(JTA) — Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera laid the foundation stone for the Jewish Documentation and Research Center of Mexico.
Several Mexican Jewish and non-Jewish officials attended Sunday’s ceremony to launch the new headquarters of the center. The building, located next to the historic Rodfe Sedek synagogue, is expected to open in one year.
“I was very attentive to the architectural project and saw how I could project from outside this double meaning: the history of a synagogue and the modern historical projection of a memory that will continue to call for all the Jewish people,” Mancera said, Televisa TV news channel reported.
The center will host an array of Jewish material, including general documents, photos and an audiovisual archive. In addition, it will have a library with over 20,000 books in several languages, a newspaper library, an auditorium for congresses and seminars, and classrooms, according to the Excelsior newspaper.
“According to the Jewish tradition, stone is an element that does not age, does not wither, so it is the symbol of conservation and survival, curiously the purpose of the institution that we are going to erect in this place is precisely that, a center of conservation, a center in which the history of our people survive without waning,” said Ruben Goldberg, the synagogue board’s president.
The president of the Central Committee of the Jewish Community in Mexico, Solomon Achar, and other Jewish officials stressed the importance of building the center side by side with the synagogue dating from 1931 in order to boost the concept of a Jewish meeting point that will also help preserve the history of the Jewish community in Mexico.
Mancera tweeted after the ceremony that it was an “honor” to join the Jewish community for the rite.
