Azores and United States
Yaffah daCosta
I was born into a Crypto-Jewish family of New England—in New Bedford,
Massachusetts, to be exact. I was not raised as a Jew, but as a Roman Catholic. However,
in our family we had customs and traditions, handed down from mother to daughter and
granddaughter, that display evidence of our Anousim (Hebrew: forced ones) ancestors.
These customs ranged from the preparation of food, like salting and soaking meat, to
house cleaning, searching for every crumb in the house during spring-time.
I would like to relate an incidence of a Crypto-Jewish coming-of-age ritual that I
experienced. I have read that the matriarchs were very prudent in choosing whom they
would pick to pass along the heritage of Crypto-Judaism. They would select one or two
daughters or granddaughters of the appropriate age as the inheritors, and would bless
them as the carriers of family tradition to future generations
I remember my great-grandmother well. She did not go to church, even though she had
raised her children as cultural Catholics. It was she, as a widow, who had brought her
grown children and grandchildren to this country from the Azores. A true matriarch of
the family, she would always have family events at her home. When she came to visit her
grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she helped with cooking, cleaning, and baking.
She was spry and active right up until a few weeks before her death at 92, when I was a
teenager.
It was on one of these visits that I remember my great-grandmother and I making
cupcakes together. I was eleven or twelve at the time, and she was teaching me how to
take the batter a tablespoon at a time, so as not to overfill the paper cups. My mother had
left the kitchen for a little while. My great-grandmother put her hands upon my head and
said something in Portuguese that I did not understand.
As I look back on that moment, it seems that she pronounced a blessing over me. I think
she asked the Almighty to guide me back to the faith of our ancestors, towards publicly
observant Judaism. The coming-of-age that I experienced, even though I could not
understand it at the time, may have been the deciding factor in why I had always felt so
uncomfortable in a church setting, and why I had searched all of my life to find the kind
of spirituality that would work for me. I found it in Judaism.
In December, 2000, I received a “Certificate of Return/Precautionary Conversion” from
the Beit Din of Flushing, New York. I still feel like a child in my understanding and
observance of Judaism. I suppose that upon nearing my twelfth “rebirth-day,” the
anniversary of my formal return to Judaism, I might contemplate having a bat mitzvah
ceremony, if HaShem grants me that length of life. (I am currently 55 years old.) But for
now, I’m satisfied with having made the return back to the faith and traditions of my
ancestors, traditions that had been ripped away from them, and that forced them to go
underground and suffer the risk of losing their lives if they were observed practicing any
form of Judaism. To date, I am the only one of my great-grandmother’s descendants to
make the return.