Restoring their heritage

Two weeks ago, Yosef Garcia and Samuel Saldaña, along with a small group of local Jews, celebrated the first services at Midland’s Avde Torah Jayah Synagogue, a fledgling congregation hidden within the walls of rented space at St. Paul’s Anglican Church.

Inauspicious as their new temple may be, to these two men that first weekend’s meager religious service was 500 years in the making.

After all those years, it seems Midland will be the setting of another chapter in the ongoing story of a group of wayward Jewish refugees from Spain, a group whose descendents are now returning to their roots and seeking a new sanctuary in the Permian Basin. 

But Saldaña’s and Garcia’s attempts to help bring thousands of Hispanic descendents of Spain’s exiled Jews back into the church, however, have encountered some controversy from Jewish leaders in the United States.

A HISTORICAL TREK
But first, a return to the beginning.

Garcia, a rabbi who is based in Phoenix, Ariz., and Saldaña, a devout Jew in Midland, said they are among the estimated 32 million Hispanic people in the Western Hemisphere with ancestral roots in Spain, where their Jewish forefathers were driven underground, expatriated or worse during the Catholic Church’s attempt to systematically eliminate all Jews from the country during the Spanish Inquisition. 

Many of these Jews converted to Catholicism outwardly to escape the wrath of the Vatican or moved to the New World, relocating to Spanish colonies in Central and South America, where they blended with indigenous Native American populations. 

“They settled away from the eyes of the Catholic Church,” Garcia said. “Unfortunately the inquisition followed them, so they had to go back into hiding.”

Once the Inquisition followed them across the Atlantic, many of these Jews buckled under the pressure and converted to Catholicism — becoming “conversos,” as they are called — but many of their Jewish customs and religious practices stuck with them through the years.

They are the Anusim, Saldaña said, which is the Hebrew term for “the coerced ones.”

Generation after generation, Saldaña and Garcia said, their Jewish heritage faded so much that many modern descendents know nothing of the Jewish blood in their own veins.   

But, without asking why, many “tenaciously” held on to their Jewish practices and passed them on to their children, Garcia said, which is why many of these modern Hispanic individuals still practice distinctly Jewish customs — for example, covering their mirrors when a relative dies or adhering to the various dietary restrictions of Judaism.

About 20 years ago, Garcia said, many of these Anusim — tens of thousands of them in southern and western Texas, alone — began asking questions about the unusual things they did, seeking the truth about why their parents taught them to follow these strange non-Catholic religious customs.

After that, he said, it didn’t take them long to connect the historical and religious dots. 

“For whatever, reason, the way I look at it, is God is calling his people back to him,” Garcia said. “We have these people who all their lives thought they were Catholics, thought they were Christians, then they decided to start digging into their past. They hear about different customs and traditions that Jews have. Then they begin to realize they’re Jews.”

PRODIGAL RETURN
Along with a small group of other rabbis, Garcia, who himself grew up Catholic and returned to Judaism after the age of 30, established the The Association of Crypto-Jews of the Americas in 2004.

Since then, Garcia said, the association has been working to help the millions of Anusim, from Canada to Peru, identify and reclaim their Jewish heritage.

“I look at the Hispanic Jew as the latest immigrant of Jews coming to the U.S.,” he said. “They coming here looking for religious freedom.”

Now with one existing synagogue geared toward this purpose in Phoenix, Ariz., Garcia has set his sights on Midland, where Saldaña and a small group of Jews have been eagerly awaiting his help.

“We’ve been waiting for Rabbi Garcia for 500 years, a rabbi with the gall to say, ‘You guys are Jews. Your grandparents were Jews. You’re a Jew,’ ” Saldaña said.

FRICTION WITHIN THE CHURCH
Despite Garcia’s efforts to bring scores of people back to the church, however, his method of doing so has aroused the ire of some leaders within the existing Jewish establishment.

He said many people who want to return to the religion of their ancestors encounter opposition or scorn from Jewish leaders at the more traditional existing synagogues, especially those that fall into the category of orthodox.

The controversy boils down to Garcia’s method of officially bringing the Anusim back, he said. When people suspect their Jewish ancestry and come to Garcia for help reintegrating into the church, he confirms their Jewish lineage and, if confirmed, issues what is called a Certificate of Return.

“Those certificates of return are not accepted by everyone,” said Rabbi Sidney Zimelman of Odessa’s Temple Beth El Synagogue.

Traditional Jewish law requires potential converts to go through a rigorous and frequently lengthy process involving dedicated study, assimilation and examination under the eyes of Jewish leaders, Zimelman said. Most converts must undergo this strict regimen for as many as three years before a Jewish panel reviews their request and decides whether to permit them to join the church.

Zimelman said most rabbis accept the possibility that these Christians are of Jewish descent, but he is skeptical about Garcia’s seemingly lax method of admitting new members to Judaism without indisputable proof of lineage in the first place. 

But, even if an individual is of Jewish descent, becoming a Jew requires more than an ironclad family tree with Jewish branches, Zimelman said.

“They’ve been so estranged from Judaism,” he said. “Conversion means you have to re-establish a tie — culturally, religiously, theologically and in every other sense — with the Jewish community, so you can be counted as a member of the Jewish community. Not that anyone doubts that they are descended. It’s not just that you say, ‘OK, anyone who thinks they may be descended from Jews … we have a congregation for you here. Come worship with us.’ Well, that’s not going to gain them acceptance altogether in the Jewish community.”

Saldaña, however, said people with Jewish blood find it insulting to have to reintegrate into the faith of their ancestors, which he compared to their original forced conversion to Christianity all those years ago. 

To them, he said, enforcing a conversion process tacitly denies their claims to Jewish heritage.

“They’re still descendents,” Saldaña said. “They have the gene inside of them. You can’t go into their body and take out that gene.”

Recognizing the freedom of religion in the United States, Zimelman said few Jewish leaders, if any, are telling Garcia and his group to stop worshiping, but many within the broader Jewish church are unwilling to recognize Certificate of Return holders as Jews.

“You can say, ‘I’m an American. I speak English,’ ” Zimelman said. “Well, that’s nice. Do you have citizenship? Were you born here? Are you naturalized? Whatever it is, you have to do a little more than just feeling that you stem from a certain origin. That’s true. That’s true with anything.”

A NEW CHURCH
Despite the dispute, Garcia said hopes the new synagogue in Midland finds a broad base to grow its numbers in the Odessa/Midland area and reunite many local crypto Jews with their Jewish roots.

“We’re very excited about it,” he said. “We’ve got great inquiries from people living in the Midland area. We’re hoping to have a full-service synagogue by the end of the year.”

The first weekend’s services brought in about five or six families, Saldaña said, and he hopes it only grows from there.

For the time being, services are scheduled for one weekend each month, depending on Garcia’s ability to travel to the area from Arizona.

If enough people join the congregation, he said, perhaps a permanent facility and rabbi could be in the works, but for now Garcia and Saldaña are just trying to get the word out.

“I feel like crying when I say that my family has gone through all this,” he said, referring to several of his ancestors who reportedly were killed in Spain for refusing to convert. “They were prosecuted. Now, it’s like ‘Welcome home.’ ”

ON THE NET
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