Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 58, No. 40, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 30, 2004 Page: 3 of 24
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She’ll help
others return
to Judaism, too
By Steve Israel
Staff Writer
Yaffah daCosta has won the right to
come home to the Jewish faith of her
ancestors, and she unabashedly pre-
dicts millions could follow in her
footsteps within a few decades.
In North Texas last week, daCfosta
described a personal journey of dis-
covery, frustration and ultimate
redemption.
It’s the path of a woman who was
brought up as a Catholic, but felt
uncomfortable, visited Israel repeat-
edly, and finally discovered her
religious roots were obscured by the
Spanish Inquisition over 500 years ago.
“1 now know my ancestry is Jewish,
and I have the evidence and the cer-
tificate of a returnee, signed by a
significant Orthodox rabbi,” a satisfied
daCfosta said in an interview. Days ear-
lier she told the same dramatic story
to pre-Selichot service worshippers at
Congregation Tiferet Israel in Dallas.
How convincing was daCosta’s
hard-won evidence of Jewishness?
This summer, the Jewish Agency in
Jerusalem granted her rights of citizen-
ship, and on Aug. 4, she disembarked
from a Nefesh b’Nefesh aliyah flight to
Israeli soil. She joined hundreds of
other new immigrants in singing
“Hatikva,”then tearfully told Israeli tele-
vision, “I’ve waited so long for this day.”
As daCosta’s own dream started
coming into view, she challenged her-
self to help others achieve their
spiritual homecomings. Earlier this
year, she and three families in Houston
created a support group they call the
Crypto Sephardic Union. They
operate the Web site www.cryp-
tounion.com and are opening
volunteer-staffed offices in Los
Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Houston,
New York and Miami. Yaftah will head
up a new center in Israel, helping
returnees with “the final leg of their
return,” she said.
She voiced confidence that a stun-
ning 20 million-plus people are alive
today, who like her, could trace their
ancestry - many of them through
direct matrilineal descent - to the
800,000 or so Jews who were affected
by the Spanish Inquisition.
“Several organizations are working
with Crypto Jews, but the Union is the
one most focused on the return, and
helping people collect their portfolios
of evidence, and helping them go to
the rabbis who are issuing return cer-
tificates," daC xista told the HP.
For English speakers she uses the
term “Crypto Jews” to describe
descendants of people in Spain and
September 30,2004
In Our 58th Year
$
Texas Jewish Post
3
By obtaining rabbinic certification as a returning Jew, Yaffah daCosta was
allowed to make aliyah to Israel over the summer. Photo Steve Israel
Portugal who were forced by govern-
ment decrees to hide their Judaism,
beginning in the late 1400s.
“I prefer the term ‘Anusim,’ which
is Hebrew for ‘forced ones,”’ she said.
“You may hear ‘Conversos,’ she added,
but that is problematic because it’s
Spanish for convert, conjuring up the
image of somebody who voluntarily
converted and chose Christianity, and
it says nothing about the underground
nature of this phenomenon.”
She abhors “Marranos,” which
means “swine.” Scholars popularized
the name, especially Cecil Roth, a pre-
eminent research and author of
“History of the Marranos.” DaCosta
said the Christian community used
that term for the forced converts who
were maintaining their culture in
secret.
“Their Judaism was observed only
in the home,” daCfosta said, “but the
significance of that is that it carries on
the traditions. It’s one of the primary
evidences today of Crypto Judaism
that the rabbis use. If our ancestors had
not carried on their customs, we’d lx*
at a loss today in knowing who we are.”
DaCosta credited Shulamit Halevi
of the Spiritas Research Institute in
Chicago with cultivating much of the
Orthodox rabbinic support tor Crypto
Jews and their right to return to their
ancestors’ faith. She said Rabbi
Mordecai FJiahu, the Chief Sephardic
Rabbi of Israel, wrote a letter of sup-
port, quoting the Shulchan Aruch, and
was followed by similar support from
Rabbis Aharon Solevicic and Godalia
Schwartz. Their letters are displayed at
www.cryptounion.com under “Rab-
binic Support.”
“Most recently Rabbi Herschel Sol-
nica in New York, the head of another
Beit Din or rabbinic court, created his
own return certificate using the word
'(fonversos’ and speaking of us as
returnees rather than converts. That’s
what our people have wanted.”
It is Rabbi Solnica’s letterhead on
top of daCosta’s own returnee certifi-
cate which bears a July 7,2004 effective
date. He’s affiliated with a rabbinic-
court of the the Va’ad Harabanim of
Queens, N.Y., headed by Rabbi Peretz
Steinberg.
She stressed that four types of evi-
dence can indicate to rabbis a person’s
Crypto Jewish status: ancestors'
country of origin, genealogical names,
Jewish customs and traditions, and
DNA (genetic) information.
“The strongest category is the cus-
toms and traditions that were handed
down usually by the women, from
mother to daughter to grand-
daughter," daCosta said. “That is
Crypto Judaism. You know, Judaism is
not just a religion, but is a culture as
well. Friday night candle-lighting
behind a closed door is a famous one."
