A Letter from Tijuana

Courting Conversos

Mexican descendants of forced converts to Christianity return to Judaism

Read accompanying sidebar

Congregacion Hebrea de Baja California sits in a hilly well-to-do neighborhood of La Mesa in the rough-and-tumble border city of Tijuana, Mexico. The synagogue is protected, in typical Latin American fashion, by a high perimeter wall and a tall security gate. Gray marble tiles line its interior and 100 or so chairs, most upholstered in leather, face the wooden ark. Copies of a Spanish-language Sephardic siddur sit neatly stacked on tables and chairs.

A little before eight in the evening on Friday, 40 or so men, women and children begin to file into the room. The women seat themselves on the left, the men on the right. Carlos Vicente Salas Diaz enters the sanctuary in one of his signature well-tailored suits and tasteful ties. The 73-year-old is a formidable man with a neatly-trimmed mustache who exudes charm and respectability. During his sermon, Salas is filled with rage at the “frightful” proposal to divide Jerusalem into Israeli and Palestinian sectors. “We Jews,” Salas says in Spanish, gesturing over his congregation, “must never allow our Holy City to be torn apart. It was promised in its entirety to us by God.” After the service, we move into the social hall where Salas blesses the wine and challah. Everyone exchanges hugs and handshakes and wishes each other “Shabbat shalom.”

Salas is not an ordained rabbi. He does not belong to the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or any other movement and has no intention of joining. Congregacion Hebrea de Baja California is not even considered Jewish by some of the city’s Jewish inhabitants. Conversos like Salas and the 148 congregants he leads—descendants of Sephardic Jews who converted to Christianity during the Inquisition and were raised as Roman Catholics—have returned to Judaism. They are, Salas believes, the key to the prosperity of Mexico’s Jewish community—and the world’s.

Born to a poor, Catholic family in rural central Mexico, Salas grew up tending sheep. His family’s Jewish roots were revealed to him by his maternal grandmother, who told her grandson about the lighting of Shabbat candles, the difference between treyf and kosher and the recitation of the Shema. “And like almost all conversos, my grandmother believed that our Jewishness had to be kept secret,” says Salas.

As a young man, Salas followed his brother to Buffalo, New York, where he wore many hats: mechanic, journalist who interviewed Fidel Castro in Cuba and student at a Methodist seminary. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he moved to Los Angeles and became a successful businessman. He continued his religious studies at the Conservative movement’s University of Judaism, where he officially converted. Salas’s wife is also a convert as are his two ex-wives. He has 10 children, including an adopted son.

In the late 1960s, Salas began to teach “Bible classes” in Tijuana because he believed that many descendants of the conversos were, like him, curious about Judaism. He purchased land and built his dream synagogue for his students, who call him “maestro.” Over the decades, he has poured more than three million dollars of his own money into the synagogue.

Gamliel Hernandez stands out among the crowd of congregants after the service. He is the only man present with a full beard and tzitzit. Although he was baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church and had attended parochial school, he abandoned religion for Marx and Lenin as a teenager. By the 1980s, he was a career diplomat in the Mexican foreign service, which included a stint as a vice consul in Los Angeles. He was also experiencing what he calls a “spiritual hunger.” His father was a friend of Salas’s and Hernandez started “visiting the Friday night services like a tourist,” he says. “Then I started taking classes, learning Torah. What I encountered was the basis of the faith that I’d had as a child. The fundamentals. And I saw the contradictions between what I was learning and what I had been taught. I had never really read the Bible before. In the Torah there’s no intermediary between man and God. No saints. No Trinity.”

Ruth Uribe Ramirez is a small, quiet woman who wears her graying hair in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She began studying theology with Salas in 1985 and her conversion to Judaism took six years, which is common in the congregation. “What most attracted me to Judaism was the idea that God is our father, that we are his creation. That was very comforting to me. I love Shabbat. I look forward to it all week long. We come to the synagogue every week for Friday evening and Saturday morning services,” says Uribe. “Nothing could keep me away.”

Not all the congregants attend regularly. “On Rosh Hashanah, I have to hold three services to accommodate all the people who show up,” says Salas. While this tendency to show up at shul only for the High Holy Days seems incontrovertible evidence that Tijuana’s conversos are authentically Jewish, Salas requires more from those who want to join his congregation. “I first determine that the men are in fact circumcised. All those who claim to be conversos have to show me some piece of paper, some document belonging to their family, a ketubah, a get, a brit milah certificate, something that demonstrates that their family is Jewish,” says Salas. He estimates that about two dozen of his congregants have officially converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. “They had been raised as ‘cultural Catholics.’ They’d never read the Bible. They’d been taught only what to do during Mass. They felt that something was lacking in their spiritual life.”

