What is the IJC’s goal?
By Eli Rosenblatt, April 2, 2008, Forward.com In northern New Mexico’s Sandoval County, there is a tombstone of a World War II veteran in a cemetery nestled in the desert brush. The name of the man, who was born in 1921 and died in 1980, is Adonay P. Gutierrez, and it is engraved on the stone below a cross. Nine different Native American communities reside in the surrounding counties, and even if cemetery visitors see his cross before his name, this lone Jew lies among them. For Cary Herz, New Mexico photography correspondent for The New York Times, Gutierrez’s memory is one way to begin exploring New Mexico’s anusim, Hebrew for “forced ones” or Jews forced into hiding during the Spanish Inquisition. Her new book, “New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory” (University of New Mexico Press, 2007), gathers photographs spanning the experience of the descendants of Jews who settled in New Mexico during its conquest by Spanish explorers. “I kept hearing about these people, who had come ove
