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A Crypto-Jew’s path of discovery

Hadassah Grove (Shari Valenta)FOR Hadassah Grove, mystery and enigma were lifelong companions.

A striking Catholic icon always occupied a prominent place by the threshold of her homes, yet she and her siblings were strictly forbidden from going to church.

Besides a vague instruction to pray to “the one G-d” on their own initiative, the children were given no religious instruction.

Occasionally, a Christmas tree would appear in the family’s living room, yet her mother preferred to give small presents over the course of eight days, instead of one particular morning. The word “Chanukah,” however, was never spoken in the home.

Unusual rituals were practiced.


Her mother would often light candles on Friday nights, furtively, away from the sight of her children; Mexican serapes would veil mirrors whenever a death occurred in the family; children were instructed to sweep floors from the corners of a room toward the center, without any explanation.

Her mother and aunts occasionally spoke in a strange Spanish dialect they called Ladino which contained words that other Spanish speakers had never heard. The children picked up some of it, and occasionally used it themselves.

When her brother died tragically at a young age, both a cross and a menorah were chiseled into his tombstone.

Years later, for reasons he was never able to fully explain, another brother suddenly moved to Israel. He announced that he had converted to Judaism.

When Grove was a teenager, she found herself in what might be called a state of spiritual malnourishment and confusion. She secretly began attending Christian churches with friends’ families.

Today, an articulate and soft-spoken woman of 46, Grove tries to put into words how it felt to be spiritually lost.

“I knew there was something going on,” she says. “You have to understand that my mom was very, very secretive. What went on in the home stayed in the home. You didn’t discuss family issues.

“I went to Catholic churches, when she didn’t know about it. I went to non-denominational churches. I was going here and there, trying to find out who I was. Where do I fit?  What is the truth?”

THAT truth didn’t come until she was a grandmother.

An artist by vocation, Grove grew up in Denver, the daughter of a Hispanic woman with a Roman Catholic background who raised her children as a single mother.

She is a descendant of a Hispanic family with long roots in Colorado and New Mexico — the San Luis Valley, Trinidad, Taos, Mora County, Las Vegas and Albuquerque. Her family tree can be partially traced and connected to the region as far back as 1650, when Spain still ruled what is now the American Southwest.

All that ancient history is an integral part of the secret that Grove sought to unravel.

The solution began in earnest only four years ago with what appeared to be the most mundane of occurrences — a picture falling from the wall.

But not just any picture.

This was the icon that had always occupied a place near the front door of  the homes in which Grove’s family lived. Six or seven inches long, painted on wood in time-faded hues, it is a classic Catholic image, depicting Mary, Mary Magdalene and others removing Jesus from the cross.

Ever since she could remember, Grove says, her mother would kiss the picture whenever she entered the house, concentrating on that part of the painting that depicted Jesus.

“This is a very, very old picture,” she says. “I’ve never known us to be without it. I’ve always known this to exist in my family. My mother got it from her mother, who had received it from her mother. I’m thinking it goes back even further than the 19th century.

“When it fell, I happened to be there. It fell by itself and I picked it up and my mother was upset. When she gets upset, she speaks Ladino, pretty fast. She cried. She said a few words that were not very appropriate.”

Grove saw that there was something on the back of the painting — an old rusted latch that had broken off when it fell. It had concealed a cavity that had been carved into the wood. Inside was a tiny rolled-up scroll. Most Jews would recognize it as a mezuzzah.

Grove recognized it too, since she had seen mezuzzahs on the doorposts of some of her Jewish friends, “but I couldn’t understand what the connection was, with my mother having a mezuzzah and being raised Catholic.

“Then it kind of registered for me, as far as why she was always kissing this part of the picture.”

She saw that the place her mother always kissed — apparently, the image of Jesus — was directly over the cavity in the back which concealed the tiny Hebrew scroll.

Although Grove was already starting to put the mystery together, her mother still refused to elaborate on the enigmatic picture.

So Grove called her mother’s sister, asking her aunt whether she had any idea what the ancient icon and scroll actually signified.

