneva, Dublin, Tel Aviv.

In Madrid

In Spain, it was possible to visit the Sefarad-Israel Center in Madrid (2013-2014), in the framework of the 15th European Jueva Cultural Day in Palma de Mallorca, at the Fundació Palma Espai d’Art – Casal Solleric ( 2014) and in the Foundation Three Cultures of the Mediterranean in Seville (2015).

The exhibition is held in collaboration with the State Institute of Culture of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria and the Center for Jewish Studies of the University of Sofia San Clemente de Ojrid; Features the graphic design of Orlín Atanasov and has been translated by Slavka Savova and Stoyan Mihaylov.

Segovia remembers the victims of the holocaust

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On January 27th, the United Nations General Assembly designated the International Day of Remembrance in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity and by the European Union as the European Day of Holocaust Remembrance . On this date the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp (Poland) by the Soviet troops; A place that represents the horrors of persecution and extermination, where a million and a half Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians and prisoners of various nationalities were murdered.

Segovia, for the fourth consecutive year, will join this tribute. The Tourism and Culture areas of the City Council have organized on Thursday 27 January at 19:00 hours, an event in the Alhóndiga in which 6 candles will be lit in memory of the different groups most directly persecuted (Jews, disabled, Spanish Republicans , Gypsies, homosexuals …).

The act-homage will go together with the mayor, Clara Luquero, the councilors of Historical Heritage and Tourism, Claudia de Santos, and Culture, Marifé Santiago. Also attending will be Elías Cohen, Deputy Secretary of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain; Uriel Macias, press chief of the Israeli Embassy in Spain; Miguel de Lucas, General Director of Centro Sefarad-Israel and Rhoda Henelde Abecassi, survivor of the Holocaust.

Rhoda Henelde Abecasis was born in Warsaw in the days of the invasion of Poland by the German Nazi army. Licensed in English Literature and Romance, she lives in Madrid and currently, as main activity, translates Yiddish literature into Spanish. In her testimony she will relate how she was saved, but especially what became of her and of the other survivors at the end of the war.

After lighting the candles, Marifé Santiago will read a fragment of his novel ‘La canción de Ruth’ and will hear a locution of Leon Felipe putting voice to his poem ‘Auschwitch’.

Next, the sixth elementary students of the Fray Juan de la Cruz School, accompanied by their tutor Belén Calvo Sanz and music teacher, Elena Labrador Ruiz-Medrano, will offer ‘Flowers between wire of hawthorn’. A composition of photos of children’s drawings, most of them Terezín, with fragments of Jewish children’s diaries. The photos will be projected while the students dramatize the quotes from the allusive diaries and interpret four musical pieces with viola, guitar and dulzaina. They will recite two final poems and distribute flowers and bookmarks.

The act will end with a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

The forgotten giants. Rabbis before and after the expulsion of Spain

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alhambra_decree-decreto-de-expulsion
Edict of Expulsion

A book by Yosef Bitton cites 20 Jewish personalities who lived between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, eight of them in Zamora

This is the title of the book by Yosef Bitton, formerly the Great Rabbi of Uruguay and current spiritual leader of the Ohel David & Schlomo congregation in Brooklyn, New York, who in the book chronicles twenty six Jewish personalities who lived between the end of the fifteenth century and Mid-17th century.
What struck me as I read it was that of the twenty-six names, eight have a direct connection with Zamora-Isaac Aboab II, Moshe Alashkar, Issac Campanton, Isaac Caro, Isaac Arama, Jacob and Levi Habib, Abraham Sabbath At least five -Jacob Berab, Samuel Medida, Salomón Serilo, David ben Zimra and Abraham Zacuto-, being disciples of the previous ones, would have relation of first degree, what would put to the city of Duero in a preminent place in the intellectual production Jewish in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In addition to his religious ordination by the Grand Rabbinate of Israel, Bitton, a native of Argentina, studied at institutions such as Yeshiva University and Emory in the United States, as well as the Ben Gurion and Bar Ilan universities in Israel. Academic rigor, including familiarity with the theological concepts and ideas drawn from the rabbis studied. Nowadays, Bitton is considered one of the rabbinical authorities of the Sephardic world.

During one of the epistolary exchanges I had with him about the various references to Zamora in his book, Rab Bittón commented that “something very special had to be happening in the city so that so many personalities would leave there.” After four congresses to study the Jewish past of Zamora, we can say that what was happening here in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the same thing that had happened in Cordoba, Toledo and Barcelona in previous periods: a vibrant cultural coexistence of which it formed Part of the Jewish community, which allowed the Zamoran Jews, for at least two centuries, to specialize in the study of the sacred scriptures.
The historical documentation indicates that after 1391, when several aljamas and Castilian juderías were violently attacked, Zamora became the refuge of the Jewish knowledge until the year of the expulsion, leaving from here the methodological and doctrinal corpus that, through its teachers , Would accompany the thousands expelled on their various routes, from Lisbon and Amsterdam to Istanbul and Jerusalem, passing through Fez, Cairo and Safed, as well described in the biographies of several of the figures presented in the book.
I confess that reading these stories was very satisfying to me because in a certain way validates what since 2010 a group of Spanish, Portuguese, American and Israeli scholars and researchers have been defending about the place of Zamora on the map of Sefarad. Or what is the same, the Jewish past of the city should not be studied only as a moment common to other towns and cities, but as the turning point of Jewish culture in the Iberian peninsula and as such, value its significance for Hispanic Judaism as a whole.
(*) Director of the Isaac Campantón Center

 

The former factory of Schinlder to be converted into a “Shoa” Memorial

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The former factory of Oskar Schindler (1908-1974), a German businessman and spy who oskar-schindler-fabrica-696x522saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews during World War II in the Czech town of Brnenec, and the land of the former adjacent concentration camp, Converted into a new memorial of the Holocaust.

This is reported by the Czech daily Pravo, according to which a foundation has already purchased the land in the center-east of the country, where in 1944 Schindler moved his enamel and ammunition factory in Krakow.

The founder and director of The Endowment Fund Memorial of Shoah and Oskar Schindler, Jaroslav Novak, explains to the newspaper that it already has the support of the local authorities but is still looking for ways to finance the project, which aims to rebuild the whole complex, Including the control towers and the field in which factory workers had been held.

According to a biography of US historian David M. Crowe, Schindler, famous for Steven Spielberg’s hit film “Schindler’s List,” was “a gold-hearted opportunist” who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews during National Socialism.

Thanks to his good contacts with the Nazi authorities in Cracow, he acquired the Deutsche Email Warrenfabrik, called “Emalia”, which had been owned by a Jew and then transferred to Brnenec with the hundreds of Jewish workers he employed and thus saved from being deported to The Nazi extermination camps.