TRIPS
WITH NOTABLE JEWISH EXPERIENCES
Emanuel Baker, vice-president, Congregation Kehilat Ma'arav, Santa Monica California
My wife, Judy, and I, when we travel, often will
visit Jewish sites of interest, particularly in foreign countries. I sometimes get to do the same thing when I
travel on business. My visit to Dachau
and attendance at a bar mitzvah at the Great Synagogue in Sydney, Australia,
occurred while I was out of the country on business. Many of the places we’ve visited are ones
that just about every Jew who goes abroad has visited, such as the synagogues
in Prague. However, we have had the good
fortune in some places to see things or participate in events that often aren’t
available to the casual tourist. For
example, we attended a wedding at the Dohanyi Street Synagogue in Budapest, an
event that had an unreal feeling to it.
The sound of the hazzan’s and rabbi’s voices filling the cavernous
interior of the shul as they conducted the ceremony was for me an emotional
event. Here was a wedding ceremony
taking place in a shul that the Nazis surely would have destroyed, and the
ceremony was being conducted by people whose forebears were marked for
annihilation. What a stark reminder of
the ability of the Jewish people to survive as a people.
Another memorable occasion was attending Rosh
Hashanah services at the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, followed by
attending Yom Kippur services in Tokyo ten days later. Services in the Portuguese Synagogue were
memorable. The synagogue was built in
the mid 1600s and to this day remains candlelit. Reading a machzur by candlelight on Erev Rosh
Hashanah while listening to an excellent hazzan leading the service with
Sephardic intonation was quite an experience.
It was almost mystic. On the
first day of Rosh Hashanah, after services, we were invited by a member of the
congregation to attend a brit milah at the Synagogue for his new-born son.
Perhaps the most memorable Jewish experience was during
our trip to Portugal. Several years
back, we had committed to going to Portugal on vacation, and coincidentally,
Vanessa Paloma, who was one of our Religious School teachers at the time, had
presented a video about a study she was doing about the Marrano Jews in
Portugal. Through her, she put us in
touch with Manny Azevedo, a Portuguese-Canadian Jew living in Lisbon, who is
very active in helping the Portuguese Marrano Jewish community return to their
Jewish roots. He agreed to be our “tour
guide”, taking us on a tour of Jewish Lisbon.
Among the places we went that day was to a university library where
research was being done into the records of Jews convicted of heresy during the
Portuguese Inquisition. He showed us an
original file comprised of parchment documents written with a quill pen and compiled
by the Inquisition authorities back in the 1600s for a woman whose last name
was Coelho. It was a complete record of
her investigation, trial, and judgment.
Can you imagine holding a 450 year-old record like that in your hands?
We also went to Porto on that trip, and Manny Azevedo
arranged for us to have a private tour of the shul in Porto, which included a
museum that featured the life story of one of its founders, Captain Arthur Barros
Basto. He was born in 1887 into a
Christian family that had descended from Jews forcibly baptized in 1497 during
the Inquisition. In the 1920s, Captain Basto, a decorated
Portuguese WW1 veteran who survived gas attacks in Flanders, began a
quasi-messianic movement in northern Portugal to “out” Marranos and bring them
back into the Jewish fold. Captain Basto was wrongly and unjustly drummed out of the
Portuguese military. In 1937, the
Portuguese military summarily expelled him from its ranks, unjustly humiliating
him all because he launched a public campaign to reawaken Portugal's Bnei
Anousim to return to their Jewish roots.
He became known as the “Portuguese Dreyfus”. Within the last two years, a petition to the Portuguese
government was successfully circulated worlwide, beginning the rehabilitation
of Captain Basto.
An incidental piece of information is
that the great great niece of Captain Basto is the actress Daniela Ruah, one of
the stars of TV’s “NCIS: Los Angeles”.
The Spanish Inquisition is better known by
many Jews, but probably more from an academic perspective. What made this trip especially memorable was
getting deeply immersed in the Portuguese Inquisition, something I knew little
about before this trip. What better
evidence exists of the ability of the Jewish people to survive than the
existence and growth of the Jewish people in Portugal, many of whom have
descended, like Captain Basto, from Jews forcibly baptized during the
Inquisition?
