The prophet Obadiah named Spain by name twenty-five centuries before a single Jew set foot there in exile. Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain, and for nearly a century, tens of thousands of descendants of the Jews exiled and forcibly converted there have knocked on a door that Jewish communities themselves sealed shut. Now Israel’s Nascent Sanhedrin has issued a ruling challenging that century-old prohibition, potentially clearing a path home for a population Obadiah’s prophecy already claimed as Israel’s own.
The prophet Obadiah, who foresaw the very moment now unfolding in South America, described the final ingathering of Israel’s scattered exiles. Obadiah declared: “And the exiles of this host of the children of Israel, who are among the Canaanites as far as Zarephath, and the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad, shall possess the cities of the Negev” (Obadiah 1:20).
Sepharad, the Hebrew name for Spain, appears in this verse alongside a promise that Israel’s exiles there will one day return to their land. The Sanhedrin’s ruling treats that promise as unfinished business.
The 1927 Ban
The controversy traces back to a communal decree enacted in 1927 by the Syrian Jewish community of Buenos Aires. The decree barred converts from joining the community. The city’s Ashkenazi community adopted the same policy, and over time it became standard practice across nearly every recognized Jewish community in Latin America, according to a Jerusalem Post report on the ruling.
Yaffah Batya daCosta, founder and CEO of Ezra L’Anousim, told the Jerusalem Post that the decree originally targeted a narrow problem: Jewish men marrying non-Jewish women whose sincerity as converts was in doubt. But the ban, once written, applied to everyone. DaCosta traced the decision to the trauma its authors were still living through. Spanish and Portuguese Jews who remained in Iberia after the expulsion decrees had been forcibly baptized into Roman Catholicism, and when they fled to Latin America, the Inquisition followed them. The Catholic Church persecuted these secret Jews for four hundred years; the last auto-da-fé, a public burning at the stake, took place in Mexico City in 1830. DaCosta believes the 1927 rabbis were protecting their congregations from that same danger by closing the door to conversion altogether.
A Bureaucratic Trap
The descendants of those forced converts, the Bnei Anusim, began seeking formal conversion in growing numbers roughly three decades ago. They ran into a wall Israeli law had inadvertently built. Israel’s Interior Ministry recognizes conversions performed within communities it classifies as “recognized and active.” The 1927 ban bars Bnei Anusim from joining those very communities, leaving many to form independent congregations that Israeli authorities do not recognize for the purposes of the Law of Return.
DaCosta calls it a bureaucratic paradox. Young men and women across Latin America have converted, identify as religious Zionists, and dream of serving in the IDF, she told the Jerusalem Post, yet Israel’s classification system keeps them locked out because their communities are labeled “emerging” rather than “recognized.”
Genetic Evidence of An Ancient Tie
The scale of the population involved is far larger than the converts alone. Rabbi Michael Freund, founder of Shavei Israel, reported in a 2018 Israel365 column on a study published in Nature Communications that sampled 6,500 people born in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, and compared them with 2,300 reference individuals from 117 populations worldwide. The geneticists found that 23 percent, nearly one in four Latin Americans tested, carry Jewish genetic ancestry. Combined with an earlier study in the American Journal of Human Genetics finding that 20 percent of Spain and Portugal’s combined population of 50 million carries Sephardi Jewish ancestry, the data points to tens of millions of people across the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world descended from Jews forced to abandon their faith five centuries ago.
The Ruling Itself
The Nascent Sanhedrin issued its ruling on July 6. It calls on the Chief Rabbinate and the Interior Ministry to accept Latin America’s converted communities as a group, stating that these communities “have undergone Orthodox conversion according to its rules and are fully observing the Torah and commandments.” The ruling further calls for sending conversion courts from Israel to Latin America and for Israeli authorities to examine and validate conversions performed by courts already operating there.
DaCosta estimates that if the Chief Rabbinate and Interior Ministry accept the ruling, between 10,000 and 15,000 Orthodox converts across Latin America would become eligible for aliyah, with roughly ten times that number of extended family expected to follow. She compares the request to the precedent already set for the Bnei Menashe of India and the Ethiopian Jewish community, both of whom Israel absorbed as distinct groups.
