(JEWISH GROUP) Her ancestors were expelled from Spain. Now she's bringing bagels to Madrid.
Until recently, a Jew could wander all day in Madrid without finding a bagel.
But now, in a sea of tomato toasts and potato omelettes, a trail of people hovers every weekend outside the Mazál bagel restaurant. Behind it is Tamara Cohen, a Philadelphian who became Spanish through a law granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews whose ancestors were expelled during the 1492 Inquisition.
When Cohen moved to Madrid, she could not track down the bagels she craved from home. Since opening Mazál in 2020, she has seen the distinctly Jewish food grow more familiar to Madrileños, with other new bagel shops following suit — but none, so far as she knows, that are also run by Jews.
“I like to think we started it,” she said.
Cohen, who is 34, didn’t have a business plan or a culinary background when she arrived in 2015. She was a recent college graduate unsure about what to do next. She had never been to Europe and decided to teach English in Spain, thinking she would take the chance to travel and study the native language of her mom, a Cuban Sephardic Jew. (Her dad is American-born Ashkenazi.)
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