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June 4, 2004/Sivan 15 5764, Vol. 56, No. 37
Rabbi peforming conversions in Spain
JEROME SOCOLOVSKY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
MADRID - As airplanes rev their engines in the distance, the rabbi from Kansas City stands on the balcony of his airport hotel room, holding a Torah in his arms - welcoming his latest convert to Judaism.
Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn is on a mission to convert people to Judaism in Spain, the land of the Roman Catholic Inquisition where untold numbers of people have some Jewish ancestry.
But the Reform rabbi's efforts aren't exactly appreciated in Madrid, where the active Jewish population numbers about 5,000 and all but one of the synagogues are Orthodox.
"We can't be like the Catholics and think that with a drop of water you've become Jewish," says Jacobo Israel Garzon, president of Madrid's Jewish community.
Cukierkorn's latest series of ceremonies was conducted during a layover at Madrid's Barajas International Airport following correspondence courses with the candidates that took at least one year to complete.
In total, Cukierkorn has converted 20 Spaniards to Judaism - most of them in Madrid, where there is no Reform temple.
He also has perfor-med dozens of conver-sions in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador and the United States, and has written a guide to Judaism to help potential Spanish-speaking converts.
"There's nothing I can do as a rabbi that is more transcendent than conversions. This has a future impact on Judaism," Cukierkorn told JTA in an inter-view in the cafe at the airport hotel.
Cukierkorn is rabbi of the New Reform Temple in Kansas City. He says he has a long interest in "lost" Sephardic Jews that may stem from his own personal history: Born in Brazil, some of his ancestors were Spanish Jews who emigrated to Poland.
Most converts find him via his Web page. He says he performs conversions only in locations where there is no Reform rabbi.
In interviews for this story, the converts asked to be identified only by their adopted Hebrew names, citing widespread anti-Semitism in Spain.
Ariel, a civil servant from Madrid, traced his family's roots back to Jews who were forced to convert during a pogrom in 1391 in the north-eastern Spanish city of Lerida.
He began reading books about Judaism and studied Hebrew in college. But after his two sons were born, he said, he "realized I had to recuperate my Jewish heritage for their sake."
Ariel was cir-cumcised by a urologist friend, and he then had his sons, aged 4 and 5, circumcised as well.
He approached the Jewish com-munity about for-mal conversion, but says their demands "basically meant having an Ortho-dox rabbi in my kitchen, and I couldn't demand that of my wife. After all, she did not marry an Orthodox Jew."
"The Internet was my only option," he adds.
Several weeks ago, Ariel and his entire family underwent a conversion ceremony led by Cukierkorn.
Another recent convert was Yakov, a clinical psychologist who flew in from Spain's Canary Islands for his ceremony in Madrid. The Canary Islands are a major European resort off the coast of Africa, and only have a smattering of Jews, mostly senior citizens from the British Isles.
Asked why he wanted to become Jewish, Yakov em-barks into a lengthy discourse on philosophy and identity, citing Karl Jung, Martin Buber and other thinkers.
"I had been searching for something that was already inside me," he says.
But when he approached the official Jewish community in Madrid, he wasn't encouraged to convert, he says. So he, too, found Cukierkorn's home page on the Internet.
Cukierkorn claims Jewish communities in Spain are turning away a great number of people who could be a benefit to Judaism.
"These people are drowning in a sea of indifference," he says.
Jews started trickling back to Spain in the 19th century after the Inquisition was finally abolished. But the community started to grow only after the establishment of the State of Israel, when Sephardic Jews from neigh-boring Morocco - many of them descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 - moved back to Spain fleeing anti-Jewish sentiment.
Jewish immigrants in recent years have come from Latin America, and they have tended to be largely Conservative, Reform or non-practicing.
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