“Somos judíos”. Así, escuetamente, algunos chuetas de Mallorca, ciudadanos descendientes de judíos conversos, perseguidos hace siglos por la Inquisición, comunican lo que constituye una novedad “histórica”. El gran rabino de la corte Nissim Karelitz, una autoridad ultraortodoxa de Israel, en apenas tres líneas les “reconoce”. Son, según Karelitz, judíos “auténticos” que no necesitan convertirse. “Somos hermanos de los judíos y por tanto judíos”, escribió a sus amigos un pintor mallorquín implicado.

Lea el artículo completo en www.elpais.com

On May 15th, during the celebration of the international activity Night of Museums, Girona organized a gymkhana through its five museums. The participants, 350 people attending distributed in familiar, youth or adult groups, were able to discover in a funny way some of the objects of these museums, which were opened until midnight.

A lady called Irena Sendler has passed away recently.

During 2nd World War, Irena managed to work at the Ghetto of Varsovia as specialist of the sewer system and pipes. As she knew the nazi plans for Jewish people (because she was Deutch), she took the job to take out children from the Ghetto. She hid the children at the bottom of her toolbox and she carried a sacking bag behind her truck (for bigger children). She also had a dog who was trained to bark the nazi soldiers when she entered and leaved the Ghetto. The soldiers didn’t want to go around the dog and the barking hided the noises made by the children. While she did this, she managed to save 2,500 children.

The nazis took her and broke her legs and arms, gaving her a terrible beating.

Irena kept, buried under a tree in her house, a record of all the names of the children she saved. After the war, she tried to find all parents which had survived and tried to get the families together. Most of them were taken to the gas chambers, so she helped the children finding a foster home or being adopted.

In Memoriam – 63 years later

SOURCE: email.

The Network of Spanish Jewish Quarters congratulates the professor Reyes Mate for the National Prize for Literature that he recenly won from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, in the modality of Essay, for his work La herencia del olvido, edited by Errata Naturae.

The professor Manuel Reyes Mate is Doctor in Philosophy by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and by the Wilhelms-Universität of Münster. Today he is the director of the Board of Institute of Philosophy of the CSIC.

You can find more information here.