A journey of my soul from the Spanish Inquisition to the present.13/10/24
1955 Born in Miramar or El Vedado neighborhoods of Havana, Cuba under the Batista regime, they were a wealthy merchant family with servants. At the expensive private Catholic school she went to Che Guevara would come to collect his daughter who was in her class. Her paternal grandfather came from Costa Rica and his parents were French, because they were multilingual they had a great advantage in business.
1959 Jan 1st Castro took power. After that the family only spoke English so that the servants would not know what was said. At school the Catholic education was replaced by the Communist manifesto of Marx and Engels.
The new regime took over the family business to and expected the family to stay and the regime would reap the profits. They got 2 Fidel Castro dolls and filled them with gold and jewelers. The peso had now become worthless.
1960 they were one of thousands of Cuban families to arrive in Miami .
Her grandfather immediately started setting up a new business as he knew there was no return to Cuba. Because the Kennedy government had turned their backs on the Cuban people, so Cuban Americans slanted to vote Republican.
In 1962 they remember the flatbeds taking missiles to Key West on the roads through Florida, and practicing the air raid drills.
She went to school at the finest Catholic Convent and only had English speaking friends forcing her to integrate. Her parents had taught her that to question is to learn. However with the Bible stories and religious dogma she kept asking questions and in 4th grade was taken to the Monsignor. Who told her she must have blind faith in the elders who have knowledge. Her questions remained unanswered and she lost respect for the upper echelons of the Church. They sent her to learn Latin in her break, which helped her language skill to this day.
At the summer day camp she met Rachel who told her she was Jewish and who brought her own food from home. She said the whole Torah was true because G-d wrote it. For some unexplained reason she connected with Jews she came across.
1962 to 1965 The Vatican 11 council (Nostra aetate; Latin: “In Our Era”) is a landmark document that rejected the traditional accusation that the Jews killed Christ, recognized the legitimacy of Judaism, and condemned anti-Semitism. The altar, for example, was turned around to face the people. Mass was changed to be in the vernacular, no longer in Latin. Aged only 14 she now felt that Catholicism was less spiritual. Women no longer had to wear veils or cover their hair
Aged 16 she went to collage and decided to study theology. Aged 17 she married a Cuban American man after 3 years of collage she became a full time mom and helped run the family business. Had 2 children 11 years apart. She started reading every book she could find on Judaism and finally took a plunge and went to an Orthodox synagogue. Was helped to study Hebrew and Jewish prayers. Bonny invited her to Friday night dinners and underwent Orthodox conversion. She later met Michael an orthodox Jew who she married. He took her to Israel to meet his family.
My maternal grandparents came from Fermoselle, Spain on the Duero River border to Portugal. They now lived in Miami and she was close to them. In early December her grandmother always made periquillos. You always swept the room to the centre and away from the door that had a mezuzah. Her grandmother knew she had converted to Judaism. When the grandmother died she had to be buried the next day this was unusual with Catholics. She was left by the grandmother a box with a Hamsa and star of David. This indicated that the family were Converso Jews. She needed to trace her matrilineal line back to the inquisition as Judaism passes to you via you mother.
1545 The Council of Trent decrees on self-reform, helping to revitalize the Roman Catholic Church in the face of Protestant expansion. It decreed that all Catholic churches must now keep records of all baptisms, marriages and deaths. It was to standardize a non existent system and so she could follow the line of her ancestors Crypto Jews were known to secretly change names to avoid the Inquisition. In records several babies had been baptized at home and not at church by the midwife
There was a lot of contraband trade between Mogadouro Portugal and Fermoselle Spain. A lot of population moved to Portugal from here.
It was found that in Converso families many married 2nd cousins and this vast number of cousin intermarriage made it difficult to register on the computer. The term Marrano also means pig in Spanish. The Church used the term New Christian for Conversos. Old Christian was the term used referring to people with pure Christian blood and to get government positions . Old Christian families would be vigilant not to intermarry with those who had been Jews.. There were several priests on her family tree so they helped Conversos to avoid rituals that were not acceptable to Judaism and arranged special permission for forbidden marriages of 2nd cousins and helped them fill in documents.. Bnei Anusim is the Hebrew term where people were forced to convert.
Nobody had ever researched the genealogy of conversion from Fermoselle. In the town Belmonte people had later made their way back to Judaism, but there weren't such records in other villages. Currently most people in the town were old and none of them knew of any Jewish history in it.
There were Inquisition records with a total of 16 Inquisition tribunals in Spain.
1488 to 1834 that is 346 years, the Inquisition officially lasted, The documents were in old Spanish which was very difficult to read. For generations no body in the family left the village, in fact her grandfather was the first to leave and the first marriage outside the family. The Church of Santa Colombo was in another part of town and she discovered that that neighborhood never mixed with mainstream Fermoselle. There was a house here that tradition had it had once been an synagogue
The El Humilladero (to humiliates) a sight that today has a statue to the civil war. People from Mogadouro Portugal would annually make a pilgrimage to it and leave a pebble on it, in memory of the dead. A typically Jewish custom.
She sent photos of the finding of the synagogues and mikva's as well as the carving on the doors of a church used by conversos that was meant to send a message to others. However she discovered that she was a pioneer in this unexplored field..
In Portugal the information was digitalized and mostly on internet from the Achieves at Torrro de Tombo dating back to the 9th century. Her hypothesis was that her family had migrated to Portugal and back to Spain.
She discovered that she was related to the family of Luis de Carvajal the governor of the Nuevo Reino de Leon part of Mexico today. He and his nieces died in the Inquisition jails in Mexico. New Christians were not allowed to live in Nuevo Spain or found guilty of reverting to Judaism.
Well known Spanish names like Ramos , Montana or Flores Diez , Guerra , Castro and Serrano are typical Marrano names. The fact that the Spanish kings wanted known for eternity who had been a Jew had allowed her to find actual notarial records from her family 500 years ago.
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