Sousa Mendes Foundation presents: Crypto-Jews and the Search for Identity

A  new documentary film Between the Stone and the Flower: The Duality of  the Conversos profiles the life and work of the renowned genealogist  Genie Milgrom. After successfully tracing her Jewish roots to  pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal, she founded the Converso Genealogy  Project. In this capacity she helps other “crypto-Jews” or “conversos”  to reclaim their Jewish roots and is now overseeing the vast  international effort to digitize the Vatican’s Jewish records. This event is brought to you by the Sousa Mendes Foundation. Register today: https://tinyurl.com/SousaMendesCryptoJews

Genie  Milgrom was born in Havana, Cuba, into a Roman Catholic family of  Spanish ancestry. In an unparalleled work of genealogy, she was able to  fully document her unbroken maternal lineage 22 generations going back  as far as 1405 to her Jewish ancestors in pre-Inquisition Spain and  Portugal. She is the past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society  of Greater Miami and past president of the Society for Crypto-Judaic  Studies. She is the author of My 15 Grandmothers, as well as How I found  My 15 Grandmothers: A Step by Step Guide, and Pyre to Fire. She brings  awareness to the topic of people tracing their Jewish roots to the time  of the Inquisition who are returning to Judaism. Genie is director of  the Converso Genealogy Project, digitizing Inquisition files around the  world.

Drora Arussy is the Executive Director of the Jewish Unity Through Diversity Institute, unitytdiversity.com where she coordinates the Certificate of Sephardic Ancestry together  with Genie Milgrom and Reconectar. She has produced eight online courses  and organized international academic conferences in New York, across  Israel, in Cambridge (UK) and in Rabat (Morocco) during her time as  Senior Director of the American Sephardi Federation’s Institute of  Jewish Experience. Drora is the co-editor of Jews and Muslims in  Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds (Lexington Press, 2021) and author of  Leah Nassi of Lisbon, an historical novel (Amazon, 2022). Her passion  for pride in one’s identity is at the core of her endeavors