Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on February 6, 2015

Source: Pinterest

The embassies of Spain in Costa Rica and around the world are bracing for a wave of applications for citizenship after an article by Dina Siegel Vann in New York Jewish Week described a legislative proposal before Spains Parliament that would grant naturalization to those with Sephardic heritage. The news propagated after a March luncheon at the headquarters of the American Jewish Committees Latino and Latin American Institute in Manhattan.

In 1492, as Columbus was discovering the Americas on behalf of the Spanish Crown, Queen Isabela I and her husband King Fernando II were imposing their terrible interpretation of Catholicism with an edict that directed non-Christians to convert, be exiled or fear the Inquisition. Thus was born the Sephardic Jewish diaspora (Sephardi is Hebrew for Spain), and the Iberian nation has been taking steps to reverse the grave display of intolerance of bigotry perpetrated by the Crown in the 15th century.

It is estimated that around 200,000 Jews were forced out of Spain by the Crown. According to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, one wave of Sephardic Jews arrived in Costa Rica during the 16th and 17th centuries, and another wave arrived in the 19th century. A greater part of the Jewish community in Costa Rica, however, came from Eastern Europe during the first half of the 20th century.

The main conditions to citizenship in the proposed bill now being evaluated by the Parliament of Spain are: Proof of Sephardic roots and an acceptable level of fluency in Ladino, the Spanish dialect spoken by Sephardic Jews but written in the Hebrew script. Native Spanish speakers can easily learn to understand and speak Ladino, but learning Hebrew script is a more intricate affair. Heres a snippet of a poem written in Ladino with phonetic use of the Roman alphabet:

En una butika skura,

Top yo una djoya klara.

La su perla kes muy pura,

Supo avlarmal korasn.

People in Costa Rica (or elsewhere, and even those who are not of Hebrew faith) who would like to know if they have Sephardic ancestry can start with their last names and begin tracing back their genealogical family tree. Here is the list of family names as published by Colombian newspaper El Tiempo; you can use CTRL F to search for your surnames:

Go here to read the rest:

Sephardic Jews in Costa Rica Could Become Citizens of ...

Category: Sephardic
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