H eadlines
Crypto Continued from Page 1
backgrounds after generations
of it being hidden from them.

Philadelphia local Ronit
Treatman is a member of
more than 25 of these groups,
including “Sephardic and
Crypto-Jewish Research.”
In 2012, Treatman found
out about her own background
through DNA testing: A surprise
finding indicated that family
members had moved to Poland
from Spain.

“It showed that part of them
were forced to convert and had
to go to Brazil,” Treatman said.

The uncovering of one’s Jewish
backstory, particularly finding
out about having crypto-Jewish
ancestors, has become more
common in the age of accessible
DNA testing, Treatman said.

Companies such as Family Tree
DNA can look more specifically
at Sephardic roots.

Treatman describes herself as
“the other side of the mirror.”
While so many other members
from the groups are raised
Catholic and are just now trying
to learn more about their Jewish
roots, Treatman has always
known she was Jewish (Her
father was an Israeli diplomat).

After almost a decade of
networking in these groups,
she’s been able to assist scores of
people in finding texts, resources
and community members to
connect these crypto-Jewish
descendants back to Judaism.

Philadelphia Jews are no
strangers to helping descen-
dants of crypto-Jews, also called
Conversos, Bnei Anusim or
Marranos — the Spanish word for
“pig,” which Treatman finds an
unfit terminology for the group.

Congregation Mikveh
Israel, the oldest synagogue in
Philadelphia, was founded by
Spanish and Portuguese Jews by
way of a Sephardic synagogue in
Amsterdam. In the 1920s, it was the first
Sephardic synagogue to respond
to the requests of the Portuguese
Marranos Committee, “for funds
to be expended in reclaiming
to Judaism more than 14,000
Marranos, who have been living
in Portugal, openly as Christians
and secretly as Jews for over four
centuries,” wrote Mikveh Israel
religious leader Leon H. Elmalah
in an Oct. 31, 1926 letter.

The appeal was made in
partnership with the Sephardic
Community of London, the
Anglo Jewish Association and
the Alliance Israelite, the letter
explained. The donation made
by Mikveh Israel would be
worth $50,000 today, Mikveh
Israel Rabbi Albert Gabbai said.

“Since we are a Spanish and
Portuguese synagogue, and we
trace our ancestry to the Jews
who escaped — because we are
a congregation that follows this
tradition started by these Jews,
it was a natural address for us to
help them out,” Gabbai said.

Gabbai visited
the Portuguese Jewish community,
which now numbers between
50 and 100, in 2017, decades
after it received a Jewish educa-
tion from Israeli rabbis sent to
teach about Jewish holidays.

The trip was heartening,
Gabbai said, as he was able to see
what Mikveh Israel’s assistance
90 years prior was able to do. But
misconceptions around Jews in
the area persist, he said.

On the trip, Gabbai witnessed
a tourist at a church — erected in
the place of an old synagogue —
who asked what had happened to
the Jews who left the synagogue.

“The guide said, ‘We invited
them to leave the country,’”
Gabbai said.

The continued stigma reaffirms
Treatman’s work, she said. It has
also driven the work of a friend of
Treatman’s, whom she met in one
crypto-Jewish Facebook event:
Keith Chavez, an Albuquerque,
New Mexico, native who found
out he was Jewish at age 13.

“My great-grandmother was
dying. She was bedridden for a
The gravestone of Keith Chavez’s
father with a Star of David at the
top. Chavez was raised attending a
Catholic church with his father.

Ronit Treatman found out about
Jewish family members who lived
in Spain after a 2012 DNA test.

length of time before she passed
away, and she wanted to talk to
me, my brother and my cousin,”
Chavez said. “So she called
us together. She said, ‘Somos
Sefarditos.’ We are Sefarditos.”
In hindsight, Chavez’s Jewish
background made sense to him,
despite attending a Catholic
church with his father growing
up. While most every Catholic
woman in New Mexico would
sweep dust out their front doors,
his great-grandmother used a
dustpan, as sweeping outside
one’s door violated the laws of
a mezuzah (though the family
never had mezuzahs on their
doorposts). She insisted upon
having her meat for weekend
meals sourced and prepared in
a way that resembled kosher law.

Chavez’s story resembles
those of many other crypto-
Jewish descendants, but he still
considers himself different.

So many other people with
crypto-Jewish backgrounds have
staunchly denied their family
backgrounds, instead favoring
their Catholic upbringings.

If they do choose to pursue
learning more about Judaism,
they can face scrutiny from some
Jewish leaders who don’t consider
crypto-Jewish descendants to be
valid Jews without conversion.

Now an adjunct history and
anthropology professor at the
University of New Mexico, Chavez
has taught about the presence of
crypto-Jewish descendants in the
Southwest U.S. and their own
Inquisition, which only ended in
the 19th century.

Like Treatman, Chavez is the
administrator of a handful of
crypto-Jewish Facebook groups.

Facebook has helped change
the landscape for crypto-Jewish
descendants looking to connect,
Chavez said, though these connec-
tions remain fewer than he hopes.

At one point, he helped a
Finnish woman, who just found
out about her Jewish ancestry,
connect with a rabbi in Helsinki.