Rooted in The Bible Itself
The Sanhedrin’s appendix, running past 2,500 words, draws on the Talmud, Maimonides, and the Ben Ish Chai, the nineteenth-century Sephardi sage and kabbalist, to argue that the 1927 ban conflicts with the Bible’s repeated command to love and protect the ger, the convert, a commandment stated 36 separate times.
That argument echoes a prediction made five centuries earlier by Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, the Spanish-Jewish statesman and biblical commentator who fled the very expulsion that produced the Anusim. Writing in his commentary on the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy, the Abarbanel insisted that the Anusim would one day “return to G-d in their heart,” and that God would bring them close according to each person’s status and ability. In his commentary on the twentieth chapter of Ezekiel, he went further, writing that in the End of Days, God would awaken in the hearts of the Anusim a desire to return, so that all of God’s sheep would rejoin the flock. The Abarbanel wrote those words while his own world, and Spanish Jewry with it, was collapsing around him. He staked his prediction on the text of the Bible itself, not on any visible sign that his exiled brethren would ever come home.
The Cost of Waiting
DaCosta describes the current pathway to aliyah for converted Bnei Anusim as narrow, expensive, and inaccessible to most who seek it. A small number reach Israel through nonprofit organizations, study in yeshivot, undergo a second conversion under the Chief Rabbinate’s framework, and only then apply to immigrate. She argues that the broader Jewish and Israeli public remains largely unaware that communities across Latin America have spent decades seeking reintegration into the Jewish people, because the history of the Inquisition and crypto-Judaism receives little attention in contemporary Jewish education.
The Ruling, In Its Own Words
The Nascent Sanhedrin issued its ruling on 21 Tammuz (July 6), sitting as a beit din, a rabbinical court, on the specific question of Bnei Anusim conversion and communal acceptance. The ruling opens by describing the 1927 ban and the barrier it has since placed before the Interior Ministry’s willingness to grant entry visas to Bnei Anusim seeking conversion in Israel. It states plainly that the ban, whatever its original intent, has hardened into something its own authors never sanctioned: “It should be noted that in the original enactment it was possible to accept into the community converts who had converted according to halacha… and the ban was only against establishing a rabbinical court to convert them.”
On the core question of Jewish law, the court grounds its ruling in the Talmud’s own tension over converts, citing the tractate Gerim alongside the Talmudic teaching that “the Holy One exiled Israel among the nations only so that converts would be added to them” (Pesachim 87b). Against this, the ruling weighs the Talmud’s warning elsewhere that converts can prove “as difficult for Israel as a skin affliction” (Kiddushin 70b), and concludes that Jewish law demands vigilance, not exclusion.
The operative ruling itself reads: “There are several communities of converts in South America who have undergone Orthodox conversion according to its rules and are fully observing the Torah and commandments. Jewish communities throughout the world, as well as the Chief Rabbinate and the Interior Ministry, must accept these communities, permit them to come in congregation, and immigrate to the Land.”
The court does not stop at the acceptance of those already converted. It calls on Israel to open a legal pathway for the process itself, instructing that “the State of Israel must permit the entry of student visas for gentiles — and certainly for descendants of anusim from South America — to Israel, for the purpose of conversion studies at one of the recognized Orthodox conversion institutes in Israel.” It goes further still, calling for Israeli batei din to travel to Latin America directly: “Consideration should be given to sending conversion courts from Israel to these countries for the purpose of converting according to the halacha of those interested,” with existing Latin American conversion courts to be examined and, where found valid, formally recognized by the State.
The ruling frames the five centuries since the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions as a debt still owed, writing that the descendants of the anusim “suffered persecution on account of their Jewishness from the Inquisition, both in Spain and in South America, for five hundred years,” and that this suffering, rather than casting doubt on their claim to return, is grounds “to make matters easier for them to return to the fold of Judaism.”
The court closes not with legal reasoning but with a charge, invoking the Bible’s repeated command to protect the convert: “Whoever fails to accept them properly transgresses the prohibition of wronging the convert and the commandment to love the convert, which the Bible warns about 36 times.”
The Nascent Sanhedrin carries no legal authority under Israeli law. Its rulings bind no ministry and overturn no policy on their own. But daCosta believes the ruling’s moral weight could still move the Chief Rabbinate and the Interior Ministry to act, ending policies that have compounded one injustice with another: the Catholic Church’s forced conversions of the fifteenth century followed by a century of exclusion from the Jewish people those conversions tried to erase.
