JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Orge Castellano is a journalist and social scientist from Spain. His works have appeared in The Forward, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among many others. Follow him on Twitter: @orgecastellano.
Orge Castellano is a journalist and social scientist from Spain. His works have appeared in The Forward, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among many others. Follow him on Twitter: @orgecastellano.
VENICE (JTA) — Through a narrow, fraying sottoportico, or Venetian alleyway, and across a wooden footbridge, there is a wide square enclosed by rows of multicolored buildings. Stepping into Venice’s Jewish Ghetto feels a bit like traveling back in time. On March 29, 1516, the Venetian Senate gated the city’s Jews here near a cannon…
(JTA) — A funeral procession outside a local church in Rome featured a casket wrapped in a Nazi swastika flag, sparking outrage in the Italian capital. The Roman Catholic Church strongly condemned the incident on Tuesday. In a statement, the Vicariate of Rome described the incident as “serious, offensive, and unacceptable.” The Italian news site…
MADRID (JTA) — A tiny Spanish town that has veered over the centuries from being a refuge for Jews to a rallying cry for their death was defaced with widespread antisemitic graffiti. Residents of Castrillo Mota de Judíos, a village in Northern Spain, began to discover the graffiti almost as soon as they woke Monday….
MADRID (JTA) — Located in the Priorat region of Spain, hidden in the steep hills and lush mountains of the Tarragona province, 100 miles southwest of Barcelona, sits the Celler de Capçanes winery. The cooperative winery, founded in 1933, has seen its reputation for high-end vintages grow steadily over the decades. And in 1995, it…
CARACAS, Venezuela (JTA) — The Champlain Towers building collapse in Surfside, Florida, impacted a range of communities whose members lived in the diverse Miami-Dade area: immigrants from across Latin America, Jewish retirees from the Northeast, Jews from Puerto Rico. One of them still feeling the most pain months later is the Jewish community of Caracas,…
MADRID (JTA) — After taking criticism from several Holocaust scholars and Jewish organizations, a Spanish university has canceled a course titled “Auschwitz/Gaza: A Testing Ground for Comparative Literature,” according to the European Jewish Congress. The course at the University of of Santiago of de Compostela in Galicia trivialized the Holocaust by comparing it to the…
MADRID (JTA) — Bernardo Pulido spent over $29,000 on genealogical documentation, Jewish heritage certificates, attorney fees and trips to Spain to prove his Sephardic heritage. But last month, like so many others attempting to gain Spanish citizenship through a 2015 law promising to right the wrongs of the Spanish Inquisition that expelled Jews, Pulido received…
MADRID (JTA) — Matilde Gini de Barnatán and her daughter Viviana Rajel Barnatán didn’t set out to make Jewish history in Spain. In the 1960s and ’70s, Matilde, now 85, established herself in Argentina as a prominent researcher, teacher and scholar of the history of Sephardic culture and the Spanish Inquisition in Ibero-America. Her extensive…
