Reports Here Confirm Persecution of Jews in Spain

The 1,000 Jews who remain in Barcelona under the Franco regime have been subjected to complete throttling of their religious life, according to first-hand accounts given to the J.T.A. today by travellers arriving from the Spanish seaport. Their accounts confirmed previous reports by the J.T.A. from Geneva (See JTA News April 21) and from Santiago, Chile, (JTA News April 2) regarding the situation of the Jews in the Catalonian capital.

The city’s one synagogue has been closed, Jewish worship prohibited, Jewish marriage, circumcision and burial banned, and Jewish children required to attend Catholic religious instruction in the schools or go without schooling, according to these eyewitnesses. Driven by fear, some Jews have become converts to Catholicism, they added.

The persecution is entirely religious, or at least was so up to the time the J.T.A. informants left Spain, they said. All republican sympathizers among Barcelona Jews left the city before it fell to the Franco forces, they said, and those who remained were mostly merchants, generally prosperous, and many of them Franco sympathizers who felt they had nothing to fear from the new regime.

Nevertheless, the J.T.A. informants related, immediately after the Franco forces took the city their police chief ordered the synagogue closed and locked, and took possession of the keys. Appeals to the military and civil governors to reopen the house of worship have been fruitless, they said. Vandals entered the locked synagogue, they added, defiled it, tore up the Scrolls of the Law and holy books and strewed them on the floor, and stole silver ornaments.

The Jewish cemetery, which adjoins a Catholic cemetery, was closed to Jews, they said, and Catholics were required to bury their dead there although the land is, by Catholic tenets, unconsecrated. Jews are required to use a Protestant cemetery.