Berta Balilti was born in Cairo and emigrated to Israel at the age of three, just before the Six-Day War. Today, Balilti fashions, “luxurious and glamorous wedding gowns sold worldwide.” Enjoying more than 1.5 million (!) social media followers, Balilti’s immigrant experience has kept her grounded and taught her the value of gratitude: “My family’s history [in Egypt] wasn’t very positive at the end. But I grew up in a family that always cherished the positive things they had there. I am obviously a proud Israeli, and do not take anything we have here for granted.”
A Berta Balitli wedding gown
(Photo courtesy of Berta Bridal)
Ben Tsvi Institute’s Piyyut Ensemble (Photo courtesy of YouTube)
The Ben Tsvi Institute’s Piyyut Ensemble performs “El Chai Mehulal Batishbachot,” a piyyut from the “Yagel Ya’akov” cycle composed by the Moroccan-Jewish Abuhatseira rabbinical dynasty. This month’s issue of Sephardi Ideas Monthly is dedicated to the “proto-Zionist” piyyutim of Yehuda Halevi.
30,000 Jews live in the predominantly Shi’ite state of Azerbaijan, which borders Iran to the North. There is almost no anti-Semitism in the country, and relations with Israel are close. These realities demonstrate how “the conflict between Israel and its neighbors cannot simply be termed a conflict between Jews and Muslims writ large. Rather, it’s a conflict between fanatical and intolerant extremists exploiting religion, on the one hand, and the rest of the world, on the other.”
Fish and chips? A Converso story. “Jewish refugees had to act like Christians, at least outwardly, so they fried fish on Fridays. Then, behind closed doors, they ate it cold on Shabbos.” French Fries soon followed in Belgium, and then, in the middle of the 19th century, “a Jewish man named Joseph Malin… opened the doors to the first fish and chip shop on Cleveland Street in London.”
The Great British Meal: Fish & Chips? (Photo courtesy ofJewniverse)
Film Screening & Exhibit Opening (Jews of Asia Series):
“‘Blue like Me’: An Indian-Jewish Artist’s Boundless Imagination” and “Baghdadis & The Bene Israel in Bollywood & Beyond”
3 November at 7 PM
at the Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, New York, NY
Mumbai-born artist Siona Benjamin creates images that span cultures. Join us for a documentary screening, a post-film Q&A with the artist, as well as to inaugurate a new exhibition on Indian Jews in the movies by Kenneth X. Robbins.
Having grown up in the enigmatic community of the Bene Israel in Mumbai, India, Siona Benjamin’s art synthesizes her Jewish roots with the Hindu, Catholic, Muslim, and Zoroastrian iconography of her homeland. ASF and the Indian Consulate at New York are proud to present Blue Like Me, a new documentary on Siona’s life and work.
The evening will also feature Kenneth X. Robbins, author of a multi-volume history on the Jews of India, for the inauguration of “Baghdadis & The Bene Israel in Bollywood & Beyond,” a new exhibition in ASF’s Leon Levy Gallery. At a time, when custom and tradition kept many Indian women from performing in movies, liberated Jewish actresses and Jewish scriptwriters built the now world-renowned Bollywood brand.
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The American Sephardi Federation's Sephardi House is located at the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th St., New York, New York, 10011).