Despite having repeatedly told her granddaughter that it was “dangerous” to pursue a Jewish connection, when Catholic-born Cuban-American Genie Milgrom’s maternal grandmother died in Miami in 1993, she bequeathed her a hamsa pendant and a Star of David earring. This, combined with the fact that her parents were second cousins from the mountain village of Fermoselle in the Spanish province of Zamora, was the start of Milgrom’s genealogical journey.
Her documentary, Between The Stone and The Flower, directed by Cuban-born filmmaker Roberto Otero, is set for its Israeli premiere on June 2 at The Museum of The Jewish People (ANU) in Tel Aviv.
In it, Bnei Anusim (descendants of forced converts) expert Milgrom speaks from the heart about her happiness about converting to Judaism, her three previous decades of discomfort in her Catholic skin, and what it was like bringing up her two Catholic children (their father would not allow her to convert them) in an observant Jewish home.
After her conversion, Genie eventually met and married Michael Milgrom, an observant Jew originally from Romania. “Michael has the patience of a saint. He has always been the rock that helps me when the going gets tough and when my past life clashes with my current life. Together, we raised my daughter [the younger child] in the best way we could, given the unusual circumstances,” she told the Magazine.
Crypto-Jewish origins
Some years later, Milgrom began to suspect she might be a descendant of those Spanish Jews forced into hiding centuries ago, and eventually uncovered a 1491 document referring to her ancestral village as a “Jewish settlement.”
The Milgroms have visited Fermoselle – the cradle of Genie’s family going back 500 years – 10 times so far.
“I am proud to know that I come from a long lineage of women and men who died in the Inquisition for wearing a clean shirt on Shabbat or for not eating bread on Passover or for not baptizing their children,” she says.
She has no doubt that “it is this strong lineage of women that pulled me out of the incense and the altars of the Catholic church.”
Milgrom spent the first years of her research following her maternal line (from which she derived her books, beginning with My 15 Grandmothers) before moving on to her paternal line, which led her to a palazzo in the juderia (Jewish quarter) in Cordoba, once the home of her ancestor Don Juan Sigler de Espinosa. Research for the film took the Milgroms and director Otero to locations in Cuba, Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, Cartagena, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Miami, and Key West.
“Having discovered my lineage dating back to pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal, I felt compelled to travel back in time and confront my history head-on. I had traced 22 grandmothers in an unbroken maternal lineage,” explains the Miami resident for the umpteenth time as she repeats the story of her genealogical search for her Jewish roots in Spain.
With the release of Between the Stone and the Flower, Milgrom – whom I had dubbed the “poster child for the Bnei Anusim” – has undeniably become the golden standard for emerging Jewish communities. By deciding to premiere her film at ANU, she is bringing home a big missing piece of the puzzle both to the museum’s section on crypto-Jews and to the tapestry of the people of Israel.
While the story she tells in her documentary is a personal one, the movement she represents is of the awakening of hundreds of thousands – potentially millions – of people who are willing to return to Judaism formally, as well as others whose moral and spiritual support for Israel is so crucial in these times.
The first 15 grandmothers
“The first 15 grandmothers, counting backward, were from Spain, and grandmothers 16-22 were from an area of northeast Portugal known as Trás-os-Montes, meaning ‘behind the mountains,’” Milgrom says. The clear view of wide and ample land below gave area inhabitants plenty of time to prepare to hide if anyone unknown was seen approaching across the medieval plains.
The Portuguese villages of Braganza, Miranda Do Douro, Mogadouro, and Macedo de Cavaleiros are numbered among those inhabited by Milgrom’s large crypto-Jewish family, “the Ramirez-Rodriguez-Fernandes and parts of the Mogadouro and Marques families.” Her ancestors were merchants, shoemakers, tanners, furriers, and more, who practiced strict endogamy.
Having discovered family members who were caught judaizing by the Inquisition Tribunal of Coimbra in Portugal – many perishing in its cells or being paraded in autos-da-fé held in the town square – she was able to match Inquisition records to her family tree culled from church records of births, deaths, and marriages, crucial for the having it recognized as a Jewish tree.
