Courtesy of Cary Herz

Dennis Duran, a descendant of Portuguese Jews, recites the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of the dead, at his family's grave sites in northern New Mexico. Duran is one of the sources Cary Herz interviewed and photographed for her book, "New Mexico Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory."

Courtesy of Cary Herz

Herz spent more than 20 years collecting stories and taking photographs for her book about the New Mexico descendents of Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Catholicism.

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Cary Herz's photo book about the hidden Jews of New Mexico took more than 20 years to complete and led her down the back roads of a state far removed from her Manhattan roots.

But when she was done, she had learned some things about herself as well as about the people who hid their Jewish faith and heritage beneath the cloak of Christian conversion.

"I learned how comfortable I am with people and that I like them — even if we are different," Herz said.

"I learned that I love New Mexico. I've been on more roads in this state than many people know exist.

"And I learned I am brave enough to let people look at my work — and that, now, I can let it go."

Work on the book, "New Mexico's Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory," started in 1985, the year after Herz took a leave of absence from her job as staff photographer with the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger and moved to New Mexico.

She had been intrigued by the state since visiting a friend in Santa Fe in 1979.

"There were lawyers (in Santa Fe then) who were raising goats," she said, still awed by an image so alien to a woman who had lived in Manhattan and photographed fires, sports and social events in New Jersey.

It was while taking pictures at the Congregation Montefiore (Jewish) Cemetery in Las Vegas, N.M., in 1985, that Herz heard about "the other people."

Herz, now 60 and an Albuquerque resident, is Jewish herself, the daughter of a father and mother who came to the United States from Germany and Austria, respectively, to escape Nazi persecution. Three of her great aunts died at Auschwitz.

But before that photo shoot at the Las Vegas cemetery, she did not know about the Crypto Jews, Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) Jews who converted to Catholicism 500 years ago to avoid prosecution, expulsion or even execution by the Inquisition.

Some of these people came to the New World with the conquistadors or with later groups of colonists. Some embraced the Christian faith they had converted to while others practiced their Jewish faith in secret.

Many of their descendants live in New Mexico, and these are the people Herz started looking for more than 20 years ago. It was no easy mission.

That's partly because some of these descendants didn't know of their Jewish background. They might recall certain family customs — such as covering mirrors when someone died or lighting candles on Friday evening to mark the advent of the Sabbath — but never understood the link between those practices and Jewish tradition.

And those who did understand might be reluctant to talk about it.

"At first, no one would tell me anything," Herz said.

But somewhere along the line, persistence and patience began to pay off. Herz said she started to learn how to push enough to get her pictures without being obnoxious about it.

"At some point, people started to trust me and started to take me to places," she said. "In the early '90s, I started driving around the state visiting cemeteries."

She was looking on tombstones for six-pointed stars, seven-branched candelabra and other symbols suggesting Jewish origins. Some led her to a new source. But many more led nowhere.

"I dropped this project a number of times," Herz said. "I'd say, 'I'm not doing this. I'm not getting enough people.' "

Then in 2003, Herz received a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. She had surgery and embarked on a lengthy regimen of chemotherapy.

"I was thinking, 'I'm going to die. What am I going to do? I've got to finish my book.' "

Herz beat back the cancer and finished the book, too.

The more than 130 black-and-white photos in the book record the symbols and the people that make up Herz's story, as well as research visits she made to Portugal in 1994 and Spain in 2000.

Ori Soltes, a lecturer in theology and art history at Georgetown University, provided an introduction, and Herz wrote the preface and the stories that accompany her photographs.

"But I'm not a historian or a sociologist," Herz said. "I'm a photographer, and this is a photography book. Photography is something you look at. These pictures are what I saw."

The people who confided in her are here, too, in Herz's photographs and in their own words.

They include:

Dennis Duran, Herz's first source, a man who converted to Judaism in 1977, years before he discovered that his ancestors were Portuguese Jews. "It just felt right," he told Herz.

Lorenzo Dominguez, a musician, radio host and descendant of Sephardic Jews. Dominguez, who died in 2003, was a member of congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque. He told Herz that he was not a crypto-Jew. "If I was," he said, "I would be practicing in secret."

Maria Apodaca, descended from crypto-Jews who came to New Mexico from Mexico in 1698. She knew nothing of her family's Jewish origins until she was 14 but has since studied Hebrew prayers and Jewish laws. "The Hebrew hymns were so familiar," she said.

Rev. William Sanchez, a Catholic priest of Jewish descent. "Several times a year, I will blow the shofar (ram's horn) in my church, and I continue celebrating the Passover each year with those who wish to participate," he said.

"Being Sephardic and Catholic began as a means of survival centuries ago. Today they have both survived and continue to coexist."

Herz said working on the book revealed to her something of the pain and struggle experienced by some descendants of crypto-Jews.

"It's psychological pain," she said. "Not damaging a lot of the time — but confusing."

Herz said the book also gave her some insight into her own family, which had been reluctant to talk much about its flight from persecution, and into herself as part of that legacy.

"My parents, too, were forced to leave their countries and change their language," she wrote in the book's preface. "They had to leave behind their way of life, people and places they knew and loved.

"They tried to re-create a semblance of their past in New York City, and at the same time they wanted to fit in and not be identified as 'different.'

"As a Jewish woman with European roots, I understand the fear and complexity of being different from everyone else — wanting to be the same while silently cherishing my differences."