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The Jews of Melilla
A modest
placard beside a storefront door announces the existence of the Beth Minzi
Synagogue in Torrremolinos on Spain’s Costa del Sol.
It is a Friday night in late February, and some twenty men,
a few fathers with young sons, and three women assemble in the
small sanctuary
while the Moroccan-born rabbi/cantor, natty in a trim black beard, long
gray coat, and black homburg, begins the Sephardic service.
During the
next two hours, men in the congregation ascend the altar one at a
time to sing a portion in Arabic-sounding melodies until a spirited
rendition of Leha
Dodi (Welcome the Bride of the Sabbath) concludes the service.
“You should come tomorrow morning when we
get a much bigger crowd,” says Victor Alberto Pinto, a youthful
businessman, as we exit onto the quiet darkened street. “Ashkenazim as
well. There
is so much opportunity with the tourist industry that Jews keep moving
here. The situation is fantastic.
It’s hard to believe that 500 years ago the Spaniards threw out
the Jews.”
He pauses for a moment, then adds: “But do
you know there is a part of Spain where the Jews were never thrown out,
where my ancestors have lived for centuries?
I have an apartment here in Torremolinos because of my business,
but my home is still there.”
Pinto gestures southward where a block away,
the Mediterranean tide is just beginning to recede.
His birthplace, the city of Melilla, lies directly across the sea
on the African coast.
A refuge for Jews fleeing the expulsion and subsequent Inquisition,
Melilla is a little known yet unique part of the Spanish-Jewish story that
continues to unfold.
It is a strange place, a small port city in
the arc of a deep harbor edged with wide white beaches, a modern marina,
and steep, seemingly impenetrable cliffs.
Ramparts on the heights of the old city overlook the sea to the
north and the new city to the south where a neat arrangement of Art
Moderne buildings, typical Spanish plazas, and two shimmering municipal
parks in the compact downtown give way to a sprawling urbanity.
At its highest point, Melilla’s luxurious parador
(government-sponsored hotel) provides a panoramic view of the coastline,
the metropolis, and the Moroccan expanse beyond that runs into a rim of
mountains across the horizon. The ambiance is modern, cosmopolitan; yet an
aura of intrigue hovers around sudden corners and down narrow walled
lanes. Casablanca, Nador, Marakeesh are but short flights away.
Melilla is a mini-metropolis wedged in
between the sea and the wilderness, with one foot in Europe, and the other
in Africa, and a place almost entirely devoted to commerce.
Except for the siesta hours of the afternoon, its shop-lined
streets bustle with pedestrian traffic: Spaniards in fashionable European
garb, Moroccans in floor-length caftans and hoods, old men loitering
against buildings, looking for the occasional tourist with American
dollars to change, unkempt children who sneak across the Moroccan border
each morning and spend the day begging passersby's for spare coins.
Though the city can easily be traversed by foot, its thoroughfares
are crowded with Mercedes Benz.
Melilla is a free port.
With no tax, luxury cars are an irresistible bargain –even if
there is no place to go.
In 1492 when the Jews of Spain were looking
for a place to go, some crossed the Mediterranean to North Africa where
the first stop was Melilla.
It had been a strategic site since ancient times, a terminal
station for desert caravans traveling up the timeless roads from the
south. It
was also a place abundant in honey (in Arabic, Melilla
means sweet; it is thought the city was named for the many bees in the
region) and salt.
Protected by forests, the early settlers lived in little
communities, or cabalas.
Five years after the expulsion, Medina Sidon, an Andalusian
nobleman of Jewish origin, established
a Spanish fortress in Melilla, (marking the beginning of Spain’s
expansion along the north African coast), and a number of
Jews moved into the city that grew around it.
In 1535, the half-Jewish king of Debdu, a city 38 kilometers to the
south, journeyed to Granada to obtain a promise of protection from the
Spanish monarch.
Subsequently, fifteen hundred Jews followed him to Melilla. Graves
dating back to 1565 are still there.
During the centuries that followed, depending
on the political situation of a given period, Jews moved out of the
Spanish stronghold into neighboring little kingdoms, picking up the
language and customs of the Berbers and Arabs they lived among, and back
into Melilla when times were propitious, all the while fiercely
maintaining their Sephardic heritage.
