Mothers and memories: Recipes connect daughters to the past
There are dozens of recipes in the book, divided into sections including chicken dishes, meat dishes, fish dishes, sauces, and an especially long list of desserts.
By LINDA GRADSTEIN
GENIE Milgrom was born into a Catholic family in Havana, and moved to Miami when she was a child. She attended Catholic schools through high school, but says she never felt connected to her religion.“I always felt I didn’t belong and that there was something else,” she said in an interview recently in Jerusalem. “I can’t explain it, but I always felt Jewish. It was a journey of the soul, and the soul remembers and connects.”Milgrom started studying Judaism seriously in her 20s, and had an Orthodox conversion at age 31. Her family was very unhappy about her choice, and she did not convert her two children.She lived as an Orthodox Jew for 15 years before beginning a dive into her genealogy, asking her mother for any documentation she had about her grandparents. But her mother said it didn’t exist.So Milgrom was on her own, and what she found after years of research stunned her. She was actually Jewish on her maternal side going back 22 generations to the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal in the 1400s and 1500s.She is from a family of “crypto-Jews,” or “Bnai Anusim,” meaning “descendants of the coerced,” who were forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition. Some chose exile, others were killed, but many became “crypto-Jews,” practicing Catholicism in public but maintaining Jewish traditions at home.Statistics are hard to find, but the Israeli government said up to 95 million people in the world today may have Jewish origins, and in countries like Spain and Portugal, some are actively pursuing their Jewish identities.Milgrom says she never expected what happened next in her story.A few years ago, her mother Isabel, who was exhibiting signs of Alzheimer’s disease, called her and said she wanted to meet with a rabbi. (Note: Milgrom asked that only her mother’s first name be used in this story.)