Mexico City’s mayor lays foundation stone for new Jewish center
Several Mexican officials, both Jews and non-Jews, attend ceremony to launch headquarters expected to open in a year
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RIO DE JANEIRO — The mayor of Mexico City, Miguel Angel Mancera, laid the foundation stone for the Jewish Documentation and Research Center of Mexico.
Several Mexican Jewish and non-Jewish officials attended Sunday’s ceremony to launch the new headquarters of the center. The building will be located next to the historic Rodfe Sedek synagogue. It is expected to open in one year.
“I was very attentive to the architectural project and saw how I could project from outside this double meaning: the history of a synagogue and the modern historical projection of a memory that will continue to call for all the Jewish people,” Mancera said, Televisa TV news channel reported.
The center will host a wide variety of Jewish material including general documents, photos and an audiovisual archive. In addition, it will have a library with over 20,000 books in several languages, newspaper library, auditorium for congresses and seminars as well as classrooms, according to Excelsior newspaper.
“According to the Jewish tradition, stone is an element that does not age, does not wither, so it is the symbol of conservation and survival, curiously the purpose of the institution that we are going to erect in this place is precisely that, a center of conservation, a center in which the history of our people survives without waning,” said Ruben Goldberg, the synagogue’s president of the Board of Trustees.
The president of the Central Committee of the Jewish Community in Mexico, Solomon Achar, and other Jewish officials stressed the importance of building the center side-by-side with the synagogue dating from 1931 in order to boost the concept of a Jewish meeting point that will also help preserve the history of the Jewish community in Mexico.
Mancera tweeted after the ceremony, calling it an “honor” to join the Jewish community for the ceremony.
Un honor acompañar a la comunidad judía en la colocación de la 1era piedra del nuevo Centro de Investigación Judío de México #CDIJUM #mm pic.twitter.com/MEduMo6YhI
— Miguel Ángel Mancera (@ManceraMiguelMX) November 6, 2016
The Times of Israel Community.