Fleeing anti Semitic outbreaks in Morocco in 1889, a sizable
population of Jews found welcome sanctuary in the little city on the sea.
In modern times, Melilla became a haven for
Jewish refugees from Nazi aggression.
Although still recovering from the Spanish Civil War (which began
in Melilla), it provided a Spanish passport, and safe passage to those
Jews who crossed the border from France into Spain and made their way down
the coast and across the Mediterranean to North Africa.
“The Jews owe Franco a big thank you,”
said Leon Benjumin who headed the Cultural and Educational Department of
Melilla’s Jewish community several years ago.
“Hitler planned to move from Alexandria across North Africa
destroying the Jews in all the coastal cities, but Franco would not allow
it. It
is one of history’s ironies that this Fascist dictator is responsible
for saving so many Jewish lives.”
A
soft-spoken scholar, rabbi and scribe of early middle age, Benjumin
traces
his family’s roots in North Africa to a century before the
expulsion. “According to our oral traditions, our ancestors left Seville
in 1391,” he says.
“They lived in Debdu for many generations until early in this
century when my grandparents moved to Melilla.”
Benjumin himself has moved to Malaga, the
Costa del Sol city whose Jewish history is aptly commemorated by a statue
of the ninth century Jewish poet-philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabriol, donated
by its American creator to this city of the poet’s birth in 1970. Set in
a small plaza before Malaga’s Juderia, the bronze’s elongated, sad
aspect seems to confirm the tragic history of Spanish Jewry.
Which
makes the story of Melilla that much more remarkable.
“There
is no other place in Spain like Melilla,” Benjumin says. “There was no
Inquisition here.
It has always been like a free zone.
People were left alone to live as Jews and not Conversos. As a
result, there has been a continuous Jewish presence here for more than 500
years.”
Chaim
Morelli Levi, a multi-lingual accountant whose grandmother lived among the
Berbers, speaks the Berber language Chelka
fluently. “There are about 1000 Jews in Melilla today,” he tells us in
equally fluent English. “We all know each other. We have twelve functioning synagogues.
Some extended families have their own synagogues.”
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The Interior of the synagogue (one of many) in
Melilla, Spanish Morocco. Photo by Harvey Frommer |
The synagogue that serves the Benarroch
family, one of the oldest and most distinguished in Melilla, is housed in
a small apartment building across from the Parque de Melilla, a vertical
swath of greenery and porticos, shaded by towering palms and criss-crossed
with paths of intricately designed stonework.
The sanctuary, up on the second floor, is a high ceilinged room
with walls of pale pink, ceramic tiled floors of gold and green, and
wooden benches
that face a central abimah.
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A little alcove behind a latticed wall forms the women’s section.
Its walls are filled with photographs of venerable Sephardic rabbis
and, somewhat incongruously, the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Despite its modest size, the Benarroch synagogue has six Torahs.
Leon Benjuim takes one out, lays it gently on the reader’s desk,
unwraps and opens it with great care.
“This one,” he says, “was written in Debdu.”
It was in this synagogue that Simi Mandel
spent the High Holy Days and Shabbats of her postwar childhood.
Today an American citizen who lives with her Brooklyn-born husband
in suburban Connecticut, Simi recalls how she and her sisters accompanied
their mother to the Benarroch synagogue while her father, a Cohen, went
alone to his.
“There were thirty synagogues in Melilla that we could have gone
to,” Simi says, “but Mommy’s uncle had built this one in 1921, and
this is where she felt we belonged.
“My
mother’s father was a Benarroch.
My father’s ancestors had lived in the mountains behind Melilla
for generations. Only my maternal grandmother came from someplace else,
and that was Ceuta (the second city of Spanish Morocco, on the western tip
of North Africa) which was the same society.
“Melilla was a dreamland, isolated from the
rest of the world,” she adds.
“There was a calm, a peacefulness, a charm that didn’t exist
anywhere else. I didn’t know what the world was until much later in my
life. We
had such a strong community.
The Jews were successful merchants.
Some, like my uncle Carlos Benarroch, had
studied law.
But they couldn’t practice so they ran the little stores.
