Béjar, a charming town south of the city of Salamanca, is very well known in the Hebrew world, above all because many Jews bear this city as a surname. Apparently, as Samuel Francés, president of the Bulgarian Jewish community, once told me, it was very common in the Jewish world during the Middle Ages, more specifically among the Sephardim scattered across the planet after the decree of expulsion by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, to adopt as a surname the city from which the parents and grandparents of those unfortunate descendants originally came. Most of the Sephardim expelled, first from Spain and then from Portugal, settled in the Balkans, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and some even reached the Caribbean islands.

As we can read on the pages of the Museo Judío David Melul, “Tens of thousands of people in the world bear the surnames Béjar, Behar, Bejarano, Becerano, or any of the different variations of the name, modified over time and by its use in places with different alphabets and phonetic systems. Many of them are Jews or descendants of Sephardic Jews who left Spain, but who preserved not only the name of their native place, but also the language, the customs, and the affection for a longed-for life that led them to preserve and transmit that intangible legacy during the following five centuries.”

But before continuing with this account, it is worth reviewing the history of this singular institution and the origin of its name. The Museo Judío de Béjar was the initiative of a very singular man, curious, hardworking, and a great philanthropist, David Melul, who, with the help of its current director, Antonio Avilés, gave life to this dream of creating this center of Jewish culture in the heart of the Salamanca mountains.

On the museum’s pages, we found this short biography of Melul, which we reproduce here in translation: “David Melul, creator and patron of the museum that bears his name, was born in Melilla on April 20, 1928. In 1946 he arrived in Béjar to study at what was then called the School of Industrial Experts, today the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering of the University of Salamanca. He spent several years in the city and completed his textile engineering studies in Tarrasa. He settled in Barcelona, specifically in the building where the headquarters of the Jewish community was located, on Avenida de Roma. There he met his wife, Adelina Nacmías, with whom he had five children: Daniel, Rafael, Raquel, Mario, and Víctor. It was also in this city that he launched his first industrial projects through a pioneering and innovative textile company focused on household products: Hispano Tex.”

Later, throughout his long life, Melul remained linked to Béjar and visited the city on many occasions, and apparently, “on one of those trips, at the end of the 1990s, he promoted the creation of this museum based on his knowledge of the city’s Hebrew past and on his interest in contributing, through his help, to the dissemination of Jewish culture and history,” as the museum’s website continues to inform us.

THE SECOND JEWISH MUSEUM IN SPAIN, AFTER THE ONE IN TOLEDO

With Melul’s financial support, after he purchased the house where the project is located, and with the invaluable help of the Ayuntamiento de Béjar, the museum opened its doors as the second Jewish museum in Spain, the first and best known being that of Toledo. The museum is spread over three floors, with several sections distributed across them: on the first level the visitor will find information on the history of the Jews in Spain; on the first floor there is a section dedicated to the conversos in Spain after the expulsion; and finally, on the second floor, completing the cycle of those who decided to remain in their faith and leave Spain, there is the section dedicated to the Sephardim. The museum also has a lecture hall, a small library, closed, and a researchers’ room, as well as toilets on the ground floor and a small shop with some objects and books relating to Jewish culture. The place opened its doors for the first time in 2006, and thousands of visitors have already passed through this peaceful space dedicated to our Hebrew roots.

Regarding the beautiful house that hosts this important institution in a city that once had an important and representative Jewish quarter, the museum’s website tells us that it is located in “a manor house from the mid or late fifteenth century, situated within a monumental ensemble made up of the Church of Santa María la Mayor, with a thirteenth-century Mudéjar apse, several interesting bourgeois houses, an old eighteenth-century textile factory with the coat of arms of Charles III on its façade, as well as the glove factory building, dating from the mid nineteenth century.”

Béjar, according to the chronicles and what we have been able to see in the museum, was a city that had an important Jewish quarter during the Middle Ages until, in 1492, the famous edict of the Catholic Monarchs abruptly ended forever that peaceful coexistence among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in what the Sephardim, still today, continue to call Sefarad. The Hebrew presence in this town, known for its past linked to an important textile industry that declined in the 1980s, dates back to the thirteenth century and gives it major importance in an area where significant Jewish life also existed in several nearby settlements, such as Hervás, which has one of the most important and best preserved Jewish quarters in Spain, and Plasencia, also regarded as an important Jewish center in that period.

