Before the days of the Spanish Inquisition, a large Jewish community flourished on the island of Mallorca.
Every autumn, thatched huts sprang up all over the island, built by the Jews in accordance with the laws of Sukkot.
All this changed when the persecution of the Inquisition began, from 1488 (four years before the Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula), until it was officially abolished hundreds of years later, in 1834.
This year, however, the tiny Jewish community of the capital, Palma de Mallorca, was determined to return and publicly celebrate the traditional Sukkot holiday.
In preparation for the holiday, the community, together with the Palma Municipality, erected what the organizers call "the island's first public sukkah since the Inquisition," in what was once the city's Jewish quarter.
"This is one of several new beginnings for the Jews of Mallorca, which is especially significant because it restores the old crown to the community," explained Danny Rothstein, founder of "Study of Mallorca" and secretary of the Jewish community in the Balearic Islands.
Rothstein, a New Jersey-based tourist and video producer, has been leading efforts to advance Majorca's Jewish community since moving to the island in 2014.
Members of the Jewish community of Palma de Mallorca erect the first public sukkah since the Inquisition on the island, Photo: The Jewish community of the Balearic Islands
For the sake of historical accuracy, it should be noted that since the Inquisition Sukkot have been established at the site in the past.
In the capital and the island of Majorca, a popular holiday destination near the east coast of Spain, a small but active Jewish community of about a hundred members has been run for decades, as well as several Jewish non-residents.
They are now celebrating the fiftieth anniversary since British non-residents founded the community in 1971. Palma also has a synagogue, a small Jewish museum and even a rabbi who lives on the island.
But this Sukkot holiday, it was the first time a sukkah was built on public land and funded by the local municipality.
The sukkah was established on the grounds of the Ca'n Oms estate, the seat of the local Ministry of Culture and other municipal bodies.
Jews and non-Jews alike were invited to enjoy the cultural contents of the "Study of Mallorca," which lasted about two weeks and included lectures in the sukkah itself and tours of the area.
The Public Sukkah is part of a pan-European initiative called the "Days of Jewish Culture in Europe", a series of events marking the Jewish heritage in dozens of European cities every year, in September and October.
The construction of the public sukkah is the latest in a series of moves initiated by Rothstein and others in an attempt to perpetuate the Jewish presence in Mallorca since the days before the Inquisition, the one that forced many of them to convert to Christianity and turned them into Chuatas, the local nickname given to martyrs.
On Rosh Hashanah, the island's Jews hosted a festive prayer and a musical concert to mark the New Year, in collaboration with the local center for Catalan culture, in a garden located in the Old Jewish Quarter.
For many of the participants it was a symbolic act, due to a particularly painful chapter in the history of the Jewish community in Mallorca.
In 1677, some Jews secretly held a Yom Kippur prayer in a garden outside the city walls, effectively endangering their lives as they continued to live according to their Jewish faith, even though they publicly impersonated Christians.
The local Jews say that when the Christian rulers heard about the existence of the prayer, they took care to salt the garden soil to ensure that nothing would grow there anymore, and then severely eradicated any trace of the Jewish tradition on the island.
In recent years, the authorities have been trying to acknowledge and atone for the horrors of the past.
In 2018, a memorial plaque was unveiled in one of Palma's squares, where 37 Jews were publicly burned in secret, in what became known as the "Jewish bonfire."
Members of the Jewish community in the process of establishing the sukkah, Photo: The Jewish community of the Balearic Islands
In 2015, the city helped build a small Jewish museum in the former Jewish Quarter.
The area, which includes sandstone facades and quiet, cobbled streets, was once a bustling and thriving commercial area, with a variety of Jewish businesses, including shoemakers, tanners and butchers.
Today only a handful of Jews live there, and most of the visitors are tourists.
In the same year, laws were passed in the parliaments of Spain and Portugal that granted the descendants of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula the right to citizenship.
Millions of dollars of public money are invested in the preservation and development of Jewish heritage sites in these countries.
Many Chuatas families continued to cling to Judaism in the dark.
Even those who did not observe their Jewish customs at that time were treated with suspicion, and were excluded from society in a variety of different and strange ways.
Many Chuatas families still have Jewish traditions today, such as lighting candles on Shabbat, covering mirrors on days of mourning and thorough cleaning for Passover.
Over time, the Jewish population on the island diminished.
But ironically, the exclusion of the Chuatas from general society played a key role in the revival of Judaism in Mallorca, according to historians: Because they were not allowed to marry Christians freely, the Chuatas did not assimilate and marry among themselves.
It helped them maintain a distinct identity until the 1970s, when the tyrannical rule of Francisco Franco finally collapsed, and Spanish society opened up to the rest of Europe.
At that time there were thousands of people living in Mallorca who defined themselves as Chuatas, a minority now numbering about twenty thousand women and men.
Members of the Jewish community of Palma de Mallorca and the built sukkah, Photo: The Jewish community of the Balearic Islands
In recent years, Chuatas have returned to Judaism, converted to Judaism, and taken over the management of the community.
In 2018, two Chuatas were elected to the four-member community council, and last June, the community received, for the first time since the Inquisition, a rabbi born in Palma to the Chuatas family, Rabbi Nissan ben Avraham.
This process, as well as the public events that took place on Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot, are a victory - as Jasca Wallis, a Chuata who returned to Judaism and who is married to Tony Pinya, also a Chuata and one of the members of the Jewish Community Council, told JTA.
"It is a victory over the Inquisition and proof that we are like the phoenix, and we have risen again from the ashes," she concluded.