We hope this post finds you well and warm! We heard it's pretty chilly over there. Though we had wonderful, warm weather with blue skies yesterday, our drive into the interior today brought us colder weather. We were pretty cold throughout our time in Ribadavia and had to step inside of a few cafes to warm up, but the cold was certainly worth what we found: history of a once thriving judería.
Judería is the Spanish word for the Jewish quarter of a town. As we mentioned in previous blog posts, Gallegos and Jews share the common experience of persecution, but up until today, we hadn't seen too much evidence of Jewish life in Galicia. But the bus pulled into the southern Galician town of Ribadavia, and from the moment we entered into the Juderia, signs of Jewish life were everywhere: stars of David, Hebrew writing on stone blocks and on street signs, and most importantly, Herminia. Herminia is an elderly woman who owns a small cookie shop in the Jewish quarter, and she quickly became our Spanish-Jewish abuela. Proudly wearing her white apron, her pin of the Israli and Spanish flags, and the new dentures she just got as a gift from her daughter, Herminia opened up a china cabinet behind her to display all of her cookies: with almond, with poppyseed, with dates, with flour, without flour, with egg, without egg, and with some ingredients imported from Israel. She is known all over Europe as the only establishment that has certain biscuits made according to the typical Jewish recipe. Herminia has lived above her cookie shop for over fifty years, and the stone wall that houses the old-fashioned oven she uses to bake is over five hundred years old. Stepping inside, it truly felt like we had traveled back in time.
A few students asked her questions in Spanish. Noa asked, "What valuable lesson did your parents teach you?" and Liora asked, "What makes you happy?" Herminia's answers were the same for both questions: "Trabajar." Working. Herminia wakes up at 4am every morning to begin baking her cookies, and when she's tired, she puts a sign in her window that says she's done for the day. At eighty years old, she has no plans to retire!
A deeply meaningful moment was when May asked Herminia in Spanish, "Have you been to Israel?" Herminia replied, "Solo en mis sueños." Only in my dreams. These words, spoken to a group of students, many of whom have had the honor and the privilege of going to Israel (in some cases more than once) was a powerful reminder that not all Jews get to stand on such sacred ground. We hope that one day when our kids make their next journey to Israel, they will dar un paseo, take a stroll, on behalf of Herminia, who only gets to love her Homeland from afar.
After our special visit with Herminia, we had lunch together in a great restaurant where the owner was also once the mayor of the town. After a delicious lunch of hot soup, salad, meat and potatoes, and four different kinds of dessert plus coffee (there is no such thing as a "light lunch"), we were on our way out of the restaurant when Caroline noticed that a Galician gentleman at the table next to us had a cochlear implant, similar to hers. She courageously went up to this Spanish stranger and used their shared connection as a way to warmly meet him. They chatted in Spanish, and two wonderful things happened: Caroline walked away feeling grateful again for the opportunity to hear another deaf man speak and for her ability to speak about it, and the other man felt grateful for being able to hear and talk to her. We can confirm the latter part of this because as Caroline walked away, we heard the Galician man tell the others at his table how impressed he was with her Spanish.
What we thought would be a mere "traveling day" with a few stops turned out to be a highlight of the trip for many of us. On to Castilla y León!
I loved this latest post. What an awesome experience
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