“When you research someone, it’s not only their birth certificates that you discover, but also their profession, their place of residence, and many other factors,” Milgrom told the Magazine. She has come across thousands of these little-known documents of Jewish life in Spain and Portugal prior to and during the Inquisition. One is a receipt issued in 1251 by two Jews to a Catholic Barcelona parish.
“I have thousands of such documents,” she says. “Those are tidbits of Jewish history before the Inquisition, of which we know little, and that’s the thread to connect with [the history of] the Jewish people. These documents are like a window into our history, and are gold.”
Unable to find any organization that understood the value of digitizing these documents, Milgrom financed the digitization of a collection of documents from pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal, “so that those digitized records could be available to the world.” They can be found on her website, geniemilgrom.com
A whirlwind who gets things done, Milgrom has been president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami and of the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies in Colorado; a senior adviser to the Jewish Heritage Alliance and the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies; and president of Tarbut Sefarad in Fermoselle.
She received the State of Florida Genealogy award for her pioneering work and for bringing attention to the existence of the Bnei Anusim – and was awarded the Medal of the Four Sephardic Synagogues in Jerusalem, presented to her by Prof. Abraham Haim, president of the Council of the Sephardi and Oriental Communities in Jerusalem.
Digitizing the Inquisition
Another project that Milgrom has been involved in since 2015 is the digitization of Inquisition procesos (judgments), each 200-300 pages long, around the world. Her success in this area in Portugal contrasts with the bureaucracy she encountered in Spain. Meanwhile, she is optimistic about the archives of Mexico City and Cartagena, Colombia, where the Inquisition also established tribunals.
Deep reconnection
Speaking with the Magazine, Ashley Perry (from the Perez family), former Israeli government adviser, describes Milgrom as “a friend and colleague and doing more than anyone I know to advance the cause of the Bnei Anusim and of the digitization of Inquisition records.”
He says she had “just been back to the Vatican” to follow up with the pope on her request to have the Vatican Inquisition archives digitized. Her first meeting with him took place last year.
Perry is founder of Reconectar, an organization set up to assist in connecting the descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities to the mainstream Jewish world, both online and in person.
“Genie is a paradigm-shifting individual in a game-changing field,” Perry asserts.
On her website, Milgrom shares all the resources she has accumulated to enable people to find their converso (medieval Jewish convert) ancestry. Since her own process “was complicated” and took 12 years to fully research, the genealogist says, “I clearly understood that unless these Inquisition records were fully digitized and up on the Internet, the work, time, and the cost of doing their own research would be prohibitive for most people.”
For years, since she began publishing her journey and discoveries on the Internet – followed by her four books, countless interviews, TV appearances, blogs, articles, and conferences – Milgrom has been receiving letters from people around the world “who are searching for their pre-Spanish-Inquisition Jewish roots.”
Many, she says, are also looking for “a deep spiritual connection to Judaism that they feel would come about by knowing if their family was truly Jewish in medieval times.”
Most tell her that they feel Jewish “in their hearts,” a feeling they cannot explain. For instance, “They talk about feeling sentimental when they meet a Jewish person or when they see candles being lit for Shabbat.”
She says that the majority are from Catholic families, while the remainder are Jews whose families emigrated from Spain to the Ottoman Empire; and others define themselves as “just curious.”
Among those who suspect that they may be Bnei Anusim are people with accounts of grandparents offering deathbed evidence that their families were not what they seemed, whether from Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, San Salvador, or Brazil – among other places.
Israel and the 200 million
After Milgrom’s fascinating and groundbreaking first book, My 15 Grandmothers, her second one, How I Found My 15 Grandmothers: A Step by Step Guide, is a gift for those taking the dive into their family’s past, armed with a few last names, some family customs or stories, and perhaps an heirloom.
This “manual,” as she calls it, is written for “these souls that are awakening, and who are yearning for the truth about their past.”
