ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question:  What is the Certificate of Sephardic Ancestry that is issued by the American Sephardi Federation’s Institute of Jewish Experience good for?

Genie Milgrom was born in Havana Cuba into a Roman Catholic Family of Spanish Ancestry. In an unparalleled work of genealogy, she was able to fully document her unbroken maternal lineage going back as far as 1430 to pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal, proving that she is a descendent of forced converts. Since then, she has dedicated her life to researching and transmitting information about the Crypto-Jews, and helping others in their journey to trace their own heritage. 

She is the author of the book My 15 Grandmothers, as well as How I Found My 15 Grandmothers, A Step By Step Guide. The books were both winners of the 2015 Latino Author Book Awards. Genie’s cookbook, Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers, contains family recipes that were passed down from generation to generation from the time of the Inquisition to the 20^th century.  Her historical novel Pyre to Fire juxtaposes the story of a Jewish family living in Spain at the time of the Inquisition and her own fascinating autobiography.

Genie writes for several online sites and her work has appeared in the Jerusalem Post, The Miami Herald and other publications around the world. In 2012 she received the Florida State Genealogical Society’s Genealogy Outstanding Achievement Award for the pioneering work she has done in Genealogy.

She has won a number of awards for her books and research, and is active in organizations that deal with genealogy and Crypto-Judaic issues. In previous programs we spoke with Genie about different aspects of her work. You can listen to all these programs by clicking on the links on this page.

Genie is currently the Anousim Coordinator for Kulanu, the organization that was founded in 1994 to support isolated, emerging, and returning Jewish communities around the world. She is specifically working with communities in the Americas. You can hear more about Kulanu by listening to the program we did with their Vice President in 2018. Genie is also using her expertise in genealogy to help people research their own Sephardic family history in order to obtain Certificates of Sephardic Ancestry that are being issued by the American Sephardi Federation’s Institute of Jewish Experience. (Listen to our program with the Senior Director of the IJE here.)

Past programs with Genie Milgrom:

Genie Milgrom’s 15 Grandmothers

Ancestral Memory and Knesset Conference on “Bnei Anousim”

The Converso Project

Crypto-Jews in Latin America

Pyre to Fire

Recipes of the Crypto-Jews