A woman from Seattle will be knighted at a ceremony in the US in October for her work in helping Sephardic Jews take advantage of the law that allows them to apply for Spanish citizenship
In the 15th century, Queen Isabella of Spain and her husband Ferdinand brought the Inquisition to the world, a murderous institution that expelled tens of thousands of Jews from their country. Five hundred years later, Spain knights a Jewish woman from Seattle after “Isabella the Catholic,” as the queen was called.
Spain has come a long way in acknowledging its extensive and painful Jewish history, Alhadaf argues, including by passing a 2015 law that gives descendants of Inquisition victims with Spanish Jewish roots the opportunity to apply for citizenship.
Endorsed by King Felipe VI of Spain, Elhadef’s knighthood stems in large part from her work helping Spanish Jews take advantage of the law that allows them to apply for Spanish citizenship before the application window closed last September. Seattle has the third largest Hispanic population in the US, numbering about 5,000.
Elhadef, a real estate woman and daughter of a Spanish family, said that she sees becoming a Spanish citizen in 2016 as something that was taken from her family and returned to a place that feels very familiar. “When I go to Spain, I feel at home,” said Elhadef, who was also a co-founder of a Spanish organization and website in Seattle , and in 2018 she was appointed the US ambassador of a network of Spanish cities with a Jewish heritage.
Spain has granted the vast majority of applications, giving about 42,600 people Spanish citizenship (including 1,500 Americans) as of the end of June, but it has rejected 2,500 applications and has yet to issue a decision on nearly half of those applications.
Some have been waiting more than five years for an answer, said Luis Portero, a lawyer in Spain who specializes in helping Spanish people obtain citizenship in both his country and Portugal, which passed a similar law in 2015. In Portugal there are also tens of thousands of unresolved cases, according to Portero, only about 300 applications were rejected and about 57,000 received Portuguese citizenship as of last December.
When Spain’s parliament considered the law, she was in the country helping organize an international conference of Spanish Jews. She was back in the US the day the law came up for a vote, she got up early to see the result.
“When it passed, I just went into gear,” she said. Alhadaf began to meet the long eligibility requirements: proof of Spanish heritage, knowledge of the Spanish language and travel to Spain to receive notarized documents.
She then began helping others obtain citizenship and taught many how to apply for citizenship, for which she would receive a knighthood.