Opinion | Searching for a Shul in Lisbon

On the day my husband Bert finally accepted that he was dying, we had a deeply emotional, unstintingly honest talk about what he wanted me to do when he was gone. The tears I’d been holding back for his sake poured out as we revisited our six-decade marriage and the rich rewards of our parenthood. Sobbing, I said I could not imagine my life without him. He said he wanted me to cry until my eyes ran dry and to miss him for the rest of my days, but not to get mired in mourning. He made me promise to do by myself everything we used to love doing together. And not to feel guilty about it.

Which explains why, scant months after Bert’s death, I and my friend Annie, also recently bereaved, signed up for a six-day group hike in Portugal from October 13 through 18. For each of us, it would be our first vacation without our husbands in more than half a century. Then, shopping in Zabars, I overheard a woman remark to the lox slicer that Yom Kippur comes “really late this year—mid-October.” I grabbed my phone, checked our itinerary. Grief-numbed, I had booked our flight to Lisbon on the holiest day of the Jewish year.

Annie is a secular Jew and I’m far from frum, but I observe the High Holy Days and would never travel on Yom Kippur. We moved up our departure date so I could observe the holiday in Lisbon before the start of the hike, because this year I felt an urgent need to fill the void with my faith, have a ritual pre-fast meal and pray with other Jews in a Jewish space.

Knowing no one in Portugal, I resorted to Jewish geography. American friends who were writers, rabbis, academics or worldly cosmopolitans became my sources. Surely one of them could refer me to someone who knew someone with connections to the Jews of Lisbon.

This year I felt an urgent need to fill the void with my faith.

Many tried. One rabbi referred me to the widow of a late colleague who had done some “teaching and community-building” with descendants of Portuguese Jews expelled in 1497. She was eager to help, but sadly, those contacts had either left Portugal or died.

Several folks directed me to the website of Shaaré Tikvah, Lisbon’s 120-year-old Orthodox synagogue, or to the city’s Chabad congregation. For me, a confirmed feminist, the route to prayer through Orthodoxy is a dead-end street. The last time I sat behind a mechitza, or upstairs in the separate and unequal women’s section, was 50 years ago. I knew I couldn’t tolerate that gender apartheid today.

A well-traveled friend recommended we book a private tour of Lisbon’s Jewishly meaningful sites. I signed us up. Assuming the guide was a Jew, I asked if she knew someone who could host us for that Shabbat dinner. No response. After we took the tour, she confided that she’d been baptized as a child but 23andMe had confirmed her feeling of being descended from conversos. Now, in preparation for her formal conversion to Judaism, she was keeping a kosher home, but she had not yet affiliated with any Jewish group. (That’s why she hadn’t replied.) Also, since there are fewer than 6,000 self-identified Jews left in all of Portugal, she wasn’t surprised that my efforts had been fruitless.

By Labor Day, I was resigned to having a non-ceremonial Friday night meal in a Lisbon restaurant when I suddenly remembered that a dear friend, Colette Avital, formerly posted in New York as Israel’s consul general, had once served as Israel’s ambassador to…Portugal!

Colette put me in touch with the adult son of a beloved late friend of hers, a successful businessman who promptly invited us to an early Shabbat dinner with his extended family before they left for their (Orthodox) Kol Nidre services. Thus did Annie and I find ourselves, at 5 p.m. on October 11, in a beautiful home in Lisbon, seated amidst three generations of Jews at three large tables set with lovely ritual objects. We listened to the brachot; feasted on challah, gefilte fish, chopped liver, chicken noodle soup, roast chicken and all the trimmings; chatted with the man and his wife, siblings and their adult kids, one of them pregnant; and delighted in his ten adorable young grandchildren. The haimische scene was as familiar to me as my own family’s holiday meals. I only wished Bert could have been there.

As for the Yom Kippur service, by the end of the summer I still hadn’t found one, but then a client of Bert’s popped into my head, unbidden. A business mogul and prominent Jewish leader, this man knew people everywhere—but not in Lisbon. He did, however, have a London-based brother with a vast network, who providentially knew a Jewish macher in Lisbon, who connected me with the rabbi of Ohel Jacob, a trilingual egalitarian shul composed of locals and Jewish tourists. That rabbi not only welcomed me for Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur but honored me with an aliyah. Standing on the bimah, I again wished Bert could be there. Yet I felt his presence and I knew he’d approve of my giant step back into life.

The moral of the story, for me at least, is profound: Travel is enriched when you connect with local Jewish life. Relentless research pays off. Jewish geography still works. And if you make a promise to your spouse, keep it.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the author of 12 books, most recently Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy.