A World Within: The Lives of Mexico’s Jews

(Originally published in Inside Mexico)

In the hills of Mexico City’s leafy, affluent, north west, Avenida de las Fuentes weaves through the suburb of Tecamachalco, closing around it in a loop. At a junction with Fuente de la Templanza (the Fountain of Restraint Street, sagely running parallel to the Fountain of Youth Street), surrounded by blocks of high-rise, luxury-end apartments, a gymnasium, a hairdresser, a liquor mini-mart and a Subway sandwich store, is what residents refer to as the Distrito Federal’s Little Tel Aviv. “Come by on a Friday night or Saturday morning and the streets are filled with Jews, all walking to Temple,” says Shauna Leff, an American Jew who’s lived in Tecamachalco for the past two years with her Mexican husband, Jorge. “You see all the religious types – the men in hats, the women in wigs. You wouldn’t know you’re in Mexico.”

Across the avenue, the Kosher Palace gleams, with its white, grated storefront and blaring Israeli music. You can find on its packed shelves: spices from Israel, halva, Israeli chocolate spread, New York pretzels, football-size jars of pickles, frozen schnitzel, felafel, and kosher everything, from Skippy peanut butter to baby food. A little further up Templanza is the Shuky Centre, a multi-storey kosher food hall with separate sections for meat and milk (in accordance with Jewish law), schwarma, sushi and kosher Mexican food, with a deli stocking Syrian lavash bread, kosher chickens and challot, the traditional plaited bread eaten on the Sabbath. A notice board advertises religious talks by a visiting rabbi, kosher cooking classes and entertainment for bar mitzvahs and weddings.

As we drive around in Shauna’s fire engine red Jeep, she points out other Jewish landmarks – temples, schools, where to get the best felafel. “This is where Jewish people come for their services,” she says, as we pass the Sinai Deli and Bakery, Sastreria Saul, butcher shops with Hebrew kosher signs, and kosher taquerias, camouflaged between the Mexican main street staples: florists, grocery stores and altars to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The schools are huge, gated compounds, unsignposted, with security guards and electric wire fences. The synagogues and temples – there are at least six in Tecamachalco – are unmarked. Many Jewish communities, after centuries of persecution, prefer not to draw attention to themselves.

In fact, if you don’t know where to look, much of Jewish Mexico remains hidden from view. In researching this story, I visited several synagogues concealed from the street, including one where members punched a secret code into the door to enter, a kosher mini mart without street frontage, buried in the bowels of a building, and a Jewish study centre tucked away inside a rabbi’s house.

Again and again, a word used to describe the Jewish community in Mexico, by Jews and non-Jews alike, was cerrada – closed. “Rich,” was another. “They live in Polanco,” one taxi driver told me, speaking of the swanky suburb to the south of Mexico City. “They support each other, help each other out,” was another lay opinion. As with most stereotypes, I found elements of truth in all of the above. But I also found a community that’s surprisingly varied, made up of several communities, each with a different style and flavour. Rather than closed, I found Jews I met to be welcoming. I was invited to eat cholent (a traditional slow-cooked stew) at a Kiddush after a Saturday synagogue service, to join in several Shabbat dinners (which I regretfully had to turn down), and even a Jewish women’s cooking class: a frenzied extravaganza in a Polanco synagogue, in which 300 religious women, most in long skirts and wigs, sat before a giant stage and screens learning how to concoct kosher delights such as “Extraodinary Rice” and home-made challot. I’m not sure how much this welcome had to do with me being Jewish (and therefore accepted into the tribe), or was a Jewish adaptation of the Mexican standard “mi casa es tu casa.” If the latter, it was one of many mexicanisms that the Jewish community here has adopted, ranging from mariachis at weddings to gefilte fish a la Veracruzana.

I also discovered that the Mexican Jewish community is unique to other Jewish communities around the world in several specific ways. According to the Central Committee of the Jewish Community in Mexico, the 40,000-strong community (the majority live in Mexico City, with smaller communities in Guadalajara, Monterrey and Tijuana) has one of the lowest assimilation rates in the world. More than 85 percent of its members marry other Jews, compared with less than 50 percent in Europe and the US. More than 90 percent of Jewish children attend Jewish schools, another statistic to make the rabbinates of other Diaspora communities drool.

The Jewish community is divided into separate communities, according to place of origin – a system particular to Mexico. There are two Syrian communities, from Aleppo and Damascus, an Ashkenazi community from Eastern Europe, a Sephardi community from Turkey, Greece and the Balkan States, and a conservative community started by immigrants from the US. The Syrian community is known to be more religious, whereas the Sephardi is generally seen as less so, meaning different communities often don’t mix, though this is seen to be changing. Unlike other Jewish communities, “in Mexico 95% of the families are affiliated to a community,” explains Mauricio Lulka, director general of the Central Committee, located inside an unmarked, yellow compound in Las Lomas. “It doesn’t matter if you’re observant, or you’re liberal, or you’re secular, or you even are atheist, you belong to a community in accordance with the origin of where your forebears came from.”

The communities provide services that reach into every area of members’ lives, from schools, to synagogues, to cemeteries, ambulance services, welfare assistance, and even anti-kidnap response. Uniting the different communities is the Central Committee, and the Jewish Sports Centre, an enclosed, 10,000 square meter mini-city that’s provided tennis courts, football fields, dance studios, ball rooms, Olympic gym and swimming facilities, classes and courses for Mexican Jews for over 50 years. The Jewish community’s infrastructure is so complete, it’s like a parallel universe co-existing alongside Mexico’s mainstream one.

“I knew Jews in Toronto, but it was nothing like here,” says Heidi Carter, a blonde, 35-year-old Canadian whose husband is Jewish. She turns blue corn quesadillas on her stove. “Here, my whole world is Jewish.” When Carter came to Mexico for the first time fifteen years ago, she fell in love – not just with Mexico, but, like so many foreigners, with a Mexican. But the eighteen-year-old’s first love was star-crossed: he was Jewish, and after several years of dating in secret and hiding from his disapproving parents, the relationship ended. Ten years later, divorced from his Jewish wife, her ex sought her out. Today they’re married and living with their small daughter in Mexico City. Her husband doesn’t care if she’s Jewish or not (been there done that), but she decided to convert anyway, for her daughter’s sake.

“I want to give my daughter that sense of that she belongs, a sense of comfort and community, and then she can make her own choices when she’s older,” says Heidi, who was raised as a non-religious Protestant. “If she grows up and later decides she wants to become Buddhist, well that’s a decision for her.”

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The first Jews arrived in Mexico with Hernan Cortes, though were believed to have been conversos – Spanish Jews forced to convert to Catholicism to escape the Inquisition. Most of them married into Mexican families, became devout Catholics, and lost their links with Judaism. The majority of Jews who make up the community today are descendents of immigrants who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly from the Middle East (Sephardi Jews) and Eastern Europe (Ashkenazis). Jews fled pogroms in Russia and Romania in the 1880s, followed by a large wave of immigration following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. Finally, a wave of immigrants fled Nazi persecutions in Europe during World War II. Many were trying to get to America, but were forced to change course when the US tightened borders in 1924. While some migrants set up communities in smaller Mexican towns and cities, the vast majority went straight from the port of Veracruz to Mexico City, where they made the Centro Historico their home.

On a recent sunny morning, the Calle Justo Sierra bustled just like any other street in the Distrito’s historic downtown. Bells from the domed Loreto church peeled in competition with cumbia music blaring from pirate CD stalls. Peseros chugged down the too-narrow street, along with water peddlers and men delivering huge, brightly colored bolts of fabric. Clothes shops lined the streets, selling thongs, cheap t-shirts and dresses displayed on mannequins hanging from the ceiling, alongside haberdashery stores crammed with shoelaces, ribbons, buttons and lace – left over from a time when this was the heart of the textile trade, and home to the Jewish traders who lived and worked it.

Two old synagogues share the same block. Both look like any other commercial building, imperceptible save for a Star of David on the wall of one – built in 1918 by the Sephardi Jews who came from Syria – and on the door of the other – built in 1941 by the Ashkenazi Jews who came from Eastern Europe. The Syrian synagogue still comes alive each day at 2pm, when a group of Jews who work downtown say midday prayers and eat a kosher lunch. (Inside, their phone numbers are penciled on a columns, in case they lack the ten men to make a minyan, the minimum number necessary to conduct Jewish prayers and can call in extras.)

Passing a storefront offering tortas two for $30, on entering the Ashkenazi synagogue, the red brick, neocolonial façade unexpectedly gives way to a courtyard, behind which a separate, grander building stands, with arched windows and a painted green and blue ceiling of stars and doves. There’s a separate section of seating for women upstairs. On the back wall is a mural depicting the garden of Eden. No longer an active synagogue, its being restored, with plans to build a museum. Mexican artists are busy at work, restoring the marble-look finish on the columns, and sanding down the woodwork carvings on the bimah, or platform. “I love this place,” says Monica Unikel, who runs Jewish tours of the historic centre, of the building that was copied from a photo of a Lithuanian synagogue. “You’re not in Mexico. You’re two blocks from the Zocalo, and you’re in Lithuania.”

“All this area was Jewish,” says Monica, whose grandparents arrived from Russia and Poland in the 1920s and went into the sweater business, indicating on the map a tight grid of streets several blocks north and east of the Zocalo. “Hundreds of Jewish families used to live in this area.” She points to Jesus Maria street. “You can joke, how could the Jews be in a street called Jesus Maria? But this is the street where they had their Jewish grocery stores, where they sold dill pickles, herrings, where there were kosher butchers, bread shops where they sold European bread, boarding houses and cheap restaurants for immigrants.”

When the Jews arrived, most of them went into selling, usually textiles. They would often go from door to door hawking stockings and socks from boxes worn across their chests, upgrading to market stalls, then stores, and eventually small businesses and even factories. “The majority lived in tenement houses, with a patio, and rooms around the courtyard,” says Monica. Jewish names were unpronounceable to Mexicans, so many changed them. Faeger became Fanny, Masha became Maria.

