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| Jews and Judaism |
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Jews have been present in El Salvador since the early 19th century, starting with Sephardic Jews and continuing with the arrival of refugees from Europe during World War II. [1] El Salvador has the second largest community in Central America, the majority established in San Salvador, which is the second city with the most Jews in Central America, behind Panama City.
Already since colonial times there is a record of Jews in Latin America, in El Salvador there is a record of several Jewish immigrations from Portugal, after the independence of El Salvador, it is believed that the first Jewish immigrant was Bernardo Haas, born in Alsace. Subsequently, the first documented German Jew arrived in the country in 1888, according to academic Jessica Alpert. France and Central Europe were the main countries of origin of this contemporary Jewish migration. [2] [3]
Business partnership with Catholic conservative landlords during the 1930s hampered Jewish security, but the situation improved after World War II, and many Jews arrived, many thanks to the work of Colonel Castellanos who saved over 40,000 Jews from Central Europe by giving them visas and Salvadoran nationality. [4] [5] On Sept. 11, 1948, El Salvador recognized the State of Israel, and in 1956 the Instituto Cultural El Salvador-Israel was founded.
Jerusalén is a municipality in the La Paz department of El Salvador. It was named by the Cordova family, more specifically by Juan Cordova. They were Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain. Other Sephardic Jews are Escalante's, Figueroas, Figueiras, Perla, Galeas, Galeanos, Gomar, López, Perez, Taher and Taheri among others, some of them became members and founders of the Seventh-day Adventist church in the area of Morazan.
Right before the Salvadoran Civil War, the Jewish community was actively involved in organizing a Zionist Organization, of which Ernesto Liebes and Carlos Bernhard were its main leaders. Members of the community were also involved. According to American writer Jane Hunter in her book Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America, in facilitating the sale of arms from Israel in El Salvador, particularly the sale of 18 Dassault Ouragan jetfighters aircraft in 1973, of which Liebes was perceived by guerrilla groups as the primary representative.
Prior to the Civil War, there were about 300 Jews in El Salvador, most of whom lived in the capital. [6] During the Civil War many Jews left the country after the kidnap and murder of a community leader and Israeli Honorary Consul for cultural relations Ernesto Liebes by the RN-FARN, the armed wing of the RN, one of the groups that formed the FMLN.
The Comunidad Israelita de El Salvador was established in 1944 with a Jewish community center opening in 1945 and a synagogue in 1950 . The country also has several Orthodox synagogues including Beit Israel, San Salvador and Shmaya V'avtalion in the town of Armenia.
Notable Salvadoran Jews include Benjamin Bloom who funded the creation of the San Salvador hospital named after him. It serves all socioeconomic classes of the country with no preferential treatment.
The signing of peace treaties in 1992 led to the return of several Jewish couples with children who had moved elsewhere during the Salvadoran civil war. A new community center and synagogue were inaugurated in the past decade. The Comunidad Israelita de El Salvador holds services on Friday, Shabbat morning, and on holy days. For Pesach, Rosh Hashannah, Sukkot, Channukah, Purim and Yom Haatzmaut the women's committee organizes meals for the community to share and celebrate together.
University students have a Jewish students association, EJES (Estudiantes Judíos de El Salvador), and a Zionist group, FUSLA (Federación de Universitarios Sionistas de Latinoamérica), both of which are active throughout the year. For adults, the community offers different educational classes in Hebrew and other topics of interest. The "Chevra of Women" offers a course in Jewish cooking, and there is a monthly Jewish bulletin called el Kehilatón, which advertises synagogue events. The Noar Shelanu youth movement, to which about 30 children age 8–18 belong, meets weekly. The kindergarten for young children also meets weekly. Two emissaries teach Hebrew and Judaism.
In 2006, El Salvador announced plans to move the embassy to Tel Aviv where the rest of the embassies are located. This met with controversy, with many believing this decision to be under the political influence of the then President, Tony Saca, who is of Christian Arab descent.
More recently, the current President has attracted tourists and investors from around the world including Israel through his country's adoption of Bitcoin alongside the USD.
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This is a demography of the population of El Salvador including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
The history of the Jews in Latin America began with conversos who joined the Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to the continents. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 led to the mass conversion of Spain's Jews to Catholicism and the expulsion of those who refused to do so. However, the vast majority of conversos never made it to the New World and remained in Spain slowly assimilating to the dominant Catholic culture. This was due to the requirement by Spain's Blood Statutes to provide written documentation of Old Christian lineage to travel to the New World. However, the first Jews came with the first expedition of Christopher Columbus, including Rodrigo de Triana and Luis De Torres.
The history of the Jews in Brazil begins during the settlement of Europeans in the new world. Although only baptized Christians were subject to the Inquisition, Jews started settling in Brazil when the Inquisition reached Portugal, in the 16th century. They arrived in Brazil during the period of Dutch rule, setting up in Recife the first synagogue in the Americas, the Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, as early as 1636. Most of those Jews were Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal to the religious freedom of the Netherlands.
The history of the Jews in Mexico began in 1519 with the arrival of Conversos, often called Marranos or "Crypto-Jews", referring to those Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism and that then became subject to the Spanish Inquisition.
