Centropa in Spanish News

  • The Spanish daily newspapers El Confidencial and El Diario Montanes published an article about Centropa in their online editions of June 8, 2013. They wrote about Centropa's work in general, and about Centropa's effort to preserve and document the "Sephardic world" in the Balkans. The article, published on both newspapers' websites, also mentions Centropas new educational project directed towards young Spanish speakers in the U.S., which focuses on "The other side of 1492", i.e. on the expulsion of the Jews by order of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. 

    "Kids often don't know that in 1492, when Columbus sailed for America, tens of thousands of Jews were exiled from the same port, but into the other direction," Centropa's director Edward Serotta is quoted. Centropa documents and preserves the stories of this Sephardic community, i.e. of those Jews who came to the Balkans and Eastern Europe after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. Until today, there are traces of a Sephardic communities in Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Greece and especially in Turkey, and Centropa conducted some 150 interviews with elderly Sephardim -- some of them in Ladino, an old language also referred to as Judeo-Espaneol, spoken by Sephardic Jews until the twentieth century. "A substantial number," Serotta is quoted saying in the article, adding that Centropa has thus managed to preserve and document a real "Sephardic world" in the Balkans: "We strengthen them (the young Jews of that region) to live the history of the Sephardim as their own." 

    Follow the links to read the full article written by Beatriz Salom on elconfidencial.com (Spanish) or on eldiariomontanes.es (Spanish). Published on June 8, 2013. 

    Click here to get to a Map of Centropa's Sephardic Interviews.

    Click here to see the movie "Three promises - Matilda Kalef"