Once we convinced American Airlines to issue the necessary paper to begin the trip in Rochester, baggage check, boarding passes, everything went smoothly. We picked up our luggage in Madrid and had a Whatsapp message from our group  that they they would be waiting for us at the “Meeting Point” and we joined up with the TBK Jews in Spain Trip. We will be with them until my birthday.

Today We toured Cordoba with three major stops. After an excellent overview of Old Cordoba and the Jewish Quarter both on bus and on foot we entered the Mezquita Cathedral Mosque. I would fill the page with pictures and still not give an idea of the complexity of a building where people go to church at the mosque. It was built as a mosque, eventually expanded to over 22,000 square meters with hundreds of columns, into which a later Cardinal built a Cathedral entirely contained inside, taking down ‘only” 240 columns to achieve the completion.  

From there we broke for lunch before reconvening  in a courtyard for a presentation on the history of the great Jewish poets of Cordoba followed by a walk – concluding with a group picture at  a statue of Moses Maimonides, The Rambam, who was born in Cordoba but did most of his writing elsewhere. From there we proceeded to Casa De Sefard, a private museum where we were treated to acapella solo of Sephardi music from various parts and time of the Sephardic world and then a talk about the prominent women of the Jew Sephardic world (many fewer than the men). 

From there to dinner and exhaustion.