Still, if there was prejudice, we didn’t know it.
We were all in our own self contained world.
“When I was growing up, we were a group of
maybe 15 Jewish kids, about the same age. It was like having that many
brothers and sisters.
We spent holidays together, we went to the park, to the beach
together.
There was such camaraderie, such respect, and not a bit of
jealousy. We’d get together in the afternoon and walk up and down
L’Avenida.
It was closed to cars.
The girls would walk by the boys, hoping they would stop and talk
to us. We’d play in the park, throwing stones at the palm trees to knock
off the dates.
My mother would yell at my sisters and me to stop: ‘The dates
will soil your clothes.
We have plenty of dates in the house.’
But it was more fun to knock them off the trees.
“In those years, you felt like you were in
Spain surrounded by Arabs,”
Simi continues. “But you didn’t see them. You had nothing to do
with them.
We went to a convent school about ten blocks from where we lived
simply because it was the best school in the city. The public schools were
for the poor children.
But we didn’t associate with the Catholic kids.
My mother felt if
you made friends with a Catholic girl, she might have a brother or
a cousin.
She kept us apart.
Each group stayed apart in those days: the Hindus, the Christians,
the Arabs, and the Jews.”
As a boy, Mario Carcienti was part of Simi
Mandel’s crowd.
Today he owns and operates a dry goods/hardware store and is the
president of Melilla’s Jewish community.
At the Jewish center, he delights in showing off
a nursery school classroom where mini Torahs painted by little
hands are suspended from clothespins on a line like so many shirts to dry.
Yet he reveals
a sensibility much changed since he and
Simi were children.
“Our
primary preoccupation today is not with the Jewish population but with the
fate of Melilla as a whole.
It is a unique place.
There are no differences among the people here. Christian, Moslem,
Jewish –we all get along.”
His words are born out by our translator and
guide, Rachid Chilali, a dynamic young man, the son of a Moroccan mother
with Egyptian, Arabic and Italian roots and a Berber father. The irony of
a Moslem helping an American Jewish couple understand the Jewish history
of his Spanish city while he is learning about a civilization and culture
that fascinates him is not lost upon Rachid.
“I feel akin to the Jews,” he says.
“They have had to move from place to place, to work very hard.
They have come out from the Holocaust.
If a person has problems, it’s easy to see your spirit reflected
in the Jewish experience. For me, they are an inspiration.”
Rachid accompanied us and Leon Benjuim on a
tour of the Jewish cemetery.
Like many places in Melilla, and indeed throughout Spain, it lies
beyond a closed door on a busy commercial street.
The wooden portal bearing the number 10 opens to a narrow alley.
To the left is Melilla’s largest synagogue.
“We used to call it the Bride’s Synagogue because all the
weddings took place there,” Simi says.
Directly ahead, the alley opens up to one of Melilla’s newer
residential neighborhoods.
An avenue bordered with brick walkways and small apartment houses
climbs a hill that ends in a great clearing.
There stands a dome-roofed church and both the Christian and Jewish
burial grounds.
Accessed through a small building with a
sacramental washstand, the Jewish cemetery is an orderly arrangement of
above ground tombs, each with a box at the foot for memorial candles.
Leon paused meditatively before the grave of his granduncle who had
been the Chief Rabbi of Morocco.
He gestured to a white stone wall some ten feet away.
“That is where
the Jewish cemetery ends,” he said.
“On the other side are Catholic graves.
There is another, older cemetery just outside the old city’s
wall. That
was from the time the Jews lived within the old city, and the dead had to
be buried outside the city wall.”
The cemetery is high enough to provide a
vista of the Moroccan wilderness, where in the distance, the faint
outlines of a road can made out.
Simi Mandel explains its origins.
“There was a rabbi who lived in Arab territory on the other side
of the mountains.
He was very sick and very old and prayed that when he died, he
would have a Jewish burial.
According to the story, upon his death, God sent a big stone to
mark his grave.
Every year, the Jews from Melilla would make a pilgrimage by foot,
going through the wilderness and over the mountain.
“Some decades ago, a group of men from
Melilla went to Caracas, Venezuela.
All became very wealthy, and each returned to Melilla to find a
wife. There are such roots. They invested in synagogues in the city; one
paid for the Jewish Center’s construction. One of them went even
further.
