El Jornal
The Hadassah News
about Recife and Olinda,
Pernambuco, Brazil

History

In the 1530’s, Portugal’s King João III divided Brazil into 16 commercial territories called captaincies. The captaincy of Pernambuco was given to Duarte Coelho, friend to many New Christians—as descendents of converted Jews were known. Pernambuco was the most profitable of the captaincies and the mainstay of the economy was sugar, with New Christians running about half the colony’s sugar mills. Planters typically kept a manor house on their plantations and a town house in Olinda (four miles north of modern Recife), which was the capital under the Portuguese.

More than half the New Christians in sixteenth-century Pernambuco were secret Jews, supporting at least 10 clandestine synagogues. Small groups met in private homes for Shabbat, while larger groups gathered in secret chapels on the sugar plantations—farther from the eyes of neighbors—on major festivals. The Inquisition came to northeastern Brazil in 1591 and many of the colony’s secret Jews were sent to Lisbon for trial.

In 1630 the Dutch captured Pernambuco and transferred the capital to Recife, which had a better port. In addition to the Jews who came as immigrants, crypto-Jews already in the colony came into the open. In 1641, the first synagogue building in the Americas—Kahal Zur Israel—was constructed on the Rua dos Judeus (Street of the Jews). Despite anti-Jewish agitation from Dutch Calvinists and Portuguese Catholics, the ruler of Dutch Recife, Count Maurice of Nassau, saw to it that Jewish rights were upheld. Under Dutch rule, Jews came to number about 1,400—half the colony’s free population. Most were involved with sugar as planters, brokers, exporters or financiers. The first rabbi in the New World, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, arrived in 1641 from Amsterdam.

When the Netherlands ceded Pernambuco back to Portugal in 1654, Jews—fearful of a newly imposed Inquisition—left. Most went back to Holland or to the Caribbean, where they planted the seeds of a new sugar industry. One group of 23 was captured by Spanish pirates. Eventually rescued in Jamaica, they were put on a French ship headed for the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. It was this group that formed the nucleus of what would become the largest Jewish community in history. New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel is a direct descendent of Kahal Zur Israel.

Some of Recife’s Jews did not leave with the Dutch but went back underground. The Inquisition rooted out secret Jews in Brazil’s northeast for another 200 years, by which time Jewish practice had supposedly died out. In recent years, however, many people of Jewish descent have emerged. Depending on whom one talks to and which definition is employed, Jewish descendents number anywhere from dozens to hundreds of thousands.

In the twentieth century a new Jewish community formed in Recife. It began in the 1920’s with immigrants from the shtetls of Russia and Bessarabia and continued in the 1930’s with a more urbanized immigration from Hungary, Romania, Germany and Austria. Beginning as peddlers and shopkeepers, they produced a small but vibrant Jewish culture that included not only organizational life but Yiddish theater and newspapers as well.

Community

Recife has two overlapping Jewish communities. The mainstream is primarily descended from the twentieth-century immigrants. Their communal center is the Centro Israelita, in the city’s Torre section, at Rua José de Hollanda 798. Among the institutions housed in the Centro are Renascer (“rebirth”), a liberal congregation that holds Friday-night services; the umbrella organization of the community, the Federação Israelita de Pernambuco and a Jewish school. For information on the community, call school director Marcel Kosminsky at 55-81-3227-0418.

Jews live primarily in the Torre, Casa Forte, Madalena and Graças neighborhoods and along Boa Viagem Beach. The children of the immigrants became doctors, engineers and architects; the grandchildren spread deeper into the professional sector. Though still a cohesive community of about 1,500, intermarriage stands at 70 percent.

The second community is that of the Anousim—descendents of crypto-Jews, many of whom now identify or practice openly as Jews. Their religious center is the synagogue essentially abandoned but still owned by the mainstream community and located at Rua Martins Junior 29, in a neighborhood that once had many Jewish residents and businesses. The synagogue has Saturday morning services and congregants often come back for an afternoon Torah lesson. (For information on services, call Isaac Essoudry at 3465-8827.)

Three years ago a rabbi from Belo Horizonte, 1,500 miles to the south, began making periodic trips to Recife to perform conversions. About 15 families of Anousim have formally joined the community based at the Centro Israelita. Others are either in the process of converting or believe conversion is unnecessary.

The encounter between the groups has been a combination of warm embrace and misunderstanding. Some look at the former Anousim and see an inspiring Jewish story; others welcome them but have no notion of their past or of the greater number of Anousim outside their view. Some of the Anousim—hardly united themselves—speak of rejection by the mainstream community.

Recife’s third congregation is the Chabad Center (3325-3733). Though there is no Lubavitch community per se, the center’s location in Boa Viagem, the neighborhood with the largest concentration of Jews, attracts many to its Shabbat services and its school.

Despite their small numbers, Recife’s Jews are the focus of the city’s attention these days. Locals view the Dutch period with pride and regard Nassau as a great builder from whom today’s politicians can learn. Until five years ago, the two islands that form the center of old Recife were run-down and dangerous. The restoration of the synagogue is part of the city’s renaissance. The synagogue restoration, the emergence of Anousim and recent research on the colonial period are putting the Jewish story into the center of a rich regional stew of culture and folklore that includes music (forró and frevo), tales of heroes and bandits, and Recife’s own brand of Carnaval.

The Jewish place in Brazil’s history and culture was barely known before the twentieth century. The Recife-born sociologist Gilberto Freyre, one of the first to treat Brazil’s multiracial character as a strength, was also the first to recognize the sizable Jewish element in Brazil’s population. (Recently two of Freyre’s grandchildren had DNA tests, which showed the probability of Jewish ancestry.) In 1996, José Antônio Gonçalves de Mello published the documentary history People of the Nation: New Christians and Jews in Pernambuco, 1542-1654. The Federal University of Pernambuco has a new program in Jewish studies; when the program’s director, Tânia Kaufman, published The Jewish Presence in Pernambuco last winter, it could immediately be seen in the windows of the city’s bookstores.

Sights

In the center of Old Recife is the Rua de Bom Jesus, nowadays also identified by its original name, Rua dos Judeus. Gentrification has turned the street into a cultural and entertainment hub, with constant traffic to and from the restaurants, sidewalk cafés and nightspots. The buildings are mostly colonial-era edifices painted green, yellow, blue and tan. In the middle of the street’s west side, at number 197/203, is the restored Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, scheduled to be reinaugurated this month. The synagogue is a yellow stone, two-story building with arched ochre doors and windows and iron railings.

The synagogue now houses the Jewish Cultural Center of Pernambuco. Inside, the ground level reveals the original synagogue floor (at least a foot below the level of today’s floor) and the mikve, discovered by archaeologists before the restoration work began. In addition to what is visible below the floor, the ground level will be largely devoted to the cultural center’s exhibits.

As in the Dutch period, when the ground level consisted of shops, the rebuilt sanctuary will be on the second floor. The center will also have a historic archive and research center. For information on the center and its programs, call Marcel Kosminsky or e-mail Tânia Kaufman at tnkaufman@aol.com.

Up the street from Kahal Zur Israel is