"Rabbi Emanuel Feldman’s excellent Second Thoughts piece (“Up Is Down and Down Is Up”) should be published in every newspaper and magazine throughout the country and blasted out in every media platform available"
Thank you for your feature on the new religious development in Mexico. A few corrections and some background are in order.
Jews from Syria and Iraq didn’t start coming after the Ashkenazim, as the article says. In 1909, Jews from Aleppo, Syria, founded their first association in Mexico City — 13 years before any Ashkenazi religious or communal entity would appear on the scene. The first Jewish communal organization in the country, known as Alianza Monte Sinaí, composed of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, was established in 1912 in that city.
The website of the Justo Sierra 71 synagogue in Mexico City, the first founded by Ashkenazi Jews there, tells the story of the community, but it doesn’t identify one particular person as its founder.
In a room in the old La Merced market, in downtown Mexico City, Jewish immigrants from Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia founded a charitable organization called Nidjei Israel in 1922. Religious services were held in rented rooms or in private homes.
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