Will New York Respond?

452 years ago the boat Saint Catherine brought to the coasts of New Amsterdam a huddled group of 23 Jews who were escaping from the Dutch settlement of Recife recaptured by the Portuguese. They were the first Jewish community of North America. The descendants of these Brazilian Jewish refugees would open the door for those who came later and helped to create the most vibrantly Jewish and interesting city in the World. Today, their distant cousins, the descendants of the Recifean Jews who stayed behind, are coming back. Will New York not rise to help their brethren? More about this crazy quest of mine in my upcoming article in the first number of Presentense Magazine.

THE LOST JEWS
by Irin Carmon
Jerusalem Post Magazine, June 5 2006

Odmar Braga knows who he is."I'm the generation of the desert," he says. "I'm not in Egypt, but I'm not in the Promised Land."

He has more than the biblical exodus in mind. Braga, 53, claims he is descended from Dutch Sephardic Jews who sailed to religious freedom in northeastern Brazil around 400 years ago

He is a Marrano, a Jew whose family converted to Christianity to escape persecution but then continued to secretly practice Judaism. And for Marranos like Braga, or bnei anousim, there have been many Egypts.

There are the dry, unforgiving stretches in the interior, where so many Jews fled after the Portuguese reclaimed the Brazilian state of Pernambuco for Inquisition-style suppression. There are the tiny villages where, for over three centuries, Marranos silently maintained a version of Jewish tradition.

The transitional desert is where some Marranos who have abandoned the isolation of their childhoods to seek opportunity - and sometimes their Jewish roots - find themselves now.

Marrano lawyer Ricardo Trigueiro, 38, uses a similar metaphor to describe discovering Judaism: "Imagine a person in the desert, very thirsty, finding water at last," he says.

Suspended between the hermetic Marrano heartland and the mainstream Jewish communities of the coast, some northeast Brazilian Marranos are even looking towards the very same Promised Land Moses had in mind. But for now they have Recife, Brazil's fourth-largest city, home to the first synagogue in the Americas and close to the northeastern states where many Brazilian Marranos are concentrated.

A year and a half ago, Shavei Israel, a Jerusalem-based organization that reaches out to lost Jews, recognized it as the natural staging ground for their Brazilian outreach when they endowed the community with its very own rabbi.

"I view our efforts as an attempt to right the historical injustice that was perpetrated on Spanish and Portuguese Jewry by the Inquisition centuries ago," said Michael Freund, Shavei Israel's president. "We have an opportunity to restore some of their descendants to the Jewish people."

In an often fractious community, this is by no means simple; those who call themselves Marranos in Recife are sharply divided. Behind the sectarian squabbling are other, thornier questions: Now that people who practiced Jewish traditions without ever hearing the word "Judaism" have been invited into synagogues, what place do they have inside them? Who is counted as a Marrano and who is not? And, perhaps most importantly, who gets to decide?

Read the complete article and see the cool pictures of the recently restored Recife synagogue by pressing here.