“I had a very strong feeling inside of me that there were a lot of things that my mother wasn’t telling. And my aunt knew everything. She was the eldest and knew everything that was going on.”

Before telling her story, Grove’s aunt asked whether she was sitting down.

“Then she told me, what I didn’t know was that we all come from what are known as Crypto Jews,” she says.

“I had heard of that but I didn’t understand fully what it meant. I knew that crypto means secretive.”

Her aunt told Grove about the Spanish, and later Mexican, inquisitions that took place between two and and five centuries ago; that Jews were often given the choice of conversion or death; that many of those Jews chose to outwardly convert to Catholicism but sought to secretly maintain their Jewish beliefs; that many of these Jews fled to Mexico, and then further north, as the persecutions continued.

She also told Grove that some of the covert rituals of those persecuted Jews lived on long after they had died; that in places like New Mexico and Colorado some of those rituals survive even today.

“I cried on the phone,” Grove recalls. “I couldn’t believe this. What do I do with this information?

“Then my aunt told me that we didn’t really have to continue carrying this on. But I said, ‘Why can’t I bring this out? This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.’”

A month later, Grove’s aunt passed away. She had suffered from leukemia and kept it a secret from everybody in the family.

But the information she imparted to her niece would not be forgotten or simply relegated to the status of an interesting family legend.

“I started researching,” Grove says. “I wanted to know more. I wanted to know where we came from.”

GROVE started to put things together.

She read books and articles about Crypto Jews and met with Dr. Stanley Hordes of the University of New Mexico, one of the earliest and most prolific scholars on the subject.

Memories of her own past began to make sense.

She learned that the tradition of sweeping from four corners is an old Jewish custom, meant to signify the eventual gathering of the Jews from the four corners of the globe; that covering mirrors at times of mourning is still practiced; that the stew her mother invariably made on Friday nights for Saturday consumption was a Mexican variation of the traditional Jewish cholent Shabbos meal.

“We just thought that mom was really weird and she’s flipping out,” she says of these rituals her mother insisted on performing.

Armed with what her aunt had told her, and what she had learned on her own, Grove finally confronted her mother about her long silence.

The answer that came was a sad one. Her mother told her that she had told the story of her family’s Jewish past to Grove’s older brother, who died by his own hand in 1977. She believed that the burden of that knowledge, coupled with other personal issues that were troubling him, may have contributed to his suicide.

The secrecy, however, probably has far older roots as well, Grove believes.

When her older brother died, for example, his tombstone bore both a cross and a menorah. Her mother explained that the cross was meant to conceal the Jewishness that was symbolized by the menorah.

“She thought it would hide the Judaism in the Catholicism,” Grove says, adding that other relatives of the family who are buried in Trinidad, Colorado, have tombstones bearing Stars of David concealed in lily designs.

“It’s part of the same process.”

Such concealment — a means to throw potential pursuers off the trail — is characteristic of many Crypto Jewish customs that persist to the present day, even though the threat of church-inspired persecution is long past.

THE knowledge that she came from Jewish roots also explained many spiritual conundra that Grove had faced over the years.

She had, for example, explored Christianity but never found its basic theology acceptable.

“I knew the story [of the New Testament] but I was really confused,” she says.

“I couldn’t understand how he could be G-d if they call him the son of G-d.

“When I was going to these different churches, I would always ask a pastor or bishop about certain scriptures in the New Testament: Why does this say that he sits at the right hand of G-d if he is G-d himself? The Trinity never washed with me. I couldn’t understand it for the life of me. I couldn’t grasp it. So I said, ‘No, there’s more truth to this.’”

At the same time, Grove and her younger brother had been fascinated with Jews and Judaism since watching “The Ten Commandments” with Charlton Heston portraying Moses.

“We couldn’t understand why we were so connected to the first five books of our Bible. We really wanted to know more about the Jewish people, the Israelites, what happened back then. That was kind of a stepping stone. It began there.”

