MADRID — María Sánchez, a retired mental health therapist in Albuquerque, spent the past four decades tracing her Jewish ancestry from Spain. She created a genealogical chart going back nearly 1,100 years, which included three ancestors who were tried in the Spanish Inquisition. Her findings even led her to join a synagogue in the 1980s and to become a practicing Jew.

So when Spain’s government said in 2015 that it would grant citizenship to people of Sephardic Jewish descent — a program publicized as reparations for the expulsion of Jews that began in 1492 — Sánchez applied. She hired an immigration lawyer, obtained a certificate from her synagogue and flew to Spain to present her genealogy chart to a notary.

Then, in May, she received a rejection letter.

“It felt like a punch in the gut,” said Sánchez, 60, who was told she had not proved she was a Sephardic Jew. “You kicked my ancestors out; now you’re doing this again.”

Spain’s statistics and interviews with frustrated applicants reveal a wave of more than 3,000 rejections in recent months, raising questions about how serious the country is about its promise of reparations to correct one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Inquisition. Before this year, only one person had been turned down, the government said. Some 34,000 have been accepted.

At least another 17,000 people have received no response at all, according to government statistics. Many of them have waited years and spent thousands of dollars on attorney fees and trips to Spain to file paperwork.

It remains unclear why the wave of rejections has come now. Spain’s government said it was simply trying to clear out a backlog of cases. But lawyers representing applicants say they feel that officials have had a change of heart on the program, which formally stopped taking applications in 2019.

In a statement, Spain’s Justice Ministry, which is in charge of the applications, said that it had done its best to follow Spanish law and that it was only natural it would have to turn down many cases. Those who had met the requirements “are welcome again to their country, but similarly, those who don’t meet the requirements will see that their application is rejected just like they would be in any other process.”

César David Ciriano, an immigration lawyer in the Spanish city of Zaragoza, said that until this year, it was almost unheard of for applications to be denied after they had been submitted to the government. This was because Spanish notaries acted as gatekeepers, approving an applicant’s Jewish heritage certificates, genealogy chart and other documents before an application was formally submitted. Government officials were not allowed to overrule the notary’s decision, Ciriano said.

However, this year, officials suddenly began second-guessing the notary’s approvals, he said.

“This is the first time I’ve seen such illegal behavior from the government,” Ciriano said.

The Spanish government in its statement said it had followed the law in enforcing the citizenship decisions.