But on a table burns a candelabrum. On the peeling walls hang pictures of bearded men in taleisim, one blowing a shofar. Hanukkiot stand on a narrow ledge. And around the small room a dozen men and women sing Adon Olam. Sundown Friday, Iquitos, Peru, in the Amazon jungle.
Darkness engulfs a capacity-filled luxury hotel ballroom.
But a spotlight is flashed on the priest on the podium who continues speaking. He is being honored for his human rights contributions during a celebration of both Hanukka and the three-thousandth anniversary of Jerusalem before a gathering of other clergymen, government officials, diplomats and a large sector of Peru's Jewish community. The priest stands outlined in the blackness against the Israeli flag. From the Altiplano of the Andes to the Amazon Basin, from the sprawl of Lima to such provincial cities as Arequipa and Cuzco, traces remain usually just splatters, but on occasion, splashes of a Jewish present, and past, on the often frayed, sometimes rent, but ever- fascinating fabric that is Peru. With recent estimates that 25 percent of Latin America's Spanish colonists were probably Jews, at least some surely accompanied Pizarro on his sixteenth-century conquest of the Incan empire, whose heart and soul lay in Peru.