The Diplomat
The Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE) has presented the Senator Angel Pulido Award to Miguel de Lucas, former director of Centro Sefarad-Israel and current Spanish Ambassador to Jordan.
The Senator Angel Pulido Award, which took place on Thursday night, is the highest award given by Spanish Jews to a person or institution in recognition of his contribution to the development of Jewish communities and the Hispanic world, the defense of freedom of conscience, religious pluralism, the fight against anti-Semitism and the work in favor of rapprochement between Spain and Israel.
Miguel de Lucas joined Centro Sefarad-Israel in 2007 as director of International Relations, until he was appointed secretary general in 2009 and, in 2013, director general of this institution, a position he held until last March. During the last five years he has combined this responsibility with those of head of the Spanish Interministerial Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and member of the Board of Trustees of the Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation.
De Lucas was appointed Ambassador to Jordan last April. Because of his connections with the Jewish world, there had been speculation in diplomatic circles that he might be appointed ambassador to Israel, but in the end the person chosen for the post was Ana Salomon, who had been the first director of Centro Sefarad-Israel.
The award ceremony was attended by the Israeli Ambassador to Spain, Rodica Radian-Gordon; the Spanish Ambassador to Iraq, Pedro Martínez-Avial; the Deputy Director General for Religious Freedom, Mercedes Murillo; the Director General for Legal Security and Public Faith, Sofía Puente; the Director General for the Maghreb, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Alberto José Ucelay; and the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Luis Manuel Cuesta, among other personalities from Spain’s diplomatic and political life.
The FCJE established the Senator Ángel Pulido Award in 2005, the centenary year of the publication of Pulido’s most important and emblematic work on the Sephardic world: Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí, published in Madrid in 1905. The last personality awarded with this prize was King Felipe VI in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, for his support to the Law that granted Spanish nationality to the descendants of the Jews expelled by the Catholic Monarchs.
