See Joseph “Joe” Kirshenbaum

Life cycles

IN MEMORIAM

JOSEPH “JOE” KIRSHENBAUM Continued from page 1

moved to California, there were daily calls to go over receipts and sales numbers. Life was full in Palm Springs; Audrey became a Nationally ranked Tennis player and has a court named after her at their club. Joe came to play tennis regularly as well. Additionally, he became a regular volunteer at the stroke center in Palm Springs. Joe was blessed with 54 years of marriage to Audrey. After her death he was blessed to find another 15 years of partnership with Virginia Allen. Joe lived a full life; he was a pillar of society who treated others as he wished to be treated. He often shared his love of Omaha and where he grew up by being a tour guide for North Omaha and the 25th St. synagogue. He supported the Temple as the kids were growing up and studied for their B’nai Mitzvah, and he instilled and lived the importance of family. “Dad asked ‘don’t cry for me when I die, I had such a great life and family,’” Bill said. “Nothing was left unsaid.” Joe, if there are tears today, they are tears for the amazing relationship and times we were blessed with, and for the sadness for us that that chapter has come to an end. Joe was a mensch, to true example of humanity, and a blessing to all who called him friend or family. A blessing to this whole community. He was preceded in death by parents, Meyer and Dora Kirshenbaum; his wife of 54 years, Audrey Wolf Kirshenbaum; his partner for 15 years, Virginia Allen; and sisters, Golda Kirshenbaum and Rose Becker. He is survived by his sons and daughters-in-law, Tom and Kate and Bill and Linda; son, Dick Kirshenbaum; daughter and son-inlaw, Kim and Todd Znamenacek; seven grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; brother, Kevee Kirshenbaum; and sister, Phyliss Rifkin. Memorials may be sent to the Rose Blumkin Jewish Home, or the organization of your choice.

SYNAGOGUES

Continued from page 18

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Olympic news

SHIRA HANAU

JTA Countries that bar athletes from other countries will not be allowed to host international sports championships, the International Olympic Committee said in a letter last week. The statement followed the cancellation of the men’s squash world championship last month, which was set to be held in Malaysia Dec. 7, after the country refused to allow Israeli athletes to participate in the contest. Israel and Malaysia do not maintain diplomatic relations and Israelis are barred from visiting the South Asian country. Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad once said he was “glad to be labeled antisemitic.” “We urge all [international federations] to be extremely vigilant when allocating and organizing international sports competitions,” leaders of the International Olympic Committee wrote in a letter, according to the Jerusalem Post.

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Meet Angelina Muñiz Huberman

ALAN GRABINSKY

MEXICO CITY | JTA When Angelina Muñiz Huberman was six years old, her mother shut the main door of their apartment in Mexico City and, whispering as if under persecution, told her that she descended from Jews. “She told me that if I ever needed to get recognized by other fellow Jews,” Huberman said, “I should make the sign of the Kohanim” — a hand gesture representing an ancient priestly blessing. That moment sparked a keen interest in her family’s Jewish heritage, which would set her on the path to becoming one of Mexico’s best-known novelists on Jewish themes and foremost scholars on Sephardim and Crypto-Judaism — people who were forced to renounce or hide their Jewishness in the face of the Spanish Inquisition. Last month, Huberman, 84, was inducted into Mexico’s most prestigious literary body, the Mexican Academy of Language, which was established decades after Mexican independence to protect and promote Mexican intonations and uses of Spanish. Earning membership in the 36-chair academic body is a highly selective process in which new members need to be voted in by current ones. Of the nine women members of the board, four have Jewish ancestry; some, such as the writer Margo Glanz, daughter of the Yiddish poet Jacobo Glanz, have actively dealt with their Jewish ancestry in their most important texts. But Huberman’s work stands out because of her research on Ladino, an old form of Judeo-Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. Besides being a pioneer in Sephardic studies in Mexico and researching crypto-Jews such as those in her family, Huberman has also focused on mystical Jewish traditions, including kabbalah. Her academic work often influences her fiction. One of her latest novels, titled Los Esperandos, tells the story of Sephardic pirates in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean in the 17th century. Born in the south of France in 1936, Huberman’s father, Alfredo Muñiz, was a Spanish journalist who wrote for the Heraldo newspaper in Madrid. When Franco won the Spanish

Civil War, her family was forced out of Spain and into France, which they had to flee again in 1939, when the Nazis advanced into the country. They landed in Cuba and lived in the countryside for a short time before establishing themselves in Mexico. Huberman reminisced about her childhood on the island in her 1995 book Castles in the Earth, which she called a “pseudo-memoir” that mixes fact and fiction. They uprooted again to Mexico City, in 1942, where Alfredo set up an outpost of a medical lab testing company owned by a relative who lived in New York. The family lived among other emigres in the Condesa neighborhood, a hub of Yiddishspeaking middle-class Jews at the time. This is where she learned about her Jewish background. Her first works of fiction use interior monologues to reflect on what it means to hide one’s identity. In her first novel, Morada Interior (or Inner Dwelling-Place), published in 1972, she writes an internal monologue from the point of view of Teresa de Ávila (sometimes called Teresa de Jesus), a Spanish Christian mystic who came from a family of converted Jews. Huberman used pieces from the nun’s real diary to fictionalize an account of how she becomes conflicted by her hidden Jewish identity. Muniz’s husband, Alberto Huberman, was born in Cuba and migrated to Mexico after the Cuban revolution to finish his medical studies. A member of the leftist-Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair, he had previously lived in Israel, where he co-founded Kibbutz Gaash. “He built the houses, the water tower, the whole infrastructure,” Huberman said. They married in 1959. For more than three decades, Muniz has taught courses in Hispano-Hebraic literature in Mexico’s National Autonomous University, a behemoth of nearly 250,000 students with a major campus in Mexico City. She said that many of her students, after taking her course, have realized that they also have crypto-Jewish backgrounds, and have undergone formal conversions to Judaism. Beyond her Jewish side, Huberman also considers herself a representative of the Spanish Exile, a name that refers to socalled “republicanos” who fled Spain’s Civil War under the auspices of Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas at the end of the 1940s. These intellectuals and writers have taken important roles within academic bodies like the MAL, and founded liberal education institutions like the Colegio de México. “In many ways,” Huberman said, “I’ve been through a double exile.”

Edited for length. You can find the full article at www.omahajewishpress.com.

Angelina Muñiz Huberman is one of a few Jews in the presti-

gious Mexican Academy of Language. Credit: Huberman