Jewish Film Festival Forces Spain to Focus on the Past : Culture: Madrid’s ‘Festival de Cine Judio’ helps people take a look at the lessons taught by the Inquisition and Expulsion.

Racist graffiti is scrawled on this city’s only synagogue, groups of young soccer fans wave swastika banners in the stadium, some toy shops sell Adolf Hitler dolls, and a common expression seems to be, “ Hacer una judiada, “ which means to do something Jewish--bad or greedy.

Most Spaniards have never met a Jew and there is widespread cultural amnesia about these people, who for centuries were an integral part of Spanish history and culture, until the forced conversions, and periods of the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion 500 years ago.

But now, the Spanish government has reached out to the Jews, joining forces with the Berkeley, Calif.-based Jewish Film Festival, in a weeklong filmic journey that ends this weekend.

With 24 films and audience discussions with 16 filmmakers, the “Festival de Cine Judio” is the biggest Jewish cultural event held in Spain in 500 years.

Enthusiastic audiences have been packing the Ministry of Culture’s Filmoteca Espanola, and after the screenings, the filmmakers, who flew in from seven countries, have been bombarded with questions.

Audiences were stunned by the “The Last Marranos,” a documentary about a group of Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Catholicism 400 years ago to survive the Inquisition, who still secretly observe Jewish rituals. Audiences saw other sides of Jewish life in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Ted Kotcheff’s comedy about a poor Jewish Canadian writer who marries an upper-class WASP, and Liv Ullmann in “La Amiga,” about the friendship of two Argentinian women who confront the ruling junta’s anti-Semitic and anti-leftist death squads.

A teary-eyed group of Spanish Civil War veterans attended “Forever Activists,” a documentary about the American veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 20% of whom were Jewish.

After seeing “Routes of Exile: A Moroccan Jewish Odyssey,” Spaniards asked Jewish and Arab Moroccans in the audience how they managed to live together so well for centuries. In “Trees Cry for Rain,” the story of a Turkish woman who is part of the last generation of native speakers of Ladino, 15th-Century Judeo-Spanish, some Spanish Jews in the audience recognized Ladino songs of their childhood.

“Seeing so many aspects of Jewish life in these movies has made me aware I have big voids of knowledge about Jewish culture and history,” said Alicia Fernandez,” a university student in Madrid.

In Spain, once home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, Jews are largely a forgotten people. There are only about 12,000 Jews in the country and about 4,000 in Madrid.

“Spaniards are really curious to see films on Sephardic subjects,” said Jose Maria Pardo, the Ministry of Culture’s director of the Filmoteca Espanola. “These films show there is no one way to define who Jews are.”

This festival is viewed as something of a coup staged by two women, Deborah Kaufman and Janis Plotkin, directors of the Jewish Film Festival, headquartered in Berkeley. After their festival played to sold-out audiences in Moscow in 1990, they got the idea of taking Jewish films to Madrid to commemorate the other side of 1492--the Expulsion of the Jews and Moslems from Spain. After approaching the Ministry of Culture last February, top government officials agreed to co-sponsor the festival.

“Through these films, we hope to break down Spanish stereotypes of Jews, showing Jews are a living, changing culture, not just relics or museum pieces,” says Kaufman, who founded the Jewish Film Festival in 1981.

“This festival is an alternative to all the Columbus hype,” added co-director Plotkin. “The Spanish are so focused on the exploration and the conquest and so little on the lessons of the Inquisition and Expulsion. The festival also brings a message of tolerance in a difficult economic period where ‘outsiders’ in Europe are again becoming victims.”