He had a road built through the mountains to the burial site of
this rabbi so that the men who visit the grave can drive there.
“What drew them back to
Melilla?” Simi
wonders.
“Was it the privileged life we had?
Franco was in power; the government was totally repressive.
But for us children, uninvolved in politics, it was an ideal way of
life. You
didn’t have fear of anyone bothering
you.
You went to stores and everybody knew you.
It was hi!
You took what you wanted.
And if they didn’t have it, they’d bring it tomorrow.
“We had a couple living in who took care of
everything.
We had a seamstress making our clothes who practically lived with
us. The
shoemaker would make shoes for my mother. My father had a chauffeur drive
him around.
He was very generous. He’d come home for lunch, and there would
be a group of people waiting to see him who needed things; he never turned
anyone away. On Sundays, he’d take me to the seafood restaurants.
When they had a good catch, they’d call him.
My father was the only male in his family and carried the name
Cohen, which is a priestly name.
He felt he was important, special.
We were made to feel we were important too.”
The
Melilla of Simi’s memory, an oasis of a well-to-do Jewish sub-culture
largely isolated from the outside society, no longer exists.
Today its Jews have moved into the mainstream of a city that prides
itself on tolerance, on the easy interaction among its four ethnic groups:
Catholic, Hindu, Moslem, and Jewish.
At the same time, the open society of the
post-Franco years, new commercial and educational opportunities, and a
welcoming environment throughout Spain have lured many of Melilla’s
Jews, like Leon Benjumin, to larger cities. Others have emigrated to
Israel, the United States, and Venezuela.
Simi Mandel is a case in point. “My mother felt Melilla was too
small a place for me and my sisters, that we needed to be exposed to other
people and a larger community,” she says.
Accordingly when Simi was a teenager, she was sent to school in
Tangiers and then Barcelona.
When she married, she moved to America.
“After my father retired, my parents joined
me in the States,” Simi adds. “But my father did not like it.
He felt he wasn’t given the respect he had been used to so they
returned to Spain.
Only to Barcelona, not Melilla.
My sister and other family members had moved there by then.
Now with my father gone, Mommy talks of relocating to Jerusalem.
But she still longs for Melilla.”
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A unique place and a Jewish Community in Spain
for over 500 years. Melilla in Spanish Morocco. Photo by
Harvey Frommer. |
Mario Carcienti is concerned about the future
of the Jewish community he heads. Nevertheless, he understands the pull of
the outside world.
“We have no university in Melilla.
Naturally
the young people go to the larger cities for their education,” he
says. “Not
all come back.
But we have young families committed to living here. Our population
has stabilized over the past decade. There are eighty children at the
Jewish day school.”
Those Jews who choose to remain in Melilla
today resist the pull of the outside world.
They treasure their collective memory of sanctuary; they are
committed to perpetuating a presence now more than 500 years old.
Yet they are aware that while the Jewish population of Melilla is
static, in cities across the sea, it is growing.
“When the Jews were expelled from Malaga, they came here.
Now they are going back to Malaga, Torremolinos, Marbella,”
Carcienti concedes.
“Here it’s old, there it’s new, resurgent.”
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Parador de Melilla: http://www.parador.es/cgi-bin/tes?en&melilla
Photos by Harvey Frommer
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About the
Authors: Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer are a wife and husband team who
successfully bridge the worlds of popular culture and traditional scholarship.
Co-authors of the critically acclaimed interactive oral histories It Happened in
the Catskills, It Happened in Brooklyn, Growing Up Jewish in America, It
Happened on Broadway, and It Happened in Manhattan, they teach what they
practice as professors at Dartmouth College.
They are also travel writers who specialize in luxury properties and fine dining
as well as cultural history and Jewish history and heritage in the United
States, Europe, and the Caribbean. (More
about these authors.)
You can contact the Frommers at:
Email: myrna.frommer@Dartmouth.EDU
(myrna frommer)
Email: harvey.frommer@dartmouth.edu
Web:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~frommer/travel.htm.
This Article is Copyright © 1995 - 2008 by Harvey and Myrna Frommer. All rights
reserved worldwide.
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