She had had Jewish friends while growing up in Denver, Grove says, and she always found them strangely fascinating.

“I thought they were just sort of different — I don’t know what word to use — their demeanor, their spirituality, everything about them, the way they carried themselves, was really intriguing to me.

“I had had connections with Jewish people and I always wanted to know what they had and how they could do certain things. There was this confidence about them.”

ALL of these threads eventually formed a nexus. The knowledge that she had descended from Jewish ancestors who were forced to hide their Judaism in fear evolved into the conviction that Grove was herself Jewish and was destined to live her life as an openly practicing Jew.

“The way everything happened just seemed to fall in place for me,” she says.

Even science has backed up her conviction.

Grove was recently diagnosed as having a genetic marker that puts her in a higher risk category for breast cancer.

The “BRCA” gene that she and several of her female relatives carry is one that is vastly disproportionate in Jewish women, as well as a number of Hispanic women whose families have dwelt in the San Luis Valley — most likely descendants of Inquisition-era Jews.

She notes the irony that not only does she hope to gain the blessings of being Jewish, but must run the risk of bearing its burdens as well.

It was the blessings, however, that drew her invariably toward conversion.

Grove briefly participated in a Conservative conversion program but opted out when she discovered that Israeli rabbinical authorities might not consider such a conversion acceptable for citizenship purposes.

A friend then suggested she contact Rabbi Refoel Levitt, who runs an Orthodox conversion program in Denver under the auspices of the Vaad Harabonim of Queens, a respected rabbinical court.

“It took me a couple of weeks to get the nerve up to call, but I did call him and he said he would really like to talk to me as soon as possible. Rabbi Levitt talked to me in depth about what had happened in the Inquisition. He gave me a lot of knowledge on this.”

Grove’s husband, Winston Grove, who was raised as a Baptist, shared his wife’s enthusiasm for Torah and Judaism and studied by her side during the entire conversion process.

The process was challenging both scholastically and personally, she says.

Her mother and Grove “bumped heads a lot” during the process, since her mother wasn’t convinced — and still isn’t — that the family needs any sort of official authentication of their Jewishness.

“She said that she didn’t understand why I needed to go through this conversion. ‘You’re Jewish by birth and you shouldn’t have to go there,’ she said.”

Grove, however, fully accepts the rules of the “Who is a Jew” process, understanding that generations of her family concealed their Jewishness and that no documentary proof exists to verify the Jewishness of any of them.

It was not easy, Grove adds, for her to fully “come out,” after being raised in a family that guarded that secret for centuries.

She admits that she occasionally still feels that old draw herself.

“The need for secrecy is over, but in a sense mother is still so hidden. I said I was not going to be like my mother, but in many ways I really am. I still have that secretive impulse, too.”

THIS past August, the conversion of Hadassah and Winston Grove was finalized. Their four- and five-year-old grandsons, of whom they have full custody, were converted along with them, while their children remain “on the fence” on the subject.

“I don’t push the issue with any other family members because it has to be in your heart,” she says. “It’s what you feel you want to do.”

Grove is now a member of the DAT Minyan at Lowry, where she says “there has been so much warmth and affection that I love it there.”

She feels that the last four years, beginning with her discoveries about being a Crypto Jew and culminating with her conversion, have been both a personal and a historical healing process — one which she hopes will serve as an inspiration for other Hispanic people who suspect they have similar backgrounds.

She doesn’t believe for a moment that any of it was coincidental.

“I think there is a design to this,” Grove says.

“When I look back at my whole life and how things have happened — how the foundation of the past was set forth — for me, speaking of myself, I really believe that there was some Divine intervention, that all this was meant to happen.”

She also believes that there is a profound significance to the fact that she “is completing a historical circle” in returning to Judaism.

“When I went into the mikveh, I didn’t think I would be so overwhelmed with emotion. But when I was in that mikveh, and taking on the 613 commandments, and there’s no turning back, I could feel myself doing this for all the women in my family that didn’t have the chance to do it.

“I could now, openly and with my own mouth, profess that I am a Jew.”

Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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