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28 April 2017
Kol HaKavod to Ambassador Ronald Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress, on the success of the 15th Plenary Assembly. ASF was proud to stand as one Jewish People with over 600 representatives from more than 90 countries.
The unknown story of Moroccan Holocaust survivors” 
By Julie Masis, The Times of Israel

The occupation Vichy regime succeeded in concentrating the Jews of Morocco in single neighborhoods as a first step to their mass murder. But they didn’t get any further because Morocco’s leader, King Mohammed V, refused to distinguish between his subjects. While Moroccan Jews are eligible for compensation from Germany because, “forced residence is recognized as a type of persecution,” the big story remains Mohammed V’s resistance: Moroccan Jews retained their citizenship and weren’t forced to wear the yellow star.

King Mohammed V
(Photo courtesy of Dfina.net)
 
Annette Cabelli, 92, a survivor of Auschwiz, Sefarad Center, Madrid, Spain (Photo courtesy of Olmo Calvo/El Mundo
Telling Holocaust Stories—in Ladino” 
By Margarita Gokun Silver, Tablet

Annette Cabelli is a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor from Salonica, Greece. Deported to Auschwitz at the age of 17, she survived three concentration camps and three death marches. She only began speaking about her experiences after a Holocaust documentary was released in France in 1956, “Before that, we couldn’t talk because people didn’t believe us.” Today she tells her story, in Ladino, to Spanish-speaking audiences.
Feature of the Week: Sephardic Jews and the Holocaust: In Search of Uncle Salomon
 

Devin Naar visits the new monument at the University of Thessaloniki commemorating the Jewish cemetery that used to exist there
(Photo courtesy of  Iosif Vaena/Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington)


2016 National Jewish Book Awards Winner and ASF Advisory Board Member Professor, Devin E. Naar, recounts how learning the story of what happened to his family in Salonica, Greece, during the Holocaust, stimulated his desire to learn Ladino and, ultimately, to teach Sephardi studies.
Remembering the forgotten Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish Holocaust victims” 
By Rachel Avraham, Jerusalem Online

Greater Sephardic Jewish communities of the Mediterranean and North Africa were also devastated by the Holocaust. While their story is less well-known than the murder of European Jewry, Israel’s sixth president, Haim Herzog, knew, and the story of Sephardi Jewry during the Holocaust reminded him of the bottom-line lesson of Jewish history, that Jews, whomever they might be, share the same fate, “Hitler did not differentiate between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews as he did not differentiate between Orthodox, observant and secular Jews or between men and women, the young and the aged.”

Train tracks linking the Vichy régime Camp at Tendrara, Morocco, with others in the desert (Photo courtesy of Josh Shamsi/Diarna Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life)

 
Upcoming Events:
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“East by Middle East” (ExME): A Night of Healing & Unity Celebrating the Sounds of the Middle East and North Africa


Thursday, May 4th at 6PM
The Brooklyn Music School
126 St Felix Street, Brooklyn

 

ExME brings a wealth of local talent to perform on the BMS Playhouse stage to highlight the ethnic diversity that makes our spectacular city shine. As part of our mission encouraging Healing and Unity, the event will send a strong message of solidarity with the many communities from the Middle East that contribute to Brooklyn’s diverse tapestry of faiths and cultures, with music drawn from the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions. Council Member Laurie Cumbo will open the night with remarks in support of the contributions of those from the Middle East and North Africa who have been instrumental in building a richer and stronger Brooklyn. Sponsored by NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Arab Banking Corporation, Nahmias et Fils Distillery, and Sahadi's Grocery.

 
The event will feature three ensembles rooted in this large and diverse region:
 

  • New York Andalus Ensemble Today, a spirit of intercultural exchange is reborn in this multi-ethnic, multi-faith group that performs in Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, and Ladino. Drawing upon repertoire from the ninth century to the 1960s, from al-Andalus and the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), the ensemble consists of a large choir and a wide array of traditional and modern acoustic instruments. Under the direction of ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Samuel Torjman Thomas, the ensemble is conjuring the cosmopolitan synergy of Andalusia in present-day New York.
  • Zikrayat performs traditional and modern Arab music and dance from Egypt, Syria, and the greater Arab world, highlighting rare and little-known gems from the "Golden Age" of Egyptian cinema (1930s-1960s). Founded by violinist, vocalist and composer Sami Abu Shumays, Zikrayat features a talented lineup of performers of diverse backgrounds brought together by their devotion to these rich art forms.
  • Vatan or "homeland" in Persian, is a Brooklyn-based band of Middle Eastern-American musicians blending the lines between Persian folk music and country, funk and rock. With toe-tapping jams, Vatan brings the sounds of a fun and irreverent music into your home.