“Life in the Centro was very austere. People saved every centavo. Those who wanted to keep kosher used to go to the Merced and buy their chickens live. In the market there was a kosher butcher who killed the chickens. They charged 10 centavos. If they wanted the chicken feathered, it cost another 5 centavos. But many didn’t want to spend that extra 5 centavos, they wanted to save money, so they plucked them at home.”

Many were able to prosper quickly in Mexico, and by the 1930s started moving to the then up-and-coming suburbs of La Roma and La Condesa. The unofficial language spoken in the Parque Mexico – which still boasts a giant sculpture of Albert Einstein’s head, with the inscription ‘A gift from the Isreali community’ – in those times was Yiddish, Monica jokes. Then in the 50s, 60s and 70s the Jews started moving further afield, to Polanco and to Las Lomas, Interlomas, Bosques and Tecamachalco, where the majority are now based. They expanded into other professions – with second, third and fourth generations represented in everything from politics to show business.

“If you compare Mexico to any other place where Jews live it’s a little paradise,” says Jessica Kreimerman Lew, who runs Casa Luna, an interfaith community centre in La Condesa. “They came with the idea that anybody who works can do well, and they did very well, and they had the religious freedom many could only have dreamed of in the countries they came from.” Kreimerman lives in Condesa, where a small but still pulsing heart of Judaism persists. At Acapulco 70 there’s a Jewish museum, archives and synagogue with a kosher deli downstairs, and there are several small, orthodox synagogues inside houses on Amsterdam Street. On the corner of Montes de Oca Street and Parral, among the restaurants, boutiques and Diego Luna’s trendy new café, there’s a small synagogue where Kreimerman takes me one sunny Saturday morning for the weekly Sabbath prayers.

Inside, before a blue-velvet curtained arc and brass menoras, Jewish candelabras, a man in a black and white prayer shawl stands swaying and praying, his soft voice running over the Hebrew words smoothly. The women sit in a small reserve of seats at the back closed in by curtains. Beyond the curtain two old men sit mumbling and gossiping in Spanish, every now and then stopping to say “omein” (=amen) in thick Yiddish accents. “Those two old grumps always sit in the corner making noise,” Kreimerman laughs.

After, she takes me to the Kiddush, where two long trestles are set up with plastic tablecloths, one for men, one for the women. On the table are kugguleh, a traditional Jewish sweet bread marbled with chocolate, potato chips, eggplant dip, boiled eggs, sardines, a bottle of vodka, kosher wine, grape juice and diet coke. “They usually have tequila,” says Jessica. There’s supposed to be cholent, the slow-cooked traditional Sabbath dish, but somebody forgot to take it out of the fridge, so it’s cold. There’s also lemon and chile, another example of the syncretism that sees Mexican Jews eating guacamole on their bagels and pozole alongside matzo ball soup, blintzes alongside quesadillas. “I see us as seeds that take on characteristics of the soil,” Kreimerman says. “Jewish life here takes on the Mexican flavour.”

Several synergies between Mexico and Judaism have allowed the community to flourish here, such as an emphasis on family, says Emilio Betech, who, along with Enrique Chmelnik and Ricardo Silva runs a weekly radio program about Jewish culture called “El Aleph”, broadcast on Radio Red. “It’s been very, very easy living in Mexico. Mexico is a very welcoming society. Mexicans are very proud people but I find them to be increasingly curious and tolerant, and very fair when it comes to weighing their patriotism with other cultures,” he says adding that his program receives calls from non-Jews wanting to know about everything from the laws of kashrut to whether or not Jews are allowed to keep pets.

According to the Tribuna Israelita, the analysis and opinion branch of the Central Committee responsible for monitoring anti-semitism, the incidence of discrimination in Mexico is low compared to other countries (they were unable to give me figures), a stark contrast to other, predominantly Catholic places in Latin America with large Jewish populations, like Argentina, which has suffered several high-profile anti-semitic attacks, including the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992. The main expression of anti-semitism in Mexico, as perceived by the Tribuna, takes the form of anti-Israel protests, such as those in the press and outside the Israeli embassy during Israel’s strikes on Gaza earlier this year.

On the contrary, there’s a phenomenon of philosemitism, or interest and appreciation regarding Jewish people, in Mexico. “They’re seen as an elite. Many Mexicans want to be Jewish because they’re seen as foreigners,” says Karina Morales Martinez, a Spanish teacher who lives in La Roma. “The classic idea of a Jew in Mexico is of someone blonde with blue eyes,” an odd reversal of the traditional racial Jewish stereotype of people with dark skin, dark eyes and big noses.

Several people I spoke to commented that the Jews have probably benefited from a Mexican stratification of society along lines of class and race, prejudices the Jewish community itself is often accused of, though no one would be quoted as saying so. Several times a source, alluding to an unspoken rule that Jews never speak badly of fellow Jews to the ‘outside world,’ leaned forward to whisper, “I’m only telling you this because you’re Jewish.”

(Jewish Tours: www.jewishtours.com.mx)