On May 21st, The American Sephardi Federation (ASF) will be presenting Mexican diplomat Andres Roemer with the International Sephardic Leadership Award as part of an event honoring the 50th Anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem. Roemer recently made headlines by staging a walkout in protest of a UNESCO resolution that absurdly denied the link between Jerusalem and Jewish history. According to the ASF statement, “Ambassador Roemer knowingly risked his position to voice and vote his conscience.”
Rabbi Ephraim Alnaqua (1359-1442), one of the great figures of North African Jewish history, is buried in the Algerian city of Tlemcen. The rabbi’s tomb became a pilgrimage site until Algerian independence in 1962. By then, most of Algeria’s Jews had fled and Jewish pilgrims were banned from entering the country.
The Algerian regime recently tried to reopen the site to visitors, but local opposition has been intense: “Locals in Tlemcen… organized large marches in protest, and threatened