Obadiah named Sepharad by name and promised its exiles would possess the land again. Nearly five hundred years after the expulsion and a century after the Buenos Aires ban, that promise remains a live question for the Chief Rabbinate and the Interior Ministry to answer.
Translation: Sanhedrin Ruling on Accepting Converts and Conversion of Descendants of Anusim from South America
21 Tammuz 5786
In the sitting of the court, as one, we have deliberated.
1. Background
About a hundred years ago, rabbis in South America instituted a takanah (rabbinic enactment) stating that converts should not be accepted, due to the painful reality of Jews who took gentile wives and sought to convert their wives in order to legitimize what they had done. This enactment received backing from rabbis in the Land of Israel on condition that it would not close the door before converts. The “door” was the possibility for those seeking to convert to make aliyah to the Land of Israel and undergo conversion there. Unfortunately, today, even this door is closed to them, because the Ministry of Interior does not permit them entry into the country. In addition, there are thousands of descendants of anusim (Jews forcibly converted, historically known as Marranos or Conversos) in South America, some of whom wish to return to the fold of Judaism, and even before them, the door is locked, rachmana litzlan (God have mercy).
It should be noted that in the original enactment it was possible to accept into the community converts who had converted according to halacha (Jewish law) — see the appendix, including the ruling of Rabbi Ovadia [Yosef] on the subject — and the ban was only against establishing a rabbinical court to convert them. However, over the years, it became established practice not to admit into the South American communities even converts who had converted according to halacha, even in the Land of Israel — and this constitutes a severe prohibition of wronging the convert (ona’at ha-ger).
2. The Sages’ Two Opposing Emphases on Accepting Converts
The Sages state two opposing emphases regarding the acceptance of converts. On the one hand, it is said (Tractate Gerim 4) that we should not close the door before converts, and it was likewise said that the Holy One exiled Israel among the nations only so that converts would be added to them (Pesachim 87b). On the other hand, it was said that converts are as difficult for Israel as a skin affliction (Kiddushin 70b, Yevamot 47b). That is to say, we are commanded, on one hand, to allow every gentile who wishes to do so to convert, and on the other hand, we must examine carefully whether he is truly converting for the sake of Heaven and accepting upon himself the yoke of Torah and its commandments. (Further elaboration in the appendix below.)
3. Ruling of the Sanhedrin
Several communities of converts in South America underwent Orthodox conversion in full accordance with halacha and fully observe Torah and its commandments. It is incumbent upon Jewish communities throughout the world, as well as upon the Chief Rabbinate and the Ministry of Interior, to accept these communities, to permit them to enter the congregation and to make aliyah to the Land. Likewise, Jewish communities around the world must recognize their Jewishness and accept them into their communities. Whoever fails to accept them properly transgresses the prohibition of wronging the convert and the commandment to love the convert, which the Torah warns about 36 times.
4. Entry Visas
The State of Israel must permit the entry of student visas for gentiles — and certainly for descendants of anusim from South America — to Israel, for the purpose of conversion studies at one of the recognized Orthodox conversion institutes (ulpanei giyur) in Israel.
5. Historical Suffering
The descendants of the anusim suffered persecution on account of their Jewishness from the Inquisition, both in Spain and in South America, for five hundred years. They should be appreciated for this, and matters should be made easier for them to return to the fold of Judaism.
6. Sending Conversion Courts
At the same time, consideration should be given to sending conversion courts (batei din) from Israel to these countries for the sake of proper halachic conversion of those who desire it. Likewise, an examination should be conducted of the conversion courts already operating in these countries, to confirm that they indeed operate according to halacha — and if so, the State of Israel should grant validity to the conversions performed by these courts.
And with this we affix our signatures.
With a blessing for the complete redemption, in mercy and compassion, through the revealed and mighty kingship of the Blessed Name.
Secretariat of the Beit Din
Additional message (19:37, 7/19/2026), Meir Halevy:
What we are saying is: it is not enough that the Jews endured 400 years of the Inquisition — there has also been a 100-year estrangement of the descendants of the anusim from the Jewish people. The time has come to put a stop to this.
