With Claudia Sheinbaum as president, what does it mean to be Jewish in Mexico?

(A photocaption in this story was updated because an earlier version included an inaccuracy.)

MEXICO CITY – In a busy garment district in this city's historic center, where stone-paved streets bustle with buyers and sellers, the signs of Mexico's first Jewish enclave are hidden in plain sight.

A tiny religious scroll over the door, tucked behind racks of colorful elastic. Letters in Hebrew fading over a storefront. A stained-glass Star of David set in a stone facade.

Mexico's new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has been famously quiet about her Jewish ancestry. Yet she will live and govern Latin America's second-largest economy from the Palacio Nacional, three blocks from Mexico's first synagogue and a neighborhood where Jewish immigrants first found refuge here.

"The Barrio Judío doesn't exist as a place" per se, said Monica Unikel, who has spent three decades documenting the history of Jewish immigration in Mexico and leads tours of the old quarter. "I started asking people where they lived, where they worked, where they prayed, and I started marking the places on a map."

Sheinbaum's four grandparents were Jewish: On her father's side, they were from Lithuania, arriving in Mexico in the 1920s, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency; on her mother's side, they were Bulgarian, landing in Veracruz in 1942, barely escaping the Holocaust.

Sheinbaum was brought up with Jewish traditions, she has said. But her parents were academics and political activists in a country where politics have historically been fiercely secular, separated from the Catholic Church and religion generally.

In Mexico, Jewish identity is deeply tied to the synagogue and faith practices, Unikel said – unlike in the U.S. where Jewish identity can be as much ethnic and cultural as it is religious. While nearly 6 million adults in the U.S. identify as Jewish, about 2.4% of the population, according to Pew Research, in Mexico, there are only an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 Jews in a country of 124 million people.

Still, the first Jewish migrants left their mark on Mexico City's cultural heart.

They built a synagogue – where Jewish men still say their daily prayers – near the sprawling Zócalo public square and the city's sinking Cathedral, itself built upon the ruins of an indigenous Mexica temple.

At the Jewish new year, a tour of a historic and humble barrio

On a drizzly day last week, ahead of Sheinbaum's inauguration and the start of the Jewish new year, historian Vania Martínez began a tour of the barrio in front of the synagogue, Monte Sinaí, which opened in 1923.

Her voice competed with the neighborhood roar. Haitian migrants heaved reams of fabric into the back of a truck. Motorcycles weaved through unmoving traffic. A fruit seller with a microphone hawked golden apples in a singsong pitch.

Inside the temple, prayers had ended and the sanctuary was quiet. Wooden chairs stood in perfect rows, framing a sacred chest where the Hebrew scriptures are carefully stored. Its simplicity is a reflection of the community's humble origins in Mexico, she said.

To Mexicans, the Barrio Judío is better known as part of La Merced, famous for its 500 years of market tradition, and for being a first stop for newcomers to the metropolis, akin to New York's Lower East Side or San Franciso's Mission District.

During a migration that began in the early 20th century, Arab and Eastern European Jews brought their traditions to Mexico, Unikel said. They influenced, and were influenced by, Mexican customs.

Jewish immigrants introduced a business model in Mexico that endures today, Unikel said. Men often worked as peddlers, carrying their wares on their backs, and they sold their goods to poor Mexicans on interest-free credit, she said. They became known as aboneros and created what is still a feature of modern sales in Mexico: "six months without interest," she said.

At the same time, Jewish immigrants were assimilating Mexican ingredients into their traditional foods, she said.

"You can't talk about Jewish food in Mexico, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, without chile, avocados or tortillas," Unikel said. "Dishes like gefilte fish a la veracruzana; guacamole with hard-boiled egg; kibbeh ? a ground meat and bulgur wheat dish ? stuffed with rajas con elote, chile and corn. There are kosher tamales made without pork lard. There is such an interesting mixture."

As Martínez gave the tour, she carried a folder and pulled out black-and-white photos of the people and places who once populated the barrio.

"Here is a beautiful one, where they've got their Shisha," she said, pointing to a photo of men seated around a table, sharing a water pipe, or hookah. "It was one of the few things they would have brought in their suitcase, the little that they could carry, and it was very representative."

The barrio was a place where a 14-year-old named Shimshon Feldman could find work, first in a Jewish bakery where he sold black bread and braided challah and later at a Yiddish daily newspaper.

There was a kosher meat market on Jesus Maria and a matzoh factory on Soledad and, in a shop beneath a figurine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a woman called Sara Makowsky sold everything a Jewish family would need for their holiday celebrations, Martínez said.

Makowsky was so successful and stable that she also ran a sort of community post office for the other Jewish migrants who were constantly moving, renting where they could.

Once a synagogue, now a cultural center

Two doors down from the Monte Sinaí synagogue, ornate wood doors in a neo-colonial facade give the impression of a mansion inside. But it's a false front: Inside, Jews, including those who fled the Nazis, built a synagogue hidden from view.

Most of Mexico City's Jewish community lives outside the historic center today. Fourteen years ago, Unikel helped restore and convert the synagogue into a cultural center, called Sinagoga Histórica Justo Sierra 71.

"When we converted the synagogue, my goal was ... how can we share our culture with the whole world, with Jews and non-Jews and foreigners?" she said. "It’s Jewish culture for the world. For me, one of the objectives is to show who we are in all our diversity so that people who have false ideas about the Jewish people can get to know who we are, our traditions and philosophies."

In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel, the cultural center curtailed its public events. Even as the war worsens in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, the cultural center plans to restart its programming this month, though with added security.

People "need to know us, not through stereotypes," Unikel said. "There are so many ways to live a Jewish life."

A visit by Claudia Sheinbaum

Sheinbaum, before she became president, served as mayor of Mexico City. The city invested in remodeling the then-rundown Plaza San Loreto in front of the Sinagoga Histórico, and Sheinbaum came to inaugurate it. Unikel crossed the street and asked Sheinbaum to come visit.

She did.

Sheinbaum said she had never seen the synagogue before, Unikel recalled. It's a copy of a temple in Lithuania, Unikel told her. Sheinbaum shared that her father's family was from Lithuania.

When she took office as president on Tuesday, Sheinbaum didn't mention her heritage, though that didn't stop the online proliferation of anti-Semitic memes in Spanish.

In an inauguration speech that included 100 promises to the Mexican people, Sheinbaum defined herself in her own way.

She said, "I am a mother, grandmother, scientist and woman of faith."

Lauren Villagran can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: With Sheinbaum as president, what it means to be Jewish in Mexico