In the bustling garment district of this city’s historic center, where stone-paved streets are alive with buyers and sellers, the signs of Mexico’s first Jewish enclave are subtly woven into the fabric of daily life.
A tiny religious scroll over a door, hidden behind racks of colorful elastic. Fading Hebrew letters on a storefront. A stained-glass Star of David set into a stone facade.
Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has been notably reserved about her Jewish heritage. Yet she will govern Latin America’s second-largest economy from the Palacio Nacional, just three blocks from Mexico’s first synagogue and a neighborhood where Jewish immigrants initially found refuge.
“The Barrio Judío doesn’t exist as a place per se,” said Monica Unikel, who has spent three decades documenting the history of Jewish immigration in Mexico and leads tours of the old quarter. “I started asking people where they lived, where they worked, where they prayed, and I began marking the places on a map.”
Sheinbaum’s four grandparents were Jewish: On her father’s side, they were from Lithuania, arriving in Mexico in the 1920s; on her mother’s side, they were Bulgarian, arriving in Veracruz in 1942, narrowly escaping the Holocaust.
Sheinbaum has said she was raised with Jewish traditions. However, her parents were academics and political activists in a country where politics have historically been fiercely secular, separated from the Catholic Church and religion in general.
In Mexico, Jewish identity is deeply tied to the synagogue and faith practices, Unikel explained – unlike in the U.S., where Jewish identity can be as much ethnic and cultural as it is religious. While nearly 6 million adults in the U.S. identify as Jewish, about 2.4% of the population, in Mexico, there are only an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 Jews in a country of 124 million people.
Nevertheless, the first Jewish migrants left a lasting mark on Mexico City’s cultural heart.
They built a synagogue – where Jewish men still say their daily prayers – near the sprawling Zócalo public square and the city’s sinking Cathedral, itself built upon the ruins of an indigenous Mexica temple.
A Tour of a Historic and Humble Barrio at the Jewish New Year
On a drizzly day last week, ahead of Sheinbaum’s inauguration and the start of the Jewish new year, historian Vania Martínez began a tour of the barrio in front of the Monte Sinaí synagogue, which opened in 1923.
Her voice competed with the neighborhood’s hustle and bustle. Haitian migrants loaded reams of fabric into a truck. Motorcycles weaved through the traffic. A fruit seller with a microphone hawked golden apples in a singsong pitch.
Inside the temple, prayers had ended, and the sanctuary was quiet. Wooden chairs stood in perfect rows, framing a sacred chest where the Hebrew scriptures are carefully stored. Its simplicity reflects the community’s humble origins in Mexico, she said.
To Mexicans, the Barrio Judío is better known as part of La Merced, famous for its 500 years of market tradition and for being a first stop for newcomers to the metropolis, akin to New York’s Lower East Side or San Francisco’s Mission District.
During a migration that began in the early 20th century, Arab and Eastern European Jews brought their traditions to Mexico, Unikel said. They influenced, and were influenced by, Mexican customs.
Jewish immigrants introduced a business model in Mexico that endures today, Unikel noted. Men often worked as peddlers, carrying their wares on their backs, and sold their goods to poor Mexicans on interest-free credit. They became known as aboneros and created what is still a feature of modern sales in Mexico: “six months without interest.”
Jewish Immigrants and Mexican Cuisine
Jewish immigrants in Mexico began incorporating local ingredients into their traditional dishes. “You can’t talk about Jewish food in Mexico, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, without mentioning chile, avocados, or tortillas,” Unikel said. “Dishes like gefilte fish a la veracruzana, guacamole with hard-boiled egg, and kibbeh stuffed with rajas con elote (chile and corn) are examples. There are even kosher tamales made without pork lard. It’s such an interesting blend.”
A Glimpse into the Past
During her tour, Martínez carried a folder filled with black-and-white photos of the people and places that once populated the barrio. “Here is a beautiful one, where they’ve got their Shisha,” she said, pointing to a photo of men seated around a table, sharing a water pipe, or hookah. “It was one of the few things they would have brought in their suitcase, the little that they could carry, and it was very representative.”
The barrio was a place where a 14-year-old named Shimshon Feldman could find work, first in a Jewish bakery where he sold black bread and braided challah, and later at a Yiddish daily newspaper.
There was a kosher meat market on Jesus Maria Street and a matzoh ball factory on Soledad Street. In a shop beneath a figurine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a woman named Sara Makowsky sold everything a Jewish family would need for their holiday celebrations. Makowsky was so successful and stable that she also ran a sort of community post office for other Jewish migrants who were constantly moving and renting where they could.
From Synagogue to Cultural Center
Two doors down from the Monte Sinaí synagogue, ornate wood doors in a neo-colonial facade give the impression of a mansion inside. But it’s a false front: Inside, Jews, including those who fled the Nazis, built a synagogue hidden from view.
Most of Mexico City’s Jewish community now lives outside the historic center. Fourteen years ago, Unikel helped restore and convert the synagogue into a cultural center, called Sinagoga Histórica Justo Sierra 71. “When we converted the synagogue, my goal was to share our culture with the whole world, with Jews and non-Jews and foreigners,” she said. “It’s Jewish culture for the world. One of my objectives is to show who we are in all our diversity so that people who have false ideas about the Jewish people can get to know our traditions and philosophies.”
Challenges and Resilience
Following the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel, the cultural center curtailed its public events. Even as the conflict worsens in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, the center plans to restart its programming this month, though with added security. People “need to know us, not through stereotypes,” Unikel said. “There are so many ways to live a Jewish life.”
A Visit from Claudia Sheinbaum
Before becoming president, Claudia Sheinbaum served as mayor of Mexico City. The city invested in remodeling the then-rundown Plaza San Loreto in front of the Sinagoga Histórica, and Sheinbaum came to inaugurate it. Unikel crossed the street and invited Sheinbaum to visit the synagogue, and she did.
Sheinbaum said she had never seen the synagogue before. Unikel explained that it’s a copy of a temple in Lithuania, and Sheinbaum shared that her father’s family was from Lithuania.
When Sheinbaum took office as president, she didn’t mention her heritage, though that didn’t stop the online proliferation of anti-Semitic memes in Spanish. In her inauguration speech, which included 100 promises to the Mexican people, Sheinbaum defined herself in her own way, saying, “I am a mother, grandmother, scientist, and woman of faith.”
Source: USA Today