Regarding crypto-Jewish traditions, Milgrom highlighted the custom of sweeping a room toward the middle, away from the direction of the door, to honor the place where the mezuzah would have been set. In the film, she discusses other Jewish rituals that her family practiced, passing them off as “family traditions.”
Meanwhile, Perry explains that “in 2019, Nature, one of the world’s most-read and prestigious academic journals, did a study on the roots of the people of Latin America. The most surprising result was that 25% of the total population of Latin America had Jewish ancestry.”
He continues: “I extrapolated from this that if we add Latinos and Hispanics in North America, Spain, Portugal and a few other places, keeping the numbers extremely conservative, we reach the number of about 200 million people who have ‘significant’ Jewish ancestry.”
Perry says that those findings are “now backed up by multidisciplinary academic research. We are talking about people having a lot more than one drop of blood from 500 years ago.”
The 200 million question
The burning question is what Israel is doing to recognize this phenomenon and attract people with Jewish ancestry, many of whom consider themselves Jews in some way.
With his contacts in the Israeli government and the legal world, Perry has been able to help place the issue of Bnei Anusim on the global Jewish agenda.
“A few years ago, we successfully had an Israeli government committee initiated under the Diaspora Affairs Ministry,” he said. “The committee wrote a report, the purpose of which was to identify how the State of Israel could best approach the issue of this emerging community with practical recommendations.”
In addition, Milgrom was among those who testified at a Knesset Caucus for the Reconnection with the Descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Communities organized by Perry and chaired by former Yisrael Beytenu MK Rober Ilatov. Unfortunately, due to the lack of political stability in recent years, COVID and now the Gaza war, the document is still sitting in a drawer – although Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, is currently showing interest, Perry explains.
Nevertheless, “We have reached hundreds of thousands,” through Reconectar, he says.
“People simply want something, to feel some level of reconnection, whether from just knowing about their roots to proceeding with a formal ‘return’; different approaches, and many other types of reactions – we try to help as much as possible.”
He says that frequently, when these descendants find out about their Jewish ancestry, they become passionate about Israel and supporting the Jewish people.
Perry has twice been invited to address the AIPAC annual conference on what the Jewish world should be doing about these emerging communities.
“Many Jewish organizations see the potential of reaching out to Hispanics and Latinos in the US because of their growing political significance, for assistance and to support the fight against antisemitism – and in pro-Israel activity.”
The first congress
Having searched online for traces of a Jewish presence in the proximity of Zamora city for almost seven years, I met Genie and Michael Milgrom in the summer of 2013 when I attended a congress on the historical Jewish traces to be found in Zamora province (where Fermoselle is located).
Needless to say, the Milgroms had been more than instrumental in making the event a reality with the participation of Prof. Jesus Jambrina of Viterbo University, Wisconsin, also a Cuban-American of Zamoran ancestry. Titled “Reencuentro e Historia de la Aljama de Zamora” (“Reencounter and History: The Medieval Jewish Community of Zamora”), it brought together a team of international and local experts in Zamora.
I knew that it was a historic, game-changing event and turned up at the congress with a local cameraman. I didn’t know what I would encounter, but I knew it was history in the making. My own documentary has yet to see the light, and I salute the Milgroms for making theirs a reality – as well as for all their spectacular work which The Jerusalem Post has reported on over the years.
Along with other attendees, I learned that the city of Zamora, capital of the province that had spawned Milgrom’s ancestors, had been equal to Toledo in Torah learning – and in the last 100 years, between the 1391 pogroms across much of Spain (which did not reach the region) and the 1492 Expulsion, it had become the greatest center of intellectual pursuit on the Iberian Peninsula.
I joined the Milgroms in Spain and Portugal on several occasions after the congress, notably visiting Fermoselle with them, as well as the Portuguese mountaintop village of Belmonte with its showcase Bnei Anusim community whose legendary existence had begun to surface in the 1980s – and the Inquisition cells in Coimbra where Milgrom’s family had suffered unspeakably. I am one of many firsthand witnesses to the Milgroms’s outstanding, groundbreaking work that is in the process of changing the face of 21st-century Jewry.