Some Jewish converts face hostility and rejection by their Christian families, others are fortunate enough to make it a family affair. “Many of these people have now been with me for more than 20 years, sincere in their faith. And ultimately, for most of them, their children and close family members returned to Judaism as well,” says Salas. Hernandez’s parents grew interested in Judaism after they heard Salas give a sermon on idolatry. “They never knew that the Torah prohibited idolatry,” he says. “After the service they went home and gathered up all their statues of Catholic saints, all their crucifixes, and put them in a big metal box and burned them,” recalls Hernandez, most of whose family ended up converting.

Sadly, says Salas, they also face rejection by other Jews. “Conversos have been persecuted for the past 500 years… And when these people decide to return to Judaism, they are clearly persecuted and rejected by the traditional Jewish community that refuses to recognize them as Jews,” he says. Tijuana’s other synagogue, Centro Social Israelita, is Orthodox and not in search of converts or the attention Salas has brought to the city’s Jews. Relations between his congregation and what Salas calls Tijuana’s “traditional Jewish community” have not been warm. Contact between the city’s two synagogues is minimal and kept to civil affairs, according to San Diego journalist Donald D. Harrison, who remembers being told by one member of Centro Social Israelita that Salas is “‘turning out Jews like tortillas.’”

It’s common knowledge in Tijuana that everyone who can afford to buy a home in San Diego has either already done so or is in the process of doing so. This includes members of both Tijuana’s “traditional” and “nontraditional” Jewish communities. The major reason is the rise in crime that came about after the drug cartels secured a foothold in the city in the mid-1990s. Sequestros, or kidnappings, have become commonplace for Tijuana’s wealthy and middle and upper-middle classes. There were 396 homicides in the city in 2005, including the murders of two Jewish businessmen during a robbery.

Salas is not worried that his flock will decrease. “There are probably 30 million Jews in Mexico,” he says casually, counting the conversos, although official estimates say that there are no more than 40,000 Jews in the entire country of 107 million. “Already we have five converso congregations in Mexico,” he says proudly. “Together they have about 5,000 members. There are other converso congregations in Latin America. Brazil has quite a few. And there are congregations in Spain and Portugal. This September here in Tijuana we’re going to host the first-ever international convention of converso congregations. We’re expecting as many as 500 delegates.”

Salas plans to establish a University of Judaism in Tijuana to train rabbis who will preach to the converso congregations. Salas’s other project is “New Jerusalem,” a community for the elderly 80 miles south of Tijuana, complete with a Jewish cemetery. And Salas has a special treat in store for kosher meat lovers. “In a few months we’re even getting a rabbi from Jerusalem who will work as our shochet so that we’ll be able to produce our own kosher meat. We plan on exporting it to Israel. Imagine that. Kosher meat produced in Tijuana!”

Salas’s openness to conversos is a “potentially historic moment in Jewish history,” Gamliel Hernandez, the former Mexican diplomat, says. “There are a lot of people in Mexico who are lost, who are searching for faith. I think that if they were introduced to Torah, they would move rapidly toward Judaism,” he adds.

Salas hopes that the story of his congregation will encourage other Jews, including American Jews, to engage with the conversos who are intrigued by Judaism. “Everyone says that soon one-third of the U.S. population will be Hispanic,” he says. “I am convinced that many of these people are conversos. American Jews complain of low synagogue attendance and the low birthrate among Jews. You could turn this all around by reaching out to the conversos, educating them and accepting them as Jews. We Jews could become a larger and stronger community in the world.”
—Abe Opincar

Sidebar

Mexico and its Jews

In the early 1800s, the first German Jews arrived in Mexico, and in 1884, President Porforio Diaz, with an eye toward developing his nation’s economy, invited Jewish bankers to settle in his largely Roman Catholic country. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, numerous Sephardic Jews immigrated to Mexico followed, after World War I, by a wave of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing the dying Russian Empire. In 1924, Mexico imposed tight restrictions on immigration, shutting off the flow.

Today, most of Mexico’s estimated 40,000 Jews live in prosperous neighborhoods in Mexico City, organized largely in communities based on the regions from which their ancestors came: Syria, Turkey, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. For the most part, Jewish relationships with the rest of Mexican society have been polite if not always warm. More than a few Jewish families felt a chill during the presidency of Luis Echeverria from 1970 to 1976, when several industries—many of them owned by Jews—were nationalized, and the pattern repeated itself in the 1980s under President Jose Lopez Portillo.
In recent years, many Jews have joined other Mexicans in moving to Tijuana, where the economy has been more stable and the air less polluted, and where nearby San Diego offers superior medical care, financial services and shopping centers.

Perhaps the most noteworthy recent development for Mexican Jews, however, is the passage in 2003 of the Federal Law to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination. Adopted unanimously in both houses of the Mexican Congress and signed into law by President Vicente Fox, the law bars discrimination of any kind, including, explicitly, anti-Semitism. Non-Jewish Mexicans may still harbor ambivalent feelings toward Jews, seeing them as some sort of “other,” but equal access to jobs, education and the like are now guaranteed by law—a far cry from the days of the Inquisition.
—Boris Weintraub