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14 August 2015 
In Honor of Jean-Claude Kuperminc, Director of the Library and Archives, Alliance Israélite Universelle 
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Reviving the Lost Language of Ladino” 
By Benjamin Ivry, Forward
 
Born in 1923 to an Ottoman Sephardic family, Haïm Vidal Sephiha survived Auschwitz. After the war he dedicated himself to Judeo-Spanish, even leaving his wife and son on the way to becoming a world-class scholar. Vidal Sephiha’s son, Dominique, a French journalist, understands his father’s decision to leave: “His mission was to reawaken Judeo-Spanish. I understand and accept that it was done at the price of breaking up with my mother and not seeing me for almost 10 years.”


 
Rome’o i Zhuliyet (Salonika, 1922), one of the only Ladino copies of Shakespeare’s play in North America was recently part of the Center for Jewish History with American Sephardi Federation’s exhibit, Sephardic Journeys.
Alliance Students on the main street of the Mellah, Mogador, Morocco. Proudly French and Jewish, the network of schools founded by the Alliance Israélite Universelle across North Africa and the Middle East, gave Jewish and non-Jewish students unprecedented access to a rigorous, modern education (Photo courtesy of Diarna: Geo-Museum - Retrospective Exhibit: “AIU: Memoires”
 
The Jews Who Are Determined to Stay in France” 
By Emily Shire, Daily Beast

Secular, French Jews are deeply connected to their French identity and thoroughly assimilated into the fabric of the country. For them, leaving France is difficult to imagine, even with the rise in anti-Semitism.

 
Song of the Week (Video): “Ya Sh’ma Ev’yonecha” (“God, Hear Your Poor Ones”)
 

Ofir Ben Shitrit preforms with the Israel Andalusian Orchestra (Tel Aviv, Israel, 2013)  
 
Watch and listen to the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra perform Yehuda HaLevi’s piyyut, Ya Sh’ma Ev’yonecha” (“God, Hear Your Poor Ones”), featuring the young Israeli vocalist, Ofir ben Shitrit. Many Sephardi communities sing this piyyut amongst the slichot (penitential poems) performed in the forty-day period before Yom Kippur.

The current issue of Sephardi Ideas Monthly explores the personalities and milieu that made possible the miracle of Andalusian Jewish poetry. Click here to read: “The Lost Andalusian Jewish Culture.”
Jewish – and proud to be Tunisian
By Conor McCormick-Cavanagh, Your Middle East

Jacob Lellouche runs Mamie Lilly, the only kosher restaurant in Tunisia. Lellouche is also president and founder of Dar el Dhikra (Arabic for “House of Remembrance”), an organization dedicated to preserving Tunisian Jewish heritage. But true to Tunisia’s relatively tolerant atmosphere, Lellocuhe proudly identifies as a Tunisian, “I am Tunisian… I am just like everyone else here. Muslim, Jew, Christian. We are all Tunisians.”

In 2008, Ali Kaba (pictured here), a West-African Muslim researcher for Diarna, discovered a faded Hebrew plaque—all that remains of the tomb of Chief Rabbi Messaoud Raphael el Fassi
above a solitary locked doorway in downtown Tunis (Photo courtesy of Ali Kaba/Diarna Geo-Museum
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