Please click here to purchase tickets, and use the promo code EXMEPARTNER


Book Talk: Vulture in a Cage: Poems by Solomon Ibn Gabirol


Thursday, May 18th at 7PM
The Oded Halahmy Gallery at ASF
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, New York City


Join ASF and Professor Raymond P. Scheindlin, renowned expert on Hebrew literature in its Golden Age and a master translator of biblical and medieval Hebrew poetry, for a discussion of his latest translation. Named after Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s own sharp self-description, Vulture in a Cage is the most extensive collection of the 11th-century Sephardi poet’s works ever to be published in English.

Weighty poems of praise, lament, and complaint sit alongside devotional poetry, love poetry, descriptive meditations on nature, and epigrams. Obsessed with the impediments of the body and the material world, Ibn Gabirol ambitiously dreamed of breaking through corporeal constraints and launching his soul into the realm of the intellect. Ibn Gabirol created a style that was in conflict with the aesthetics of his age but that feels quite at home in our own.

Dr. Scheindlin, Professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary and director of JTS's Shalom Spiegel Institute of Medieval Hebrew Poetry, has been a Guggenheim Fellow (1988) and a fellow of the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library (2005-2006). He is also a member of the editorial boards of the journals Jewish Quarterly Review and Near Eastern Literatures. He received the Cultural Achievement Award of the National Society for Jewish Culture in 2004

Space is limited; RSVP required

 

Please click here to make a reservation 
Complimentary


Greek Jewish Festival


Sunday, May 21st from 12-6 PM
Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum
280 Broome Street (between Allen & Eldridge Streets), New York City

Join ASF at the third annual Greek Jewish Festival as we celebrate the unique Romaniote and Sephardic Heritage of the Lower East Side. Experience authentic kosher Greek foods and homemade Greek pastries, traditional Greek dancing and live Greek and Sephardic music. There will be an outdoor marketplace, kids activities, and so much more!


Mexico and Moral Courage:
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Jerusalem’s Reunification
&
Honoring Ambassador Andrés Roemer’s Stand for Jerusalem at UNESCO


Sunday, May 21st at 7 PM
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, New York City

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the liberation and reunification of the Jewish People’s eternal capital, ASF is awarding the International Sephardic Leadership Award to former Mexican Ambassador Andrés Isaac Roemer Slomianski. When confronted by the recent UNESCO resolution that sought to erase Jerusalem, Israel’s Jewish and Christian history, Ambassador Roemer knowingly risked his position to voice and vote his conscience, leaving the voting hall instead of following the instructions he had received. While the resolution still passed, Ambassador Roemer did not forget Jerusalem and his moral courage convinced several countries, including his own, to seek to reverse the resolution’s ill–considered position against historical truth and the possibility of peace.
 
Featuring remarks by Mexican Consul General Diego Gomez-Pickering and Professor Ephraim Isaac
 
Mexican Kosher hors d'oeuvres and refreshments to be served

Co-Presented with The Philos Project

RSVP Required

Please click here to make a reservation 
Complimentary


When Baghdadi Jews Baruch and Ellen Bekhor (née Cohen) succumbed to the camera’s gaze for their denaturalization pictures in 1951, they became stateless. Ellen was in her eighth month of pregnancy. Permitted to bring no more than a few kilos of belongings out of Iraq, Ellen carried their wedding picture and ketubah in her pocketbook. Laissez-Passer, Royaume D’Irak by Leslie Starobin (2016) 

The Last Address

Through April 2017
in ASF’s Myron Habib Memorial Display 


Center for Jewish History 
15 W 16th Street
New York, NY 10011

 

The American Sephardi Federation proudly presents excerpts from The Last Address, a multi-year, photo-montage series and oral history and book project by award-winning artist Leslie Starobin that explores the enduring texture of memory and culture in the lives of Greater Sephardic families from dispersed Jewish communities in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Iran, and Lebanon.

Leslie Starobin is a Boston-area photographer and montage artist. Her work is in the permanent collections of many academic (Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University) and public (Jewish Museum, MoMA) museums. Starobin is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation of the Arts/Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Most recently, she received two Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Grants for this series, The Last Address.

Her exhibition in ASF’s Myron Habib Memorial Display 
is sponsored in part by CELTSS: The Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching, Scholarship and Service at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, where Starobin is a Professor of Communication Arts.

Please click here for additional information and viewing hours

 and your tax-deductible contribution will help ASF preserve and promote the Greater Sephardi history, traditions, and culture as an integral part of the Jewish experience! 

Contact us by email or phone ((917) 606-8266) to learn about giving opportunities in honor or memory of loved ones

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The American Sephardi Federation is located at the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th St., New York, New York, 10011).

www.AmericanSephardi.org | info@AmericanSephardi.org | (212) 548-4486

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