Albuquerque New Mexico is a town where cultures run together: green chili matzo ball soup is a staple at many Passover tables and tortillas have been used as a substitute for challah at the Friday night blessings on more than one occasion.
So it isn’t too surprising that the Anti-Defamation League Albuquerque would host “¡Celebrate! The Jewish Experience in Spanish Speaking Countries,” a week of music, film, art and lectures rooted in the journey of Jews after their expulsion from Spain in 1492.
“I am thrilled with the depth and scope of ¡Celébrate! and the incredible collaborations that have continued to make this a ‘not-to-be-missed’ community event,” said Susan Seligman, New Mexico Anti-Defamation League director and organizer of the festival. “¡Celébrate! speaks to people of all backgrounds. It is about discovering one’s roots and how those roots shape our lives and cultures today.”
New Mexico is home to many descendants of “conversos,” Jews who publicly renounced their tribe under force during the Spanish Inquisition, but who continued to maintain their traditions in secret.
Many of these conversos ended up in Mexico, where they enjoyed a short period of freedom, until Spain and the inquisition followed them there.
Once again, many found themselves fleeing, to what was then the territory of New Mexico. Some settled there and enjoyed relative refuge, particularly after New Mexico gained statehood.
Others settled into Tijuana and built a vibrant, Jewish community that, like the one in New Mexico, mingled its culture freely with that of Tijuana and its people.
Their story was told in the film “Tijuana Jews,” directed by Isaac Artenstein, a Jew whose own family lived in Tijuana during the 1950s and ‘60s. There are still roughly 600 Jewish families living in Tijuana today.
The expulsion from Spain was not the last time Jews sought refuge in Mexico. Mexico developed an open door policy on immigration and accepted many Jews at a time when they were being turned away from other countries at great peril.
During the Holocaust, Gilberto Bosques Saldívar, the Mexican Consul General in France from 1939-1942, personally helped save nearly 45,000 lives by granting and assisting with emigration to Mexico, at great risk to his own life, an act that lead many Jews to call him the “Mexican Schindler.”
“Instead of Gilberto Bosques being called the Mexican Schindler, Schindler should have been called the German Gilberto Bosques,” said Enrique Chmelnik, director of content for the Memory and Tolerance Museum in Mexico City, one of many speakers who provided lectures for the event.
The story of Bosques’ brave efforts to save thousands of people fleeing the Nazis, including Jews, socialists and Spanish republicans, was told in the film “Visa to Paradise,” directed by Lillian Lieberman.
The ADL’s National expansion of the program will happen next year and will definitely be stopping by California, so keep an eye out for it in El Tecolote’s Calendario!