The rabbi eventually led her
through the conversion process.

“That I felt good about,”
Chavez said. “Because she came
home.” l
Photo by Keith Chavez
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JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



H eadlines
Music Continued from Page 1
vaudeville acts, among others,
from the United States, the
former Soviet Union and Israel,
among others.

“Faculty at Penn regularly
bring their students to learn
about the Freedman archive,”
the website description reads.

The university labeled the
Freedmans’ six-decade effort
to build the collection “a labor
of love.”
And that label could not
have been more on point.

Robert Freedman, now 92
but still a savvy husband, gave
most of the credit to his wife,
Molly Freedman. He said she
motivated him to start buying
the old recordings on work
trips to different towns.

The Yiddish music reminded
her of her childhood, and she
wanted to preserve it.

At some point during each
trip, Robert Freedman, who
worked as a lawyer, would stop
in an old record store in the
downtown area. Eventually,
the Freedmans started making
these visits together during
their vacations.

“No matter where I traveled,
instead of taking a lunch hour,
I would walk downtown, find a
record store,” Freedman said.

“I had a lot of business in
New York. Michigan. Almost
any town you can name,” he
continued. “On vacations when we
traveled, South America.

Argentina was a real treasure
trove. They have a big Jewish
community. France. Including
Sephardic records. Amsterdam,
I was amazed, had the largest
Jewish record store in Europe,”
he continued. “Would you
believe that I found a couple of
Yiddish records in the Vatican?
I bought two records there.”
But Robert Freedman
further explained that to
truly understand why this
became the couple’s passion,
you have to understand their
background. Robert Freedman and
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM A program from the Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive
Courtesy of Robert Freedman
Molly Freedman did not
grow up together; he came
from Upper Darby, she from
West Philadelphia. But they
nonetheless came of age in a
similar Jewish culture.

Their families were secular,
cultural Jews who sent their
kids to afternoon schools
that taught students how to
read and write in Yiddish, as
well as summer camps where
they played and sang Yiddish
music. Robert Freedman also
has memories of singalongs in
his parents’ “tiny Upper Darby
living room,” as he described it,
in which relatives and friends
would “sing all night.”
The Freedmans came from
an Old World culture, and they
were set up in an Old World
kind of way, too.

His mother and her aunt
ran a beauty parlor together,
and with Robert Freedman
a young lawyer and Molly a
22-year-old beauty, they saw
them as a natural fit. So her
aunt, Sophie Fireman, invited
Robert Freedman and his
parents to a dinner party at her
house. When they arrived, there
was no party. Just a conversa-
tion between Robert Freedman
and Molly’s uncle at the
basement bar.

Later, Molly walked in with
her parents and her father
addressed Robert Freedman’s
mother by her maiden name.

They had grown up in neigh-
boring shtetls in Ukraine.

Six weeks later, the couple
was engaged. Though he may
not have had a choice in the
matter, Robert Freedman
agreed that his wife-to-be was
“gorgeous,” he said.

But his father may have
liked her even more.

“‘She understands Yiddish,
she reads Yiddish, she writes
Yiddish, and with it all,
she’s good-looking,’” Robert
Freedman recalled, quoting his
old man.

After marrying and having
two sons, Albert and David,
Molly Freedman asked her
husband a question one day.

“I miss the music,” she
said. “Why don’t you look
for records, and bring them
home?” That’s when the collecting
started. David Freedman, now 59,
remembers his father playing
the music in their living
room. He also recalls his
father getting up on Sunday
mornings to listen to the “The
Barry Reisman Show.”
“It was the only place in
Philadelphia that was on the
radio with Yiddish music back
in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s,”
David Freedman said.

What started as a fun
nostalgic activity grew into
something more over time.

Robert Freedman began
cataloging the records and
songs into a computer database.

When the Freedmans lived
in an apartment complex in
Rittenhouse Square, word
got out about the collection,
JEWISH EXPONENT
and they started receiving
donations. “The collection got so large
that we had to buy another
apartment, a studio apartment,
to store the recordings,” Robert
Freedman said.

Researchers started visiting
and asking to stay over at the
studio, so the Freedmans put
a bed in there. One Klezmer
enthusiast stayed for more than
a week.

“We finally decided that it
belonged in an institution,”
Robert Freedman said.

Robert Freedman wanted
to donate it to an organiza-
tion in New York City. But
again, it was his wife who made
the final call: It had to stay in
Philadelphia. “Molly said, ‘We’ll never see
it again,’” Robert Freedman
recalled. “‘It belongs here.’”
When they
donated the collection to Penn, the
Freedmans got an appraisal
valuing it at $240,000,
according to Robert Freedman.

But it’s worth much more than
just dollars.

The Freedmans celebrate
their 63rd wedding anniversary
this month. Molly Freedman
has dementia, but she can still
remember the Yiddish songs
and sing along.

Robert Freedman will start
a song, and Molly Freedman
will “go right into it,” as her
husband described it, and then
the two will sing together.

“The significance to the
Jewish community,” said their
granddaughter, Maya Pratt-
Freedman, a Penn student
who recently made a short film
about the archive for a final
assignment. “It’s a gold mine of
the past.” l
jsaffren@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
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