Other significant customs are
soaking meat in a salt brine; cracking
open a raw egg and examining it
before using it to see if there is any
blood, and if there is blood in the egg,
to throw it away; covering windows
and not playing music in a house of
mourning; fasting on Mondays and
Thursdays; orienting beds north and
south; sweeping toward the center of a
r(x>m so as not to sweep dirt out the
door; housecleaning on Fridays;
burning nail clippings and hair trim-
mings; secret prayer rooms in homes;
and handing down tallit (prayer
shawls).
The ability to document ancestors’
country of origin is the second most
meaningful Crypto indicator, she
believes, “because the people who are
experts in this field know the migra-
tory paths of the Crypto Jews when
they left Spain and Portugal and where
they went. My ancestors came from
the Azores | Islands in the Atlantic
Ocean]...I have the birth certificate of
my mother’s parents from the Azores."
Next on the list of evidence is family
names. “There are some names that
are fairly obviously Crypto Jewish
names," daCosta said. “One of the
classic examples is a name that ends in
Zeilicovich cites Jewish-Latin links
By Steve Israel
Staff Writer
FORT WORTH—Ask Rabbi
Alberto Zeilicovich if he’s heard
about Jewish descendants of
Spanish and Portuguese Crypto
Jews living in Central and South
America and he’ll ask if you have a
few minutes to spare.
There’s a “huge” number of
Sephardic descendants throughout
Latin America, he said last week.
The rabbi of Congregation Aha-
vath Sholom cites his experience in
Colombia, Puerto Rico and
Argentina.
For eight years in Colombia in
the 1980s, he said, there was con-
vincing evidence of Jewish customs
widely practiced by those who con-
sidered themselves Catholic. And
he noted that Medellin, a city
whose name has Jewish connota-
tions, is located in the state of
Antiochia, which he believes is
derived from the name of the king
of Syrian King Antiochus who tried
to Hellenize Judea and eliminate
Judaism - a policy that ignited the
rebellion of the Maccabees some
2,100 years ago.
“In December, residents light
candles in the street outside their
homes for one week," he said. “They
call the observance the festival of
light. The first time I lit my
Chanukiah and put it in my
window, I noticed nearly everyone
had lit candles outside their homes.
I asked ‘What’s going on. It’s the fes-
tival of luminaries - lights,’ they
said." I couldn’t believe they had
such a festival. This is because they
are descendants of the Marranos
| Crypto Jews \.”
Also, “every big house will have a
bath, underground, just like a
mikvah.” Another “sign" of Jewish
heritage, he said, happens every
Friday night, when “everyone lights
candles. They say it brings luck."
Most of these Colombians con-
sider themselves ('.atholies, he said,
yet “people came to me all the time
to ask about Judaism” and the pos-
sibility of their own Jewish ancestry.
“But if you are a rabbi in
Colombia and people say they are
Jewish, you have to be careful,” he
said, recalling how thousands of
Colombians claimed Jewish iden-
Rabbi Alberto Zeilicovich
tity and emigrated to Israel in the
past, but later were found to be
simply seeking a new home.
Yet he echoed the contention of
others that there are millions of
people descended from Spanish
and Portuguese Jews who live in
Latin America.
In Puerto Rico, where Rabbi
Zeilicovich spent three years, large
pockets of Spanish Jewish descen-
dants live in the island’s interior.
“These were all Marranos,” he said.
“If you read the inscription in the
gate to the Old City of San Juan,
you see the welcoming inscription
that’s written in Latin, but the
words arc Baruch Ha Ba from the
Book of Songs.”
‘ez’. But you can’t go by names alone,
and you should know that Perez, Mar-
tinez, Gomez, and so forth, are not
necessarily Crypto Jews.”
“While DNA has won fame in the
courtroom, it’s in the early stages of
proving the Jewish link,” she said.
“Mitochondrial DNA on the mother’s
X-chromosomes, showing only
mothers and having nothing to do
with men, is what we re dealing with.
In a database in Flouston
| familytreeDNA.com, operated by
Bennet Greenspan), my DNA results
were compared to thousands on that
database. They showed a common
Jewish ancestry.”
However, “There’s no major rabbi
yet who has said DNA can prove Jew-
ishness for all people,” she said.
Her own Jewish links showed up in
a variety of ways. “ The thing I got into
trouble for the most was, in high
school years, if I went over to
someone’s house and I ate over there,"
she said. She related that to traditions
associated with kashrut diets. “I was
only supposed to eat at my mother’s
house and my aunts - your matrilineal
women,” she said.
When she graduated from high
school in 1965, Yaftah daCosta had
grown uncomfortable with the con-
straints of her Catholic upbringing
and began reading to deal with her
agnosticism.
“So I just left the church. I saw
people acting differently from what
scripture said. All they had to do was
go in a little closet and tell them what
they had done and say a few words
about it and then they could go ahead
and do it again. So I just didn’t feel
comfortable about it," she said.
It wasn’t until 1992 that she read a
Hal Lindsey txx)k and was moved to
visit Israel. Several trips and meetings
see RETURN p. 19
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Wisch, Rene & Wisch-Ray, Sharon. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 58, No. 40, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 30, 2004, newspaper, September 30, 2004; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth754484/m1/3/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .