Genie grew up in a Roman Catholic family from Cuba and always, inexplicably, felt Jewish in her soul. Genie returned to the Jewish people and was able to document an unbroken maternal lineage going back to 1405 and Pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal. Under the guise of Family Customs, her grandmothers taught her many of the Jewish dietary laws as she watched them work in the kitchen. She was also able to find hundreds of recipes that her grandmothers carried around from country to country for centuries with many of them being recipes used by the Crypto Jews. She will highlight the holiday of “Saint Esther” and is honored to be a link in this amazing chain of inspiring women today.

Inês was born in Bragança, NE Portugal, in a Roman Catholic family. Just like many other families in the region, the awareness of some Jewish ancestry and the consequent duality of identities inspired her to study local Jewish history. For the last 14 years she has been devoted to studying the Iberian Jewish history from a population genetics perspective. Knowing that much of the individual self-awareness and collective memory regarding Jewish ancestry was vanishing, she started the fieldwork of DNA-collecting among people who not only identify themselves as Jewish descendants, but were also identified as such by their non-Jewish neighbors. This self-identification was grounded on genealogical surveys, inquisitional processes, family histories and traditions. She will show how the resurgence and revival of this Jewish legacy in her region relates to the celebration of Purim.