Spain

Spanish politicians reject Holocaust memorial

Sandy Rashty — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:03:45 +0100

Politicians from the Spanish region of Galicia have rejected a draft resolution to commemorate the Holocaust, according to reports.

In Spain's provincial administrations, a council of speakers must approve a national resolution before it is submitted to the local parliament.

In Galicia, a veto in the council of speakers prevented the resolution on Shoah commemoration from going to a vote, the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The block came from a left wing coalition and a nationalist group - respectively the Galician Left Alternative (AGE) and the Galician Nationalist Block (BNG).

AGE leader Xosé-Manuel Beiras reportedly rejected the resolution because "We do not want to support a statement promoted by the state of Israel which is dyed in the wool of imperialism."

Professor Beiras, who has accused Israel of being a "racist state" and committing genocide against the Palestinians, added that "We have repeatedly condemned the [Jewish] Holocaust but have never condemned any of the other [genocides]."

According to the JTA, Pedro Gomez-Valades, president of the Galician Association for Friendship with Israel, issued a joint statement with the Federation condemning the move. It read: "Similar resolutions had passed since 2010, but this time representatives of AGE refused to ok the draft resolution in the Council of Spokespersons ahead of a plenum vote."

Holocaust commemoration motions were passed in the Galician parliament in 2010, 2011 and 2012 to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. However, this year, no resolution was passed.

New friends help me mind the gap

Steven Allweis — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:51:39 +0000

Travelling around the world on your own at the age of 20 is a fairly daunting prospect.

Leaving behind family, friends, university and the culture you know so well is not easy, especially when your first destination is a soulless, depressing hostel nearly 10,000km away.

But thanks to the warmth and openness of Jewish communities my travels have been a lot more rewarding and enjoyable. As part of my course I get to spend a year travelling to countries which speak the languages I study – French, Spanish and Portugese.

When I set off to Brazil for three months at the start of last summer. I had no work organised and no accommodation planned other than a hostel booked for a month. The only person I was in contact with was Rabbi Shabsi Alpern from Chabad in Sao Paulo.

Rabbi Alpern, along with his son Yossi, runs the most incredible charity, Projeto Felicidade. It’s an organisation set up to support children with cancer and their families and primarily caters for non-Jewish kids, the poorest of the poor, who are undergoing treatment.

There are trips to the zoo, football stadiums, the cinema, adventure parks, a purpose-built centre in the countryside and many more hugely enjoyable activities.

Rabbi Alpern gave me the opportunity to volunteer with this organisation. It was the most rewarding time imaginable. But more than that, the warmth extended beyond work.

I had been invited by the rabbi to attend the Chabad shul on Friday night and promised a meal. This engaging, friendly attitude continued every week, with different members of the community hosting me every Friday.

I was Jewish and that was enough for them to extend a welcoming arm and invite me into their homes. It’s a powerful tool, a feeling that a Jew, whatever their level of observance, could travel anywhere in the world and still feel part of a community.

I moved to Madrid to teach English as a language assistant, arriving the day before Yom Kippur. Heading off to shul in the evening and then the following day was an odd feeling. Just as in Brazil, I felt at home straight away.

The Jewish community opened its arms to welcome people from all over the world and made them feel as if they had suddenly found a new, multi-cultural, 50-strong family.

I have to go to France in the summer for three months, and although I don’t know where I’m going to be and what work I’ll be doing, I can rest assured that I’ll find a friendly reception from a community. That’s the way it seems to be with fellow Jews, wherever you are in the world.

Spain offers Sephardim new deal on citizenship

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 18:15:00 +0000

In a landmark decision, the Spanish government has ruled that all Sephardim — the descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 — will be able to acquire Spanish nationality wherever they live in the world, provided they obtain accreditation from the Spanish Federation of Jewish Communities (FCJE).

The ruling was announced in Madrid on November 22 by the Spanish Justice Minister, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, and the Foreign Minister, José Manuel García-Margallo.

Mr Ruiz-Gallardón said the new legal procedure represented a substantial advance on the reform of Spain’s 1982 Civil Code which allowed Sephardi Jews to gain Spanish nationality but only after having lived in Spain for at least two years. The new law will be ratified shortly by Royal Decree.

Mr Ruiz-Gallardón said that his ministry had received “numerous” requests for Spanish nationality from around the world. For his part, Mr García-Margallo emphasised the historic links of the Jewish people with Spain. “Our relations have… never been forgotten and have intensified the more tolerant and democratic Spain has become,” he said, adding that he hoped the new law would “recapture the memory of a Spain which has been silenced for so long”.