The Sephardic Jews that were exiled from Spain and the Mediterranean area in 1492 and 1497, coupled with other migrations dating from the 1700s and during World War II contributed to Dominican ancestry.
The history of the Jews in Costa Rica dates back to the Spanish conquest with the arrival of many Sephardic converts known as Marranos who escaped from the Spanish Inquisition and settled mainly in the city of Cartago and its surroundings. They hid their Jewish past by all means, making even their descendants have no idea of it.
The history of the Jews in Honduras begins in the colonial period, during the proceedings of the Inquisition with the arrival of sephardic Jews to Honduran soil. As of April 2020, in Honduras there are 390 Jews who have gained the Honduran residence. Honduran Jews are able to practice Judaism peacefully and are included in Honduran politics and culture. The Jewish community is primarily concentrated in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, where there are synagogues. Honduras was one of the first countries to recognize the State of Israel, in 1948, and the Jewish community in Honduras has benefited greatly from Israeli aid.
The Israelite Association of Venezuela,, known as Tiferet Israel, founded in the 1920s by Sephardic Jews, is the oldest surviving Jewish organization in Venezuela. An association of Sephardic Jews, it supports a large synagogue in Caracas and counts about 800 families among its members.
The Comunidad Israelita de El Salvador is the only Conservative synagogue in El Salvador.
José Arturo Castellanos Contreras was a Salvadoran army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva during World War II, and in conjunction with a Jewish-Romanian businessman named György Mandl, helped save up to 40,000 Central European Jews, most of them from Hungary, from Nazi persecution by providing them with fake Salvadoran citizenship certificates.
Masorti Olami is the international umbrella organization for Masorti Judaism, founded in 1957 with the goal of making Masorti Judaism a force in the Jewish world. Masorti Olami is affiliated with communities in over 36 countries, representing with partners in Israel and North America close to two million people worldwide, both registered members and non-member identifiers. Masorti Olami builds, renews, and strengthens Jewish life throughout the world, with efforts that focus on existing and developing communities in Europe, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, and Australia. More than 140 kehillot (communities) are affiliated with Masorti Olami in Argentina, Aruba, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Germany, Honduras, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Uganda, Ukraine, Uruguay, the United Kingdom and additionally, more than 600 in Canada and the United States and over 80 communities in Israel. All of Masorti Olami's activities are conducted within the context of the overall Conservative Judaism movement, in close cooperation with its affiliated organizations in North America and Israel. The current executive director is Rabbi Mauricio Balter.
The history of the Jews in Bolivia goes back to the colonial period of Bolivia in the 16th century. In the 19th century, Jewish merchants came to Bolivia, most of them taking local women as wives and founding families that merged into the mainstream Catholic society. This was often the case in the eastern regions of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando, where these merchants came either from Brazil or Argentina.
The Synagogue of the Sephardic Jewish Community is a synagogue in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The history of the Jews in Chile dates back to the arrival of Europeans to the country. Over time, Chile has received several contingents of Jewish immigrants. Currently, the Jewish community in Chile comes mainly from the migrations occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly of Ashkenazi background.
A German Salvadoran is a Salvadoran descendant of German citizens who have adopted the two nationalities or Salvadorans who have German ancestry, there is a record of waves of German immigrants since the 19th century, later with the arrival of German refugees during the Second World War. El Salvador has important relations with Germany
Sephardic Bnei Anusim is a modern term which is used to define the contemporary Christian descendants of an estimated quarter of a million 15th-century Sephardic Jews who were coerced or forced to convert to Catholicism during the 14th and 15th century in Spain and Portugal. The vast majority of conversos remained in Spain and Portugal, and their descendants, who number in the millions, live in both of these countries. The small minority of conversos who did emigrate normally chose to emigrate to destinations where Sephardic communities already existed, particularly to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, but also to more tolerant cities in Europe, where many of them immediately reverted to Judaism. In theory, very few of them would have traveled to Latin America with colonial expeditions, as only those Spaniards who could certify that they had no recent Muslim or Jewish ancestry were supposed to be allowed to travel to the New World. Recent genetic studies suggest that the Sephardic ancestry present in Latin American populations arrived at the same time as the initial colonization, which suggests that significant numbers of recent converts were able to travel to the new world and contribute to the gene pool of modern Latin American populations despite an official prohibition on them doing so. In addition, later arriving Spanish immigrants would have themselves contributed additional converso ancestry in some parts of Latin America.
Comité Central de la Comunidad Judía de México (CCCJM) is the main Jewish community organization in Mexico. The organization has a long-standing cooperative relationship with Tribuna Israelita, an outreach group it first formed in 1944. The CCCJM is also a member of the World Jewish Congress.
The La Comunidad Mexicana Israelita El Neguev "Venta Prieta", better known as the Jewish Community of Venta Prieta is a Jewish community in the city of Pachuca de Soto, Hidalgo, Mexico. The community is made up of people who are descended from B'nei Anusim, also known as Conversos, Jews who were either forcibly converted to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition and later returned to Judaism.
