Letter from Recife: Increasing Returns

By Alan Tigay

As a Brazilian city unearths the artifacts of its Jewish past, some of the people whose identities were buried for more than 300 years are also emerging.

Letter from Recife: Increasing Returns By Alan Tigay As a Brazilian city unearths the artifacts of its Jewish past, some of the people whose identities were buried for more than 300 years are also emerging. In the last week of December 1999, when the world around them was focused on entering a new millennium, a team of archaeologists in Recife, Brazil, succeeded in digging its way back to 1654. After removing 750 tons of earth and debris from a building that had most recently been an electrical supply store, the archaeologists found their way to the mikve of Kahal Tsur Israel, the first synagogue of the New World.

The discovery of the mikve, and the restoration of the synagogue as a cultural center, has raised the Jewish profile in Brazil, but not always in ways Recife’s small Jewish community expected. The inauguration of the Jewish center was scheduled for last October 21, with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in attendance. It was postponed because of security concerns

Several months before security became a worldwide obsession, I went to Recife to see what was happening. In addition to the widely publicized synagogue restoration, the 1990’s saw an explosion of interest in the city’s Jewish past.

Just as the original synagogue became a symbol of the city’s early glory, its renovation became a symbol of a renaissance in Recife’s rundown, crime-ridden old city. Signs that once identified the street on which the building stood as Rua de Bom Jesus had the street’s original name—Rua dos Judeus (Street of the Jews)—added. The Dutch colonial façades have been spruced up and sidewalk cafés sprouted on both sides of the old synagogue. Meanwhile, books about the secret Jews of the Portuguese period and the openly identified Jews of the Dutch period became local best sellers. “This is all such an important part of our patrimony,” said a non-Jewish history teacher I befriended during my stay. When I gave him a Jewish-design bookmark as a parting gift, he kissed it.

Recife’s Jewish history has a particularly loud echo. It was Jews fleeing the Portuguese reconquest of Dutch Brazil in 1654 who went on to become the founding nucleus of the Jewish community of New York. But I wasn’t looking for New York Jewish roots, or a city newly enamored of its Jewish heritage. I was looking for the people left behind. For while Recife was discovering its Jewish artifacts, Jewish descendants began emerging from the mists of history.

“Perhaps because the Marranos felt so secure in their ‘Brazilianness,’ about 15 years ago a spontaneous phenomenon began—people in various cities looking for their Jewish identity, and celebrating publicly,” said Pedro Albuquerque, who has emerged as a leading spokesman for what he proudly calls “the Marrano movement.”

When the portuguese founded the colony of Pernambuco (the state of which Recife is the capital) in the sixteenth century, crypto-Jews came in substantial numbers. They were prominent in the sugar trade and laid the foundations of Brazilian culture. One, Ambrósio Brandão, wrote the first history of Brazil; another, Bento Texeira, published the first poems. Branca Dias, who ran the first school for girls in the colony, is today a folk heroine of Brazilian culture.

When the Dutch conquered Pernambuco in 1630, anousim—the Hebrew term for forced converts—returned to Jewish practice and other Jews came from Holland. According to most histories of the Dutch withdrawal 24 years later, Jews boarded ships bound for Dutch ports. But the histories don’t account for everyone. Some Jews, undoubtedly including those who couldn’t afford to book passage, simply melted into the Brazilian interior.

Most of the Jewish descendants who have emerged in Recife in recent years are from the interior or, at most, one generation removed from the conservative, secretive villages in which their ancestors found refuge, sometimes intermarried, but maintained varying degrees of Jewish practice and identity.

The twentieth century saw a new Jewish community grow in Recife—largely Ashkenazic and today largely non-Orthodox. This community of 1,500 has become a beacon for some of the crypto-Jews. On a sunny afternoon I met at the Centro Israelita—Recife’s Jewish community campus—with a group of once secret Jews who have come all the way back.

“My conversion was a year and a half ago, but I returned to Judaism many years ago,” said Isabel Carlos de Oliveira, a teacher of high school Portuguese and the mother of two. “There were certain practices in my family—like not mixing meat with milk, lighting a candle on Friday nights. When I asked my mother why, she would always say, ‘Because that’s the way it is.’ That phrase led me to start reading about Judaism.”

Most of the returnees had to ferret out Jewish details from reluctant family members. Heloisa Fonseca Santos is one of the few whose parents actually told her they were Jewish. She wasn’t entirely certain what that meant. “One day on the street I saw a bearded man wearing a Star of David,” recalls the 47-year-old housewife. “I asked him if he was Jewish and where his church was. He sent me to the synagogue on Martins Junior Street. I knocked on the door and a man there asked me my mother’s name. When I said Castro Fonseca, he said, ‘The first rabbi in Recife was named Isaac Aboab de Fonseca.’ And he let me in.”

Fifteen Jewish descendants have been converted in the past few years by Leonardo Alanati, a Liberal rabbi who visits periodically from Belo Horizonte, 1,500 miles to the south.

