In 2016, the Brazilian-American children’s writer Daniela Weil spent six months in the city of Salvador, in Brazil’s Bahia state. Unlike her native São Paulo, which has a thriving Jewish community, Salvador has only some 200 Jews. But Weil soon learned that the city—once the center of the Portuguese Inquisition in the New World—had a mikveh (ritual bath). She eventually met Bruno Guinard, the transplanted Frenchman who discovered the mikveh on the grounds of the hotel he owns, and told her its story:
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More about: Brazil, Inquisition, Latin America, Marranos, Mikveh