Centro Sefarad-Israel is a Spanish public diplomacy institution created as an inter-administrative consortium to serve as a bridge between Spain and the Jewish world. Established on 18 December 2006 through an agreement involving Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (together with the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, AECID), the Community of Madrid, and the Madrid City Council, it operates with a cultural and educational mandate rather than as a religious institution.

Its core mission is to foster knowledge of Jewish culture in Spanish civil society, with particular attention to Sephardic heritage as a living component of Spanish culture. In parallel, the institution promotes dialogue and cooperation between Spanish society and Israeli society through mutual cultural knowledge, and it maintains collaborations with Sephardic communities worldwide. This mission is pursued through a steady public program that typically includes lectures, seminars, concerts, book presentations, temporary exhibitions, and film screenings, delivered both onsite and through online formats.

The center’s headquarters are located at Calle Mayor 69, in Madrid’s historic core, within the Palacio de Cañete, a municipal property on the Calle Mayor whose Herrerian-style façade and corner towers have shaped the streetscape since the seventeenth century. Municipal documentation regarding the move to this building often uses the earlier institutional name “Casa Sefarad-Israel.” A 2009 protocol between the Madrid City Council and Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs formalized the installation of the institution’s headquarters in the palace, associating the site with exhibition spaces, a conference room, and library-related services designed to support public access to Jewish and Sephardic cultural knowledge.

A further expansion of its public-facing infrastructure took place through cooperation with the city’s library network. Following a 2021 agreement published in Spain’s official state gazette, the center deposited a specialized collection of 400 titles on Jewish themes, enabling the creation of a dedicated and clearly identifiable section within the Biblioteca Pública Municipal Iván de Vargas. This initiative, publicly referenced as the “Biblioteca Centro Sefarad-Israel / Isaac Revah,” reinforced the institution’s educational role by integrating a curated Judaic and Sephardic collection into a broader municipal public library system.

This municipal memorial, officially titled A las víctimas del Holocausto (“To the victims of the Holocaust”), stands in Parque Juan Carlos I, beside the Garden of the Three Cultures and next to the Vergel de los Granados, also known as the Jewish Garden. It was created as a public tribute to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War and emerged from a formal agreement between the City of Madrid and the Jewish Community of Madrid, approved by the municipal plenary in 2005.

The monument was inaugurated on 15 April 2007 in a ceremonial act attended by the Mayor of Madrid (Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón) and representatives of the Jewish Community of Madrid, as well as other civic and diplomatic figures. The City of Madrid presented it at the time as the first Holocaust memorial monument erected in Spain.

Description and symbolism

The memorial is a conceptual sculptural ensemble whose dominant element is a vertical, abstracted projection of the Star of David, formed by multiple triangular steel prisms arranged around a central hexagonal core. The formal description notes Hebrew inscriptions on the central structure and a set of perforations that reinforce the symbolic geometry of the composition.

The star rises from a stepped, star-shaped platform clad with weathered wooden railway sleepers, explicitly referencing the deportation trains associated with the extermination process. Two additional components flank the platform: a semicircular arrangement of 44 vertical railway sleepers, evoking a field of gravestones, and a schematic yet expressive figure of a father holding a dying child, also built from wooden sleepers.

A corten-steel pedestal along the approach bears a bronze commemorative plaque. Its inscription dedicates the monument to the victims of the Holocaust, “in memory of the six million Jews murdered during the Shoah,” and also remembers Spanish victims, Roma victims, and others murdered in the Nazi extermination camps. The plaque includes the inauguration date alongside the Hebrew calendar date 27 Nisan 5767.

Official records describe the main element’s dimensions as 10.00 x 1.50 x 1.50 m, and identify the work as municipal property. Press reporting at the time also noted the monument’s approximate height (10 metres) and weight (around four tonnes), and credits the project to sculptor Samuel Nahón (Samuel Nahón Bengio) with architectural design by Alberto Stisin.