Professor Graciela Mochkofsky
Graciela Mochkofsky

An utterly fascinating, true story that begins in 2003 when Mochkofsky discovered on the internet a letter about a Rabbi who was converting Inca Indians to Orthodox Judaism. The letter led her to Segundo Villanueva, a Peruvian Catholic carpenter born in 1927, whose father had been murdered and left him only with a Bible. Villanueva founded his own community in the Amazon jungle and there (re) discovered Judaism. He and his children came to believe that they were descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who came to the Andes after the Spanish expulsion. His makeshift synagogue began drawing crowds of fervent believers, and then Israeli rabbis converted them and brought them to Israel where they settled in the West Bank. But, the story of Villanueva has drawn many others in the Andes to search for their Jewish roots.