Spanish towns plan mock wedding at Sukkot festival

Two Spanish towns are preparing a Judaica festival featuring a mock wedding to celebrate their lost Jewish heritage.

The event, co-organized by non-Jews from San Juan and Rio Jerte in the province Extremadura in northwestern Spain, will also include a Judaica market and songs on Sept. 28-29, according festival coordinator Antonio Gil.

“This is a local event for the local population so that people who live here know that part of our history,” he said. Gil added that the idea for the festival came last year from Maria Dolores Marin of San Juan, and is not geared toward attracting tourists.

In planning the event, Gil and Marin consulted Avigail Cohen Komer, an Israeli Jew who owns a shop in the nearby village of Hervas, where a Jewish festival is held every year.

Northern Spain used to have a population of hundreds of thousands of Jews before the Spanish Inquisition, which began in 1492 and  drove countless Jews into exile. Others were forcefully converted to Christianity, though for decades many of the converted continued to practice Judaism in secret.

In recent years, municipalities across Portugal and Spain have been spending millions of dollars renovating Jewish heritage sites. Gil said the festival’s organizers will decorate some homes that used to belong to Jews.

The municipality of Zamora, some 130 miles north of the two towns, also announced its own Jewish project earlier this month, in which it will post plaques near its places of Jewish historical interest, according to the daily La Opinion-El Correo de Zamora.

Zamora’s head of economic development, trade and tourism, Francisco Javier Gonzalez, told El Correo that the city has “a historic debt” to its Sephardic ancestors, who were forced to leave the Zamora and Castile and Leon.