Kosher hotel in Portugal to host 160 this Shabbat
The newly kosher Har Sinai Hotel in Belmonte, Portugal (we wrote about it here) will be the site of a festive Shabbat this coming weekend. Shavei Israeli’s emissary Rabbi Elisha Salas and Rabbi Isroel Nachum from Safed are hosting a group of 80 American Jews in the picturesque Portuguese town with the long Jewish history.
Belmonte had a thriving Jewish community until its members were forced into hiding or compelled to convert to Catholicism 500 years ago. Today, the descendants of those Jews – the Bnei Anousim – are increasingly re-discovering and re-embracing their hidden heritage. Belmonte, where Rabbi Salas is based, is one of the centers of that revival.
Rabbi Nachum from Safed organizes four worldwide Jewish heritage trips every year; this is the first to come to Belmonte and is one of the first events to be held at the Har Sinai Hotel since Rabbi Salas began supervising the hotel’s kashrut.
The 27-room hotel will be closed to the regular tourists for the weekend in order to host Rabbi Nachum’s group. Two gourmet chefs from the U.S. will be flying with the group to prepare all the meals.
In addition to Belmonte, the visitors will be taking the train to Trancoso, another Bnei Anousim center and the home of the Isaac Cardoso Center for Jewish Interpretation. We wrote about Trancoso most recently here when the Cardoso Center received the city’s first Torah scroll in half a millennia.
The group will celebrate Kabbalat Shabbat in the Belmonte synagogue together with the Belmonte Bnei Anousim community and Rabbi Salas’s students from the surrounding area, who often spend Shabbat with their teacher in town. Rabbi Nachum’s group has taken care to include the locals in all of the weekend’s activities – prayers at the synagogue, classes, meals, and the post-Shabbat Melave Malka.
Including the American visitors and the locals, a total of 160 people will be together in Belmonte this weekend. That’s what we call a Shabbat Shalom!