Museum of the Jewish People
Irit Shapira Meir, a curator at ANU, explains to the Magazine that “The Museum of the Jewish People has a very close connection to the crypto-Jews in Belmonte.
“Museum representatives were sent to document the community in the 1980s, after they once again came out to the light,” she says.
“Inacio Scheinbardt, a businessman who had dealings with the museum was roped into being the translator for the museum representatives sent to document the community. And a well-known photographer named Frederic Brenner joined the crypto-Jews for holidays, ceremonies, and for Passover,” she explains, “but first had to convince them to allow him to take photos.”
These shots are now part of the crypto-Jewish collection on display at ANU.
“An oil lantern, such as those used to secretly light Shabbat candles, is also on display,” says Shapira Meir. The lanterns were lit with oil bought directly from the oil press and with wicks made by specific women in the community. These types of lanterns have been in existence since the 15th and 16th centuries,” she says.
There is also “a short animated film illustrating how crypto-Jews in earlier years celebrated Passover and how families would gather in basements wearing white to make matzot.”
Emerging communities need help
After some time working with and assisting Bnei Anusim around the world, the Milgroms came to understand that even though they had converted or “returned” fully with their genealogies, they were still often shunned by the traditional Jewish communities in Latin America and elsewhere.
“In many communities, they were not allowed to buy kosher meat or get a circumcision or be buried in a Jewish cemetery. I would visit community after community who were shomer Shabbat for years, and still their children were denied a local Jewish education.”
While there are entire Bnei Anusim communities as well as individuals returning to ancestral practices in an open way, while some of the communities are emerging, others continue to remain below the surface, in fear of the world around them, explains Salomon Buzaglo, head of the Institute for Sefardi and Anousim Studies at Netanya Academic College.
He quotes Prof. Renato Athias, an anthropologist from the University of Pernambuco, Brazil (where there are several recognized emerging communities), as saying that among these crypto-Jewish groups, who have been waiting in vain for assistance in rejoining the Jewish people, are those who are beginning to fall prey to Christian missionary activity designed to distance them from Judaism.
Certificate of ancestry
In the meantime, Perry, Milgrom, and Drora Arussy of the organization Unity Through Diversity are partners in the Certificate of Sephardic Ancestry project. The certificate is cultural and not halachically binding. It testifies that someone with expertise has reviewed the bearer’s Jewish information such as family trees and other documents, “which no one had even wanted to glance at in the past,” Perry says.
“Of course, the certificate is just a recognition of identity, with no halachic or legal standing; it doesn’t say if someone is Jewish, it just recognizes the high likelihood that they have Sephardi ancestry. We don’t just hand them out, and we probably turn down more candidates than we accept – we ask for solid evidence. These certificates bring so much joy and pride to people, to see that someone is finally recognizing their identity.” Details about the Certificate of Sephardi Ancestry are available at sephardiccertificate.com/
Milgrom waxes enthusiastic, saying: “The pride people exhibit when they hold this token certificate – and the tears that are shed while telling us how amazing it makes them feel – have made this program wildly successful in our eyes.”
“People frame the certificates and show them proudly to their friends,” says Perry.
“Drora and Ashley live in Israel and work daily on bringing recognition to these communities,” Milgrom explains, “and I work from the other end in Latin America as director of Bnei Anusim for the organization Kulanu.”
Israeli premiere
Between the Stone and the Flower will be screened at ANU on June 2 at 8 p.m., followed by a Q&A session with Milgrom. The film is in English and Spanish, with Hebrew subtitles. It has been shown at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, the Berlin Independent Film Festival, the Sacramento Jewish Film Festival, and the No Boundaries Film Festival, where it won an award.
The screening will be preceded by a tour of the museum’s crypto-Jewish exhibition beginning at 6:30 p.m. and followed by an ANU “Foodish” section talk on the culinary traditions of the crypto-Jews – based on Milgrom’s book Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers: Unique Recipes and Stories from the Times of the Crypto-Jews during the Spanish Inquisition.