Eshel Hanassi is an agricultural school and youth village near Beer Sheva, Israel. Thirty families who work at the school live in homes on the yishuv and it has a small core of Torah-observant families who live there as well.
One would consider it an unlikely place to find a vestige of the Inquisition, but not only is a descendent of Cryptic Jews living there, but he has righted the wrong of centuries past, restoring Jewish continuity to his ancestral family who had perished.
David Curiel, 66 was born in San Antonio, Texas to a Catholic family of Mexican Americans. He had no knowledge of any links of his family to Judaism. Nada. And then he discovered the text that changed his life. He was studying Criminology at St. Mary’s University in 1975, doing research on genealogy. He happened to look up his family name in the Jewish Encyclopedia and discovered that it originated in a small town in Spain of the same name. Further research uncovered that it was the name of Jewish Conversos who had fled Spain to Portugal, Hamburg and the Netherlands, among other places. Curiel means G-d called out to me.
David asked his grandfather if he knew of any Jewish ancestry within the family. His grandfather answered that there had been a rumor that his ancestors had been Jewish but there was no record, documentation or even leftover rituals to link the Curiels to the Jews of Spain.
Curiel says that the tentacles of the Inquisition were very strong in Mexico so he never found any Jews with that name still living there. He has, however, located Jews in other countries with the surname Curiel.
But Curiel was hooked. He was working at a bank at the university and asked a Jewish colleague if he would take him to Jewish services with him. The colleague agreed and took him to a Conservative service.
“I was really pleasantly surprised to see no statues in the synagogue. I mean it is one of the first commandments.” Curiel asked the rabbi if he could start studying with him. The rabbi was reluctant to do so because Curiel was so young but he was determined and, within a year, Curiel was the youngest person the rabbi had ever led to conversion. Curiel had a bris and was immersed in the mikveh and he kept his already Jewish name.
This interest in Judaism was foreshadowed when Curiel was still younger.
“When I was in first grade, our school had a book drive. The aim was to have each parent buy a book, which their child would read, and then donate to the library. There were lots of books but my eyes were drawn to Stories of the Old Testament. It was the most expensive book but I begged my father to buy it, and eventually he did.”
Curiel says that his mother would read a chapter to him every night and he would try to imagine what Beer Sheva looked like, never imagining in a million years that he would buy a house there, which he will be living in when he retires from teaching English at the end of this year.
Curiel has been researching his family tree for decades and has learned some astounding facts. There was a Rav Israel Ben Meir di Curiel, a Sage in Tzfat, who sat on the Beit Din in the 16th century along with Rav Yossef Caro. There were also 35 Jews named Curiel murdered in the Holocaust.
In his research, Curiel came across a ketubbah, in the Israel Museum, the oldest known surviving ketubbah in the western world, from a wedding in the Netherlands in 1617. The groom – David Curiel and the bride Dona Rachel Curiel.
He’s also been to Beit Hatefutzoth where he was treated with the reverence of a rare exhibit himself as soon as he mentioned his name. “They were shocked to see a real Curiel,” he says.
Although Curiel eventually discovered that Conservative Judaism didn’t make him a Halachic Jew, he was forthright enough with himself to know that he didn’t want to take on the burden of mitzvot. Especially at the time, when he was in officer’s training in the army and knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the mitzvot. But he was very keen on Israel.
He clearly remembers talking to his father about The Six-Day War and who was going to help Israel. It was obvious that they had help from a Higher Power. And then, when Operation Thunderbolt – the raid on Entebbe took place, it was electrifying for Curiel, and he promised himself he would make aliyah, which he did in 1982. “Best thing I ever did,” he says.
He met his wife, Yehudit, a Jewish woman from New Jersey on Kibbutz Keturah in the South, two and a half months after he made aliyah, and they married. The have two children – a son, Shai, and a daughter, Ilana – and seven grandchildren.
Here’s where the poetic justice meets Divine Providence and closes the historic circle. His daughter married an Azoulay, a family name of other Conversos who were originally from Spain and descended to Morocco, making his daughter and her three children Sephardic as well.
His son Shai, married Revital. Revital had had a serious kidney infection before she met her husband, and she made a promise to Hashem that if He healed her, she would name her four children after the four archangels. They have four boys named Uriel, Michael, Gavriel and Refael.
Curiel is counting the days till his imminent retirement, looking forward to the time when he can settle in the city where Abraham, the hero of his childhood book of stories made his home, which was also called an Eshel.
If you have any information about the Curiel family, you would like to share with him, you can do so at: [email protected].
