A Synagogue Hidden in the Crowd

From the outside it is a building like any other in Mexico City’s historic center – colonial façade and wrought-iron railings curling around the windows. Across the street is the Loredo Park, named for the Catholic church at its perimeter and the streets are crammed with the rows of tiny shopfronts and snaking passageways that accommodate the thousands of people that live and sell here every day. The only difference you will notice on the facade of the Sierra Justo synagogue are two Stars of David carved into the archways above each wooden door.

Long before Jewish families shopped at Kosher Palace in Tecamachalco or orthodox Jews walked to temple through the leafy suburban streets of Polanco, there was a large and enterprising Jewish population in the Centro Histórico. Jewish families from the Middle East (Sephardis) and Eastern Europe (Ashkenazis) came to live on Jesús María Street, Loredo Street and the surrounding grid of downtown blocks in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. They weren’t the first wave of Jewish immigrants – who were believed to be converted Spanish Jews that came with Hernán Cortés to escape persecution during the Spanish Inquisition – but definitely, the wave that held tightest to their original culture and traditions.

On these streets in the city center, Jewish merchants started as most immigrants in Mexico have – selling trinkets in the streets and working their way up to stands and storefronts. The community began to prosper and adopt the Mexican culture and language, but barriers, some self-imposed and some involuntary, still kept them from fully assimilating.

There was persecution – during the first wave of Jewish immigration in the 16^th century, immigrants were forced to worship in secret to escape the watchful eyes of the Mexican Inquisition. There was prejudice – “My grandmother told me that when she was young the kids would say that the Jews had tails,” says my friend Arturo with an embarrassed roll of his eyes, “and so they used to try and lift up the girls’ skirts to see.” Sounds like an excuse to lift up little girls’ skirts to me, but still a nasty thing to hear at 8 years old.

There was elitism – Jews married only within their community, and many Mexican women who worked as medicine women to members of the Jewish community eventually became the single mothers of pale-skinned, curly-haired babies.

And there was solidarity – In the thirties, fascist groups demanded that the Jews get out of Mexico and the community rallied to form the Comité Central Isrealita de México, an organization that defended Jews’ right to remain in the country, strengthening ties within the community and with wider Mexican society.

Despite bumps in the road, Jews in Mexico were offered a kind of religious freedom unheard of in many of their home countries and are now very much immersed in Latino life, even, as one Inside Mexico article describes it, “eating guacamole on their bagels and interchanging pozole for matzoh ball soup, blintzes for quesadillas.”

In 1912 the Sociedad de Beneficencia Alianza Monte Sinaí brought together Jews throughout the area, and in 1918 they built Mexico’s first synagogue, Monte Sinaí – which just happens to be a few buildings down from Sierra Justo synagogue on Sierra Justo Street. In 1938, 20 years later, the first stone was set for Sierra Justo.

Twenty steps past the building’s main entrance and you are in front the structure’s true facade – whitewashed walls with blue and white colored stained-glass windows that shimmer in the sun. Facing that entrance is a wall of photos from the Manuel Taifled Archive which chronicle the history of the temple, Dusia Kreimerman and Miguel Vestel’s wedding – the synagogue’s first – and images of community banquets celebrating Jewish holidays.

Up the first flight of stairs is the synagogue’s main room with intricately painted doomed ceilings, a golden four-postered platform in the middle and the temple’s holiness of holy spaces, the aron ha-kodesh (or Holy Ark) on the eastern wall of the room cloaked in a royal blue curtain, or a parokhet. The Holy texts have long been removed from this sanctuary, but services are still held here every once in a while, like the Hanukkah celebration that Arturo attended this year.

“The majority of the people at the service weren’t Jewish,” he told me, “but we were all very respectful and the Rabbi invited us all pray along with him and join in singing traditional Hebrew songs.”

The church’s Holy Ark and its platform are decorated with carvings of Middle Eastern fruit – pomegranates, grapes and pears – and the deer and mythical grifos important to Jewish tradition. The back upstairs wall is painted with an incredibly peaceful scene from the Garden of Eden (despite that tricky snake you’ll see wrapped around one tree).

This building was the focus of life for the centro‘s Ashkenazim Jews from the time of its founding up until the mid-eighties. For decades before that, the Jewish community had been slowly moving out of Mexico City’s center to more affluent areas like La Condesa, La Roma and Alamos. Fewer and fewer members attended services and the synagogue was eventually left abandoned. It wasn’t until 2008 that a team led by Jorge Abraham organized a restoration of the building and re-inaugurated it as a cultural space.

The synagogue, now a kind of museum, hosts various exhibits on its third floor, once the reserved space for women and children during the orthodox services. When we visited, Hebrew books from the famous Palafoxiana library in Puebla were on display. Texts used by Catholic monks studying the Bible and the life of Christ – just one more way that Jewish and non-Jewish Mexicans are intricately connected.

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