Statement of Significance :ochocandelas.com:

STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE

Ocho Candelas takes its title from an old Turkish-Sephardic Hanukkah song and is a new documentary that explores the creation and development of a group of Jews-by-choice in Mexico. The film closely analyzes religious conversion and the bigger social and cultural impact it has on society as a whole.

The beginning of the 21st Century will be remembered as a time when Judaism struggled to answer one of its pivotal questions: “What makes a man or a woman Jewish?” The only answer has been an ongoing debate between two possible alternatives: “blood or faith.” Ocho Candelas tries to join the discussion by looking at the example of the community of Beth Shmuel in Veracruz, Mexico.

Beth Shmuel consists of a group of Jews that were converted by the American Rabbi Samuel S. Lerer twenty years ago. This community has had a troubled existence dealing with the difficulties of being Jewish in a mostly Catholic area and surviving, despite a lack of interaction with the Mexican Jewish establishment, which has been slow to embrace these “new” Jews.

Moreover, Ocho Candelas underlines the universality of the Jewish experience. Argentinean, American, Mexican and Israeli Jews all play parts in the documentary and their reaction to the problem of conversion offers both a global and heterogeneous response to what has become a generalized Jewish issue.

By exploring what has pushed these Mexicans to convert to Judaism, Ocho Candelas has managed to shed light on the complex question of Jewish faith, while succeeding in highlighting one of the most difficult pages in Jewish history: Crypto-Judaism. What happened to the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who came to America in the 16th and 17th centuries? Ocho Candelas makes the connection between the new Jewish converts of Mexico and these lost Jewish immigrants of the past.

Although Abraham, the first Jew on the planet, wasn’t born Jewish, Jews in recent times have forgotten that conversion is permitted and praised by the Talmud. When someone decides to convert, he is not only entering a new world; but bidding farewell to an old one. An establishment, a family, a group, might feel betrayed by the person who has decided to leave, and these are only some of the aspects someone who decides to convert has to experience. To understand and approve of conversion has always been a struggle. But, in Mexico, conversion seems impossible. Except for Rabbi Lerer’s congregation, most communities refuse to practice conversion. Ocho Candelas brings a new perspective on the question of conversion, providing the testimony of a group that has never been heard, but whose stories might prove vital for future understanding of the Jewish religion.