Isaac Querub, the president of the FCJE, declared that, just as March 31, 1492 — the date of the edict signed in Granada ordering the expulsion of the Jews from Castilla and Aragón — was a black day for Spain, November 22, 2012 would “pass into history as a day of clear blue sky and intense luminosity”.

There are around three million Sephardim around the world. Most live in Israel, the United States, France and Turkey but there are also sizeable communities in Latin America, especially Argentina, Mexico and Chile.

The Madrid ruling was welcomed by Sephardi communities worldwide. Osvaldo Sultani, of Argentina’s 60,000-strong Sephardi Federation — the largest in Latin America — said: “This measure, which we have been requesting for so many years, fills us with joy. It is an honour for all Sephardim and represents recognition for a people who have never forgotten Spain in 520 years and have never forgotten their language.”

Spanish student rabbi with a mission

Simon Rocker — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 10:00:00 +0100

Haim Casas has just arrived in London as one of the new crop of rabbinic students at the Leo Baeck College. It is not a career that would have originally crossed his mind growing up in a Catholic family in Cordoba, Spain.

But his journey to Judaism was not just a new beginning: it was also, after centuries, a kind of return.

The 31-year-old law graduate is a descendant of conversos, Jews who adopted Christianity under duress, to escape expulsion or worse in medieval times at the hands of the Inquisition.

It is a lineage of which he only gradually became aware. When he was a young boy, he recalled, “my mother’s father, whose family name was Casas — the name I use — used to take me to the Jewish quarter of Cordoba every week. He used to tell me about Jews in the city and how painful their expulsion was. He always showed a nostalgia, which for me, was very touching.

“Then two teachers from my school asked about my family name and if I were Jewish. That was a big shock.”

Intrigued, as a teenager he began reading about Jewish history, though without contacts among the city’s small Jewish community, he had viewed Judaism as “archaeology”, a dead civilisation. “Then I discovered there was a Sephardic diaspora — that Spanish Jews were still alive in Morocco, Israel, Turkey, France and Canada. That was also a big shock.”

When he went to university in Seville, he struck up a close friendship with a Moroccan student, who had grown up among Jews and then converted to Judaism himself.

“He became like my brother,” Mr Casas said. “I saw Judaism as a possibility for my life, and started studying more, and practising some of the Jewish holidays.”

A 10-month stay in Reading, where he had gone to improve his English, also helped. “I got in touch with the Orthodox community there and started attending services every Friday.”

When he returned home, he met a non-Jewish family who also had a Jewish background, who were opening a private museum dedicated to the Jewish story in Spain and invited him, six and a half years ago, to work for it.

“I started meeting local Jews, American Jewish students who were in the city for a few months learning Spanish and other Andalucian Jews,” he said.

But Mr Casas did not find open arms among the Orthodox community in Seville, who “never understood the situation of people like me. So I decided to start a new community in Andalucia, with non-Orthodox Jews and Spanish people trying to convert to Judaism. I founded a Jewish community even before I was officially Jewish.”

He set up an association called Bet Rambam, the House of Maimonides, after Cordoba’s most famous Jewish son, whose statue stands in the Jewish quarter. Since last year, a Progressive minyan has met in Seville, an hour away. The network now comprises around 100 people – a fifth of whom are prospective converts, including some with a similar background to Mr Casas’s own.

His personal Jewish ties grew ever stronger as he discovered others with the same family name in Morocco and elsewhere. “In the archives in Paris, there was a Jewish family with the same name who were deported to Auschwitz”, he said.

His paternal grandmother had the family name of Leyva, which some researchers believe is related to Levy.

He chose to undergo a formal conversion from the London-based European Progressive Beth Din, and took the Hebrew name Haim, which happens to sound like the Spanish pronunciation of his first name Jaime (James).

Now it is his dream to return to Andalucia as its first permanent Progressive rabbi. “There is an amazing future for the Jewish community in Spain if we work on two issues. We need well-educated Jewish leaders. The other thing is to keep this once-a-year Beth Din, which is converting, or helping to go back to Judaism, a group of around 30 people from different cities in Spain a year – which is a big group.

“We are speaking of a process which is more than recovering Jewish identity, but also rebuilding it from scratch”.

Anti-Israel activists ask Barcelona FC to uninvite Gilad Shalit

Marcus Dysch — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:00:00 +0100

Anti-Israel activists in Spain have called on Barcelona football club to drop an invitation to Gilad Shalit to attend a derby game against Real Madrid.

The four-time European Cup winners offered the former prisoner of war tickets to the October 7 El Clásico match as a gesture of goodwill.

BDS Catalunya, a Barcelona-based group promoting boycotts of Israel, has created a petition to send to club president Sandro Roselli asking him to withdraw the invitation.

