Ceremony recognizes seven crypto-Jews as Jews
By Paul Haist
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A unique ceremony of return March 26 marked the formal recognition as Jews for seven people who came together in Phoenix under the auspices of the Association of Crypto Jews of the Americas.
Rabbi Joshua Stampfer, rabbi emeritus at Portland's Conservative Congregation Neveh Shalom, traveled to Phoenix to take part in the event with ex-Portlander Rabbi Yosef Garcia and Rabbi Albert Plotkin, a retired Reform rabbi in Phoenix.
The seven people recognized as Jews were deemed to be crypto-Jews, that is, individuals whose family Jewish identity was lost in previous generations through coerced or otherwise unwilling conversion to Christianity during or in the years after the Inquisition.
The seven included six women and one man. All of them had undergone an extensive interview process to determine the appropriateness of recognizing them as Jews.
Stampfer stressed that the process was neither conversion nor welcoming back; rather, it was formal acknowledgement of the participants' authentic status as Jews.
Avdey Torah was created not as a crypto-Jewish congregation, according to Stampfer, a scholar of crypto-Judaism and founder of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, but as "a bridge" for crypto-Jews finding their way back to their roots.
Since Garcia departed, some in his congregation have found their way to other Jewish congregations here. Stampfer said he was aware that some had gone to Congregation Shaarie Torah.
At the time that Garcia chose to relocate to Phoenix, several of his congregation were planning to participate in a ceremony here similar to the one that just took place in Phoenix. That ceremony was postponed when Garcia left.
Stampfer said there are plans to go ahead with the Portland ceremony, perhaps in June. He said there were about 12 people interested in taking part.
In Phoenix, the event began with a joint excursion to nearby Tucson where the participants immersed themselves in the mikvah there. The one man in the group also underwent the ritual drawing of a drop of blood.
Then, on March 26, the group gathered at Garcia's home, which doubles as the meeting place of his new Congregation Avdey Torah.
There they were led by the rabbis, constituted as a rabbinical tribunal, and in the presence of friends and family, in a ceremony, which included a "taking of vows and the recitation of the shema. Each participant received a document in Hebrew, English and Spanish certifying his or her status as a Jew. Each took a Hebrew name.
Stampfer said the ceremony was, to the best of his knowledge, the first instance of such an event.
He acknowledged that some in the Jewish community will question the Jewish status of those who went through the ceremony.
Indeed, when the issue first came up in Portland prior to Garcia's relocation, Rabbi Shlomo Truzman of the Sephardic Congregation Ahavath Achim cast more than a doubtful eye on the process.
"Rabbi Stampfer's desire is to help these people, I can understand it and I wish I could do the same, but only if they would apply themselves to the halachic rulings, and, unfortunately, I don't see that happening (in this case)," said Truzman at the time.
"If they want to come back to the fold, by all means. They will be welcomed with open arms, but only if they stick by the rules—and they go through halachic conversion," Truzman continued. "What's the problem of going through a conversion?"
In a side note to the recent event in Phoenix, Stampfer noted that five others who had been slated to take part in the ceremony pulled out at the last minute.
The rabbi said they were "afraid of their names being revealed," a fear he said "was very real."
For some of those who took part, the event was clearly deeply moving, according to Stampfer.
"Two of the women became very emotional," said the rabbi. "They really wept, sobbed and expressed their enormous relief at finally being accepted by the Jewish community?the fulfillment of dreams."