I want to share with you a story related to the festival of Hanukkah. As a child, my mother didn't teach me anything about the holiiday, its history or the custom of lighting candles each night as part of the celebration. You see, originally, Donato Manduzio,...
Since I was a young girl my mother and grandfather constantly reminded me of my Jewish identity. They told me that one day we would be able to return to the Land of Israel, the land G-d gave to us. However, I had little knowledge...
From Jin Jin to Yecholiya, has been a long and arduous process. It is something that I, as well as all Kaifeng Jews, have been dreaming of. When I was a little girl my father told me that I am a Jew, and that one...
When I came to Israel in 2006, with the help of Shavei Israel, and went through the conversion program at Bat Ayin, it was the first time I was touched by Judaism. When I was a kid, growing up in Kaifeng, my father and grandmother...
I cannot say how old I was when I noticed that I was different from all the other children about me. In my home, as in all the Xueta homes, it was forbidden to speak about it, hushed not to mention it. Anyway, I recall a quaver of mystery, something shameful and hidden that popped up here and there during conversations: Silences, movements, cut-off words, a tension unknown in our otherwise apparently happy lives.
My father, a merchant, curious and optimistic, dragged along his entire life some indefinite fear. Of course, I could not discern it until in his old age he uncovered weaknesses that I hadn’t known of before. Today I am sure that his identity as a Xueta and his mother’s absence (she died when he was a child), were the two singular causes that cast a pall upon his life.
Nissan Ben Avraham is the name of a Rabbi who was born in Palma, where he was baptized as is the custom in every good “Apostolic and Roman Catholic” home, and given the name Nicolas Aguilo. He came on Aliya 26 years ago because “if after 600 years I could not overcome the stigma of my being a Jew, why shouldn’t I be a Jew?”
Yesterday, after an absence of 12 years , Nissan Ben Avraham came face to face with his city of birth to relate his personal story: From Palma to Israel, at a one-day seminar organized by Shavei Israel on the components of the Chueta’s identity and their historical link with the Jewish people.
“I was about ten years old when the children at school cursed me for being a Xueta. I then discovered that to be a Xueta was something awful even though I did not succeed in understanding why. I did not know if the meaning of that word was being a Jew or not. I did not understand the meaning of the Anous nor did I absorb the reaction of others to this phenomenon,” he explained.
[caption id="attachment_759" align="alignright" width="205"] Avner Diniz at the Western Wall[/caption] Avner Diniz is sitting in his living room in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, reflecting on the unusual path that took him from just a few faint hints of a Jewish past growing up in...
As Shavei Israel's delegate, Rabbi Elisha Salas to teach Torah, Jewish culture and Jewish tradition to Bnei Anousim
Beginning this week, Rabbi Elisha Salas will be Shavei Israel’s new emissary to the Bnei Anousim, or crypto-Jews of North Portugal.
Rabbi Salas, 53, was born in Chile and made aliyah to Israel in 1999. Salas now lives in Jerusalem and is married with four children. After graduating from Santiago University in Chile with two degrees in accounting and religious studies, Salas spent five years at the Beit Midrash Sepharadi in the Old City of Jerusalem. In addition to being an ordained rabbi, Salas is certified to practice as a "shochet" (kosher slaughterer).
As Shavei Israel's emissary in Portugal, Rabbi Salas will teach Torah, Jewish culture and Jewish tradition to Bnei Anousim (whom historians refer to by the derogatory term "Marranos"), conducting a wide range of social and educational activities in the process. The rabbi’s work will focus mainly in the Belmonte community, where a number of Bnei Anousim returned to Judaism in recent decades and now live as a traditional, thriving Jewish community.
Salas will also work with Bnei Anousim in other areas and towns throughout Portugal, primarily in the north.
