Tuesday January 11, 2022

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections that requires hard spiritual work.
Henri Nouwen

 

With a touch of chutzpah and “a little help from God,” Braulio Rocha, a Roman Catholic Portuguese immigrant, traded in his mop for a camera.

Braulio Rocha, a Portuguese janitor at a Montreal synagogue, was about to begin his daily floor mopping routine some years ago when he heard a frantic voice: The photographer assigned to shoot a bris, a ritual circumcision, hadn’t shown up, and the baby’s grandmother was panicking.

Mr. Rocha, an amateur photographer, had recently arrived in Canada from Madeira with $50 in savings and a beat-up old Canon camera that he always carried with him in his car. Wearing his gray and blue polyester janitor’s uniform, a long key ring dangling from his pocket, he recalls, he summoned up the courage and asked the forlorn grandmother if he could shoot the baby’s bris — for free.

She agreed, and a new career was born.

Brisses soon led to bar mitzvahs, and six years later, Mr. Rocha, a 45-year-old Roman Catholic, has been called the bar mitzvah photography king of Montreal by rabbis and clients alike.

Mr. Rocha, who had never met a Jew before...read more