The plight of descendants of conversos, those Jews forced to publicly recant their religion under threat of execution by the Inquisition, but who continued to practice their religion in secret, has gotten more attention in recent years. I’ve written several stories about Rabbi Rigoberto Emanuel Vinas, a Cuban-born rabbi who teaches classes for anusim, as forced converts are known in Hebrew.

Juan Mejia, was ordained a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in May 2009. After a torturous journey, which involved his rejection by the tiny Jewish community in Bogota and several years of study in Jerusalem, Mejia converted and began training for the rabbinate. Raised as a Catholic in Colombia and educated at Christian schools, Mejia was on his way to becoming a monk when he discovered that his family had Jewish roots. His grandfather would recall men gathering in darkened corners to place towels on their head and pray from a strange book.

Mejia promises to take the type of outreach Vinas has pioneered to a new level. With many anusim shunned when they turn for help to Jewish communities in Latin America — those communities are beset by a “colonial mindset,” Mejia says, and have contempt for the claims to Jewish ancestry of the locals — Mejia hopes to reach them over the Internet. “I fight the Inquisatorial frame of mind,” he says. He already runs a Web site that offers online instruction in Jewish topics. And with his rabbinical training now complete, he hopes to relocate with his wife, also ordained last week at JTS, to the southwest, where many anusim are located.

Mejia believes that only in the United States, with its large, secure, and welcoming Jewish community, can anusim be educated and brought back to their roots. “The anusim revolution starts here,” he says.

The newly formed Global Mashadi Jewish Federation was officially launched on Monday, July 6th. A conference of descendants of 19th-century Iranian Jews forced to convert to Islam and live as secret Jews convened in Jerusalem recently and was attended by leaders and individuals from the Mashadi Jewish communities worldwide. It covered topics such as the alarming assimilation of the Iranian Jewish Community in the United States and Italy, a reaffirmation of the Mashadi traditions, and the creation of a Mashadi archive museum documenting Mashadi history, books and artifacts. Three generations of Mashadi were forced to live as secret Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries, after having been forced to “convert” to Islam by their Iranian neighbors. This is a group with a particularly unique history and series of traditions that they are proud to embrace.
The forced conversions occurred during the period known as “Allah-Dadi,” beginning in 1839 and lasting almost a century. The mission of the new federation, founded by Mr. Bahman Kamali, is to ensure the survival of the Mashadi heritage and preserve it in all locations where Mashadis live. Mashad is Iran’s second largest city and capital of an important province in the northeast region of the country. With the establishment of the State of Israel, many Mashadi Jews immigrated to the Jewish State, and today nearly 15,000 of them live in Israel, comprising the world’s largest Mashadi community. Additional communities were established in New York, Hamburg, London and Milan.

Yad L’Achim has been active for decades in fighting against the decimation of the Jewish Nation, whether it comes in the form of missionaries, Arab men who marry and oppress Jewish women, or the issue of the missing Holocaust orphans. The organization has asked the Vatican to declare that all those who follow him must reveal the truth to their Holocaust orphan children.

It is estimated that thousands of Jewish children were left with Christian monasteries or families by their Jewish parents during the Holocaust, in the hope that they would survive the war. However, many of these children were never claimed, returned or told of their Jewish background. A letter from Pope Pius XII to his representative in Paris on November 20, 1946 verified that he ordered Jewish babies baptized during the Holocaust not to be returned to their parents. The recipient of the letter, Angelo Roncalli, who was later to become Pope John XXIII, often disobeyed these instructions.

Former Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau stated that the Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII refused several requests by Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog to meet with him before and during the war to discuss how the Church could either help save Jewish lives or locate Jewish orphans cared for by Catholic families. Rabbi Lau stated the previous pontiff, Pope John Paul II, told him in 1993 that he had refused to baptize a Jewish child whose parents had died, “because the parents had specifically requested that the child be brought up as a Jew.” However, the same John Paul II did not respond to a request by Ukraine’s Chief Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich to open church archives and reveal the names of Jewish children who were raised as Catholics during World War II.

Yad L’Achim has been working for several years throughout Europe to locate the children. Most of its work is being done in Holland, but much is also being done in other countries. The organization reports that it received positive responses from the Queen of Holland and the Presidents of France and Belgium to their requests to use their influence to have the churches reveal the names of the hidden children.