About MARIAL Faculty, Fellows, and Staff Calendar of Events Research and Publications Fellowships Work-Family Resources Virtual Exhibitions	About MARIAL MARIAL in the News Emory Jewish Students Feel Out of Place The Atlanta Journal- Constitution October 13, 2005 By Drew Whitelegg What do you do when you want to mark one of your culture’s most sacred festivals but can’t find a place to do it? Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown today, is the Jewish Day of Atonement, a day for reflecting on the previous year, and even Jews who don’t consider themselves religious like to spend it with family or close friends. “I was kind of surprised to see there wasn’t a synagogue within an hour and a half of Salamanca,” said Josh Weiss, 21, from Virginia. “I guess I shouldn’t have been.” This year the Jewish festival follows Columbus Day, which celebrates the moment the explorer first laid eyes on the New World in 1492. The irony becomes crystal clear in Salamanca, long a cradle of Castilian culture: Columbus’ voyage was part of an effort by Catholic monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand to stamp their authority on the world. This included the conquest of the Moors in Granada, the codifying of the Spanish language into the first grammar and, specifically, ridding Spain of its 300,000 Jews. In a further irony, Salamanca on Thursday plays host to the descendants of the Spanish empire started by Columbus, when the 15th Cumbre Iberoamericana - an impressive international gathering of Latin American leaders - comes to town. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is on his way; Cuba’s Fidel Castro has apparently yet to confirm. Judaism’s presence minimal Holding the meeting on Yom Kippur is a reminder that Judaism had almost no presence in this empire, compared to, say, the British, where Queen Victoria was made empress of India at the behest of a Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. A country’s history is writ large across its landscape. Travel around Spain and it’s hard to avoid the fact that the nation was formed through a particularly imposing and authoritarian brand of Christianity. What were once minarets on countless mosques during the 700-year Moorish rule were converted into church towers from which bells summon people to Catholic Mass. But some history is conspicuous by its absence. Emory’s Jewish students have had trouble finding signs of their culture at all. As Eric Goldfarb, 20, from Pennsylvania puts it, Jewish history in Spain seems to have a distinct “lack of markers,” despite the presence of a long tradition of Jews in the country before Columbus’ journey. In Cordoba, the students were excited at the prospect of being led to an old synagogue. But the synagogue turned out to be a tiny room off a side street. Values, plazas don’t coincide Spain offers a certain paradox, which comes from a reputation for liberal, tolerant values. One of the first acts of the present Spanish government was to make gay marriage legal, while international commentators praised the nation’s restrained reaction to the Madrid bombings in March 2004, which killed nearly 200 people. Spain’s plazas, where young and old rub shoulders into the late evening, feel like the kind of open public spaces that Americans dream of creating in their cities. And yet, when one looks closer, these public spaces are often extraordinarily homogenous. In Salamanca, especially, one can’t help feeling in its main plaza that things haven’t changed that much since 1492. It’s a paradoxical public space in which difference seems to have no presence. It’s doubly uncomfortable when a bust of the fascist leader Francisco Franco  (albeit normally daubed in red paint) looks over the square. Emory’s Jewish students originally thought of heading to Madrid, about 125 miles away, to attend Yom Kippur services. But because of the Cumbre, Salamanca University has canceled classes, and the students are off. Some students are flying to London; others are heading to the mountains. Many will engage in the Tashlic, symbolically throwing pieces of bread into a river to unload the misdeeds of the previous year. And for one Jewish student, cancelled classes mean a chance for a vacation.  Adam Block, 21, claims to miss the Yankees more than Yom Kippur, and he's off to get a late suntan in the Balearic Islands.  It's a nice image, over 500 years since 1492:  a New York Jew, spreading out his towel on a Mallorca beach, finding his place in the world in perhaps the most public space of them all.  < More MARIAL in the News