Several have spouses who are also studying for conversion. While most are happy to talk about their experience, they indicate that where they are going is more important than where they have been. When Ricardo Trigueiro, a 34-year-old lawyer, is asked if he tells his family story to his daughter, he says, “Yes, of course we talk about it, but life can only be lived forward, even if we understand it best by looking backward.”

Those who have converted share the Jewish community’s excitement about the restoration of the old synagogue—under the auspices of the Jewish Federation of Pernambuco—but they also see it as something more. “I think it will be more than just a cultural center,” Trigueiro remarks. “I believe it will attract more and more [anousim] who will begin to visit more and more often.”

If the building is a symbolic lure to Jewish descendants, the mikve on the ground floor symbolizes one of the issues that divides them. Beyond the 15 once secret Jews who have undergone conversion (using the Atlantic Ocean as mikve), there are many more who are not ready, who prefer an Orthodox conversion, or who are holding out for a ceremony of “return” that acknowledges their struggle and distinguishes them from other converts.

The mainstream community holds religious services in the Centro Israelita, in the city’s middle-class Torre section, and has left the building on Martins Junior for the use of the anousim. It was there, on a Shabbat with no minyan, that I met Odmar Pinheiro Braga, 49, a police inspector, poet and former president of a now dormant association of anusim. An observant man who keeps a kosher home, he calls conversion “a humiliation I won’t go through.”

“How do you convert salt into salt?” he asks.

Though he declines to go into detail, he also indicates that some anousim have been rejected by the mainstream community. “Their security [at the Centro Israelita] is so good,” he asserts, “sometimes they keep their own brothers out.”

Depite his protests, braga seems less adamant when talking about return as opposed to conversion. Thanks to the efforts of pro-anousim activists in Israel and America, the idea of a certificate of return has been sanctioned by Israel’s chief rabbinate, though most rabbis still are unaware that the option exists. Braga’s has been the main address for at least two missions, sanctioned by the rabbinate, of Israeli rabbis to Recife, though there are, as yet, no tangible results.

Within Brazil, those who want Orthodox conversions have no real options. Throughout South America, Orthodox rabbis simply do not perform conversions, referring would-be converts to the United States or Israel. Just a trip abroad is beyond the reach of most Brazilians, though a few from Recife have, in fact, gone to Israel to study and convert. The idea behind the missions to Recife has been to send a teacher and, when people are prepared, send a beit din to perform conversions.

Sitting on the old wooden seats in the synagogue, I tried to get a sense from Braga how big the community of anousim really is. He told me he would meet me at my hotel that evening and tell me more.

At the appointed hour it was not Braga who appeared but Pedro Albuquerque, a lean, 45-year-old business consultant. His chauffeur drove us to his home, on a slope overlooking the Atlantic. I quickly learned that his leadership in the Marrano movement is in part due to his status—he was the most affluent and best connected of the anousim that I met—and that his family has a virtually unbroken chain of Jewish identity. I also saw that Albuquerque’s family reflects the contradictions of a community that still has part of one foot in the cellar.

Though he has interacted for several years with the Jewish federation, it is only recently that he went public, giving his first interview about the Marrano movement to a local newspaper. Sixteen years ago he had his daughter baptized. When asked if he would baptize a child born today, he thought for a moment and said, “No way.” But he says his mother, nearing 80, is still afraid of public disclosure, and continues to follow the syncretistic Catholic-Jewish practice that many Jewish descendants have followed for centuries.

In the garden in front of Albuquerque’s house is a larger-than-life-size replica of the Rua de Bom Jesus/Rua dos Judeus street sign. The restored synagogue is a powerful symbol to him. “Do you realize,” he asks, “that it was never a Dutch synagogue, it never had an Ashkenazi name? It was an Iberian, Sefardic synagogue, built with the sweat and blood of families named Azevedo, Berengué, Costa, Da Silva, Pinheiros, Saraiva and Teixeira.” If all of Recife regards the old synagogue as part of the city’s patrimony, Albuquerque’s point is that the anousim—converted or not—are the actual descendants of those who built and prayed in it.

Despite his friendships with leaders of the Jewish federation, Albuquerque looks to Israel—“I’ve never been there,” he said, “but I know the country through history and through love”—for the solution to the status of Recife’s anousim.

But even as he pursues contacts about a mission that will do just that, he sees a larger, and much more difficult, mission in the Brazilian interior.

“The grand purpose of the Marrano movement,” he says, “is to rescue those communities, especially in [the state of] Rio Grande do Norte, where the people are the most needy and the most authentic. But only after rescuing their self-esteem can we go after, gradually, a program of education that will rescue their identities. And without the resources, this is just a quixotic dream.”

Perhaps not so quixotic considering what has come up from the basements of Recife in the past 10 years.

Reprinted here with permission from Alan Tigay (Hadassah Magazine) : www.hadassah.org/NEWS/magazine/Jan_02/ltr_rcp.htm

Rufina

Portugal

E-mail: Rufina Bernardetti Silva Mausenbaum