This Museo Judío de Béjar, located very close to the Ducal Palace that once housed the Dukes of Béjar, invites us to learn about a past so closely tied to our heritage and identity that it is worth visiting, knowing, and learning a little more about our distant and also close origins, since without understanding our rich history we cannot understand the present. For all these reasons, these lines invite you to come to Béjar and learn something more about our history in this small museum, yet one great in knowledge, the Museo Judío David Melul.

Congregation Sha’ar Zahav stands as one of the most significant expressions of modern Jewish communal life in the United States, embodying the intersection of Judaism, social inclusion, and LGBTQ+ history. Founded in San Francisco in 1977, the congregation emerged at a moment when LGBTQ Jews were largely excluded from both religious institutions and public Jewish life. Sha’ar Zahav responded to this absence by creating a fully inclusive synagogue grounded in halachic tradition, Jewish learning, and communal responsibility, while affirming the dignity and spiritual legitimacy of LGBTQ identities.

From its earliest years, the congregation functioned as more than a prayer space. It became a center for pastoral care during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, offering religious support, memorial practices, and communal solidarity at a time of widespread stigma and loss. In this period, Sha’ar Zahav played a critical role in shaping Jewish responses to illness, mourning, and social justice, integrating traditional liturgy with contemporary realities without abandoning ritual depth or textual seriousness.

The congregation is affiliated with Reform Judaism, yet its liturgical life incorporates Hebrew, music, and ritual structures that emphasize continuity with broader Jewish tradition. Over time, Sha’ar Zahav has become a national and international reference point for inclusive Jewish practice, influencing synagogue models far beyond San Francisco. Its educational programs, lifecycle rituals, and public advocacy demonstrate how Jewish communities adapt to social change while remaining anchored in historical frameworks.

Today, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav is recognized not only as an LGBTQ synagogue but as a landmark of American Jewish history, reflecting late 20th-century transformations in identity, belonging, and religious expression. Its physical presence in San Francisco anchors decades of lived experience, memory, and cultural production, marking it as a key site in the cartography of contemporary Jewish heritage.

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.

The Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Estrela is the first Jewish burial ground of modern Lisbon, created at a time when Jewish presence as a public religious practice was still fragile and recent. In the early 19th century, small groups of Jews, mainly from Morocco and Gibraltar, began to resettle in Portugal, with communities forming in Lisbon, the Azores, and Faro. In Lisbon, many cautiously retained British citizenship, a factor that helps explain the cemetery’s connection to the grounds of the British Cemetery in Estrela.

In 1801, a small plot of land was obtained within the British Cemetery of Estrela to allow burials according to Jewish ritual. The earliest identified grave is that of José Amzalaga, who died on 26 February 1804, as recorded in the epitaph. For approximately six decades, this was the main burial place for the Jewish population of Lisbon, until 1865, when the space became saturated.

From a material perspective, the cemetery is small in scale, with around 150 graves, mostly marked by horizontal gravestones in the Sephardic tradition. Cleaning and stabilization actions were recorded, including the consolidation of walls, during interventions carried out in the 2010s.

Jewish funerary continuity in the city was reorganized from 1868 onward, when a royal decree authorized the creation of a new cemetery on Calçada das Lages, today Avenida Afonso III, which remains the active cemetery of the community. Later, in 1892, the statutes of the Guemilut Hassadim Association were ratified, assigning it the mission of providing religious and funerary support and of administering both cemeteries, the one at Rua Nova à Estrela and the one at Calçada das Lages, including death records.

Today, the former cemetery remains largely invisible and is, in practice, not open to visitors, even when visiting the British Cemetery itself, where the Jewish graves are explicitly described as inaccessible.

In recent years, the surrounding urban context has brought the site back into public debate. The transformation of the so-called English Quarter into a private residential complex includes reference to the former Jewish cemetery and a proposal to keep it covered by a landscaped pergola, specifically to reduce its visibility from the surrounding residences. Public discussion around the project highlighted a risk: rather than valuing and explaining this heritage, the architectural solution may end up making it even less visible.

As a closed and discreet site, this cemetery nevertheless retains exceptional historical value, not only as a physical trace of the Jewish return to Lisbon in the 19th century, but also as a material marker of a city in which the normalization of modern Jewish life had to be built step by step, even before the formal abolition of the Inquisition in 1821.

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.

Rossio Square and the former Paço dos Estaus are linked to one of the decisive ruptures in Portuguese Jewish history. After King Manuel’s expulsion decree, Jews were led to believe that they would be allowed to leave the kingdom. Instead, the crown concentrated many of them in Lisbon, restricted departure, and turned the promised embarkation into compulsory conversion. The final phase of that process was centered at Rossio, where the Estaus stood on the square’s northern side.

On Easter Sunday, 26 March 1497, the mass baptism took place by the Estaus House. Jews gathered in Lisbon were taken to several churches across the city and forcibly baptized, without free consent. What had been presented as departure ended in forced incorporation into Christianity, and openly organized Jewish communal life in Portugal was brought to an end.

After 1497, there were no longer publicly recognized Jewish communities in the kingdom. In their place emerged the category of “New Christians”, while Jewish practice, identity, and memory persisted in concealed, fragmented, and often persecuted forms.

In the early 20th century, the photographic studio known as Photographia Ingleza was operated in Lisbon by the brothers Josef (Joseph) Lazarus and Maurice Lazarus, two figures associated with the modern Jewish presence in the city. The studio was established on Rua Ivens, in the Chiado area, one of Lisbon’s most dynamic cultural and commercial districts at the time.

Before settling in Lisbon, the Lazarus brothers had worked extensively in Mozambique, where they became pioneers in the large-scale production of photographic postcards and albums depicting colonial life. This experience shaped their technical expertise and commercial approach to photography. On May 1, 1909, they officially opened Photographia Ingleza in Lisbon, positioning the studio as a provider of high-quality portraiture and photographic prints.

Only three days after its opening, the studio received formal appointment as photographer to the Portuguese Royal Household, a distinction that placed Photographia Ingleza among the most prestigious photographic establishments in the country. From their premises on Rua Ivens, the Lazarus brothers produced studio portraits, official photographs, and images that circulated widely in illustrated magazines and visual media of the period.

The address of the studio is documented as Rua Ivens 53, Lisbon, a detail preserved through photographic stamps and museum records. This location is particularly significant, as it situates the Lazarus brothers within a street already closely linked to the history of Portuguese photography. It is noteworthy, and somewhat ironic, that Photographia Ingleza operated on Rua Ivens, the same street where the renowned photographer Joshua Benoliel lived. This coincidence highlights Rua Ivens as a discreet but important axis of early 20th century photographic production in Lisbon, bringing together, within the same urban space, key figures of the city’s visual culture.

Within the context of Jew Where, Photographia Ingleza stands as a marker of Jewish professional life in modern Lisbon and of the contribution of Jewish photographers to the construction of the city’s visual memory during the period of Jewish reestablishment in Portugal.

HaAva veHaHava (“Love and Friendship”) is the synagogue of Papeete and the central Jewish place of worship in French Polynesia. Founded in 1993 in the Fariipiti area, it serves a small, geographically isolated community in the South Pacific, sustaining Shabbat and holiday life for locals and visitors. Its warm interior is known for stained-glass windows by Deanna de Marigny, blending Jewish liturgical themes with Tahiti’s cultural setting.

HaAva veHaHava, whose name is commonly translated as “Love and Friendship,” is the central Jewish place of worship in French Polynesia. It stands in the Fariipiti area of Papeete and is widely described as the only synagogue in Tahiti, serving a small, geographically isolated Jewish community in the South Pacific. After decades of an itinerant community life, the congregation consolidated its presence in the early 1990s, establishing a community center and building the synagogue in 1993 on Rue Moerenhout.

Contemporary reports portray the community as small, often counted in the low hundreds or fewer, yet able to sustain communal prayer, Shabbat and holiday life, and visiting rabbinic leadership for major occasions. Architecturally, the synagogue is noted for its warm interior and stained-glass windows created by the artist Deanna de Marigny, whose designs evoke Jewish liturgical themes while situating the building within Tahiti’s distinct cultural landscape. As a landmark of modern Jewish continuity in Polynesia, HaAva veHaHava represents both diaspora resilience and the re-rooting of communal institutions in one of the world’s most remote Jewish settings.

Joshua Benoliel was born in Lisbon on 13 January 1873 and became one of the most important visual chroniclers of Portugal in the early 20th century. He is widely regarded as a founding figure of Portuguese photojournalism and is often described as the greatest Portuguese photographer of that period. Of Jewish ancestry, he held British citizenship throughout his life, and a documented Lisbon address places him and his family at Rua Ivens, no. 6 (4th floor), in Chiado.

Before turning fully professional, Benoliel worked at the Lisbon Customs (Alfândega). He developed his photographic practice alongside the photographer Chaves Cruz, first as an amateur and later as a professional reporter. From the early 1900s through the 1920s, he built an exceptional visual record of Lisbon and Portugal, photographing not only daily street life but also the major political and social turning points of his time.

Benoliel followed the Portuguese royal household and covered state ceremonies, diplomatic encounters, and visits involving foreign royalty, producing images associated with King D. Carlos and Queen D. Amélia, among other leading figures of the era. His work also captured defining historical events and social realities, from the final years of the monarchy through the instability of the First Republic, including public ceremonies, civic inaugurations, political turbulence, and moments of social conflict. His photographic legacy is frequently estimated at around 60,000 images, a rare archive for understanding Portuguese life and modern urban change in the first decades of the 20th century.

His career is closely associated with O Século, one of the most influential newspapers of the period. He worked there as a photographic reporter between 1906 and 1918, and later returned in 1924, remaining active until his death. He also collaborated internationally, including correspondence for Spain’s ABC. Over his lifetime he received distinctions linked to his photographic work, including recognition in international exhibition contexts. Joshua Benoliel died in Lisbon on 3 February 1932.

A substantial part of his legacy is preserved in Lisbon’s municipal collections. The Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa safeguards an important corpus of his work within the “Benoliel” photographic collection, which preserves thousands of images that document Lisbon and Portugal around 1900 to 1930. The same collection also includes significant later work by his son, Judah Benoliel (1900-1968), extending the family’s photographic documentation into the mid 20th century.

A rare piece of Jewish material culture was recovered in Lisbon during the archaeological works carried out between 2014 and 2016 on the riverfront plot formerly occupied by the Armazéns Sommer, at Rua do Cais de Santarém (today integrated into the Áurea Museum by Eurostars). The object is a circular ceramic stamp, preserved as a fragment, whose reconstruction suggests an original diameter of about 9 cm and an average thickness of roughly 1.5 cm. It was found in deposits dated to the transition from the 4th to the 5th century CE, within a late Roman urban setting close to a narrow street leading to a fountain and cistern, near the line of the Roman wall.

The stamp’s significance lies in its iconography. On the working face, the authors identify a schematized menorah, originally with seven branches, and, beside it, a lulav motif associated with Jewish ritual practice. While the menorah could, in certain contexts, be ambiguously adopted, the lulav is understood as a distinctly Jewish symbol, strengthening the interpretation that the stamp belonged to a Jewish user or a Jewish-controlled context. The stamp is therefore discussed as a practical instrument for marking perishable goods, plausibly bread. In particular, the study argues that it could have been used to imprint unleavened bread, mazzah, functioning as a visible kosher identifier for goods produced outside the household, where communal or commercial production required clear signals of ritual compliance.

Beyond the object itself, the stamp contributes to broader discussions about Jewish presence in late Roman Olisipo. Direct archaeological indicators of Jewish life in the far western provinces are scarce, and this piece stands out for linking symbolic language, ritual practice, and everyday provisioning within an urban context on Lisbon’s Tagus waterfront.