Signed by more than 800 people, the petition states: “Since April, Gilad Shalit is no longer officially part of the Israeli army. However, in the eyes of the Catalan people and the world as a whole he still symbolically represents the IDF.

“We are also surprised to see your club express so much friendship and sympathy towards the only Israeli soldier to be imprisoned in recent years as a result of this conflict while, at the same time, maintaining absolute silence about the 4,660 Palestinian prisoners now confined in Israeli prisons.”

FC Barcelona vice-president Carles Vilarrubí said: “Barcelona is a place of unity, not divisions. This invitation does not indicate in any way that Barca takes a position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Last year, Mr Vilarrubí invited Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to view the club’s facilities at its Camp Nou stadium.

Mr Shalit was released last October after being held for five years by Hamas. He is a keen sports fan and has spoken of how listening to reports on radio helped him during his time in captivity.

Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth offered him a role as a basketball columnist, and he has travelled to the United States to watch an NBA All-Star basketball match.

Spanish community attempt to edit the dictionary

Anna Sheinman — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:11:25 +0100

The representative body of Spanish Jews has renewed efforts to have a word that is insulting to Jews removed from the official national dictionary.

Isaac Querub, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain (FCJE), has written to the Royal Spanish Academy, the institution responsible for the official dictionary of Spanish language, asking for the removal of the word “Judiada”.

The word is defined in the dictionary as: “Bad action that is considered, with bias, to belong to Jews.”

According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Mr Querub wrote that the pejorative term “…goes against the norms of good behaviour. It does not belong in a dictionary published in the 21st century.”

Mr Querub wrote the letter after the academy declined an appeal in June by Raquel Amselem, a professor at Valencia’s Polytechnic University, to remove the word. “The dictionary is merely a reflection of the language and the word is documented in a sufficient amount of texts,” a representative of the academy wrote in an email to Ms Amselem.

Apple asked to remove app offering 'Medieval' anti-Jewish stereotypes

Jennifer Lipman — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:01:20 +0000

Stumped for an unflattering word that also means "Jew"? Spanish-speaking iPhone users have found a solution.

A Spanish-language thesaurus application called "iSinónimos" is available in the iTunes store for free. But the app, sold by developer Alberto Garcia Hierro, brings up some surprising results.

According to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the words offered instead of Judio (Jew) include terms meaning stingy, tightwad and miser.

The Los Angeles-based centre has called on Apple to remove the app because of its "bigotry".

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the centre, said: "The most successful company in the 21st century should not allow its iTunes store to serve as a digital bridge to hateful and dangerous anti-Jewish stereotypes dating back to Medieval times."

Last year French antiracism groups complained after a developer built an app allowing people to guess which public figures were Jewish. Apple axed "Jew or Not Jew" removed it from the store soon after.

New dawn for Spain-Israel

Daniel Leitch — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:10:19 +0000

Following the victory of the centre-right Popular Party in Spain's general elections last month, most eyes will be on the nation's fragile finances. Perhaps just as significant, however, will be a shift in foreign policy. New Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, a self-proclaimed Atlanticist, is widely known to be keen to rebuild bridges with Israel following a diplomatic cold war between the two countries.

Under Rajoy's predecessor, José Luis Zapatero, Spain's relationship with Israel worsened considerably. His strong anti-American streak led to a rather simplistic view of the Middle East, culminating in a series of tirades against Israeli policy.

In 2006, Zapatero was photographed wearing a Palestinian keffiyah at a rally, causing diplomatic concern. The gesture prompted accusations of "barely concealed anti-Zionism" from Popular Party officials. Rajoy, then in opposition, accused the Socialist leader of starting a "crusade against Israel".

In spite of historical ties with the Jewish people - recent DNA surveys suggest that up to 20 per cent of Spaniards have Sephardic ancestry - Spain's relationship with Israel has always been tense. Spain only formally recognised Israel in 1986, largely a legacy of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Franco's obsession with a supposed Judeo-Masonic conspiracy led him to resist any moves favourable to Israel. Zapatero, a socialist, has been unable or unwilling to appreciate the irony of prolonging the right-wing dictator's hostility towards the Jewish state.

While it would be unfair to accuse Zapatero of antisemitism, his encouragement of anti-Zionism has done little to improve the image of Jews in Spain.

Numerous studies suggest that Spain is now the most antisemitic country in Europe. In 2008, The Pew Research Centre's Global Attitudes project found that 46 per cent of Spaniards held negative views of Jews, as opposed to nine per cent in the UK. This summer, the departing Israeli ambassador to Spain, Raphael Schultz, denounced the "antisemitism and hatred that exist in Spanish society".

So what can we expect from Spain's new leader? Rajoy's Popular Party has sought to re-invent the Spanish right. Any vestiges of Franco are long-gone and his government is keen to mend relations with both Israel and the US. Just a week after being elected, Rajoy put in a friendly call to Netanyahu after the Israeli Prime Minister sent him a congratulatory message on his election. The signs are positive.

Party spokesman Alejandro Muñoz Alonso has said that Spain must "recover the influence that it enjoyed not so long ago". Whether a rapprochement with Israel will lead to a warming of attitudes towards the country's tiny Jewish population remains to be seen.

An Algarve Jewish renaissance

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:38:21 +0000

There are probably no more than 50 or 60 Jews resident in the Algarve today – expats from around the world, mainly, but of course hundreds more visit the region every year, attracted by the sunshine, the golf, the laid-back lifestyle and the charm of both its unspoilt inland villages and glitzy beach resorts.

It was the ambition of one man, South African Ralf Pinto, who had lived in the Algarve for more than 20 years, to bring the local Jews together. He developed a Jewish Heritage Centre in the region's capital, Faro, which has been visited by Jew and non-Jew alike; with his wife Judy he operated a communications network that got information out to a wide audience, and pulled visitors in to share special holidays and support the Centre.

Ralph Pinto died in August of this year but the legacy he left has inspired an astonishing turn of events.

A young American Rabbi, Zev Schwarcz, arrived in the Algarve with his wife and small child earlier in the summer. He met Ralf and was stirred by his dream because it was one he shared – of building a Jewish community where there was none before.

On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, for the first time in possibly a hundred years, the Algarve had a Rabbi, a Sefer Torah (on loan from the shul in Gibraltar), a shofar, a borrowed roof terrace in the sunshine for the service (motorway on one side, beach-goers on the street below), a Baal Tefilla from Edgware and a Cohen from upstate New York. An Israeli family, local restaurateurs, barbequed lunch for the 'congregation'.

For Kol Nidre, more than 30 people arrived on that roof terrace: a young couple from Mexico, Israelis with babes in arms, a man who lived nearby and had heard the shofar the previous week, an Italian judo teacher, a London lawyer, two nurses from Wales.

At Yizkor the following day, Rabbi Zev called out every single name of every single parent past. Not Prime ministers, not royalty. Just our mothers and fathers long gone. Later, we watched the stars come out and broke the fast with shared salads and herrings and promises. Suddenly 'should do' became 'want to.'

There is little doubt that those promises will be kept. The rooftop succah was overflowing – with people who had not been under a succah since their Barmitzvah year. And since the Holidays every Shabbat has welcomed more than a Minyan's worth of enthusiastic 'converts' – those who are rediscovering their heritage and delighting in it.

The now? An impromptu tea at the Shalom restaurant in Albufeira on Sunday saw more than an exchange of cake recipes, when some 45 Jewish residents of the Algarve and interested visitors gathered together to plan the next stages of community-building; for once good relations took precedent over golf.

The intention now is to raise funds and find premises for a shul and a Sefer Torah on permanent loan; to set up a centre for activities that will include Hebrew lessons and offer Bar- and Bat-mitzvah classes; to work with wedding planners and hotels and restaurants able to offer fully Kosher or Jewish celebrations; and, immediately, to arrange the first of two Chanukah parties, which will be publicised in the local newspapers and online with an open invitation to all Jews visiting the area. The dream that Ralf Pinto harboured all those years ago, will finally be realised.

Jewish life returns to city of Spanish Inquisition

Jennifer Lipman — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:11:40 +0100

A town which was at the centre of the Spanish inquisition will be the location of Yom Kippur services this year for the first time since 1492.

That was the year when Jews were expelled from Spain, including from Cordoba, the birthplace of the scholar Moses Maimonides and until then a centre for Jewish life.

But following efforts by a number of Jewish communities around the world, prayer books have been taken of the ancient synagogue so that the most solemn day in the calendar can be marked there once again. Just 30 metres away from the original synagogue is a museum celebrating Jewish heritage, where the service will be held. Congregants are expected to be a mix of students from Israel and Jews living in the Andalusian region.

Haim Kases, who is leading the efforts, told Ynet that it represented the start of a renewed tradition.

The edict of 1492, remembered every year on the Ninth of Av, was the darkest point in Catholic ruling couple Ferdinand and Isabella's murderous campaign against the Jews of Spain and then Portugal. There had been a thriving Jewish community there for centuries.

Experts believe that thousands of Jews were killed for refusing to become "conversos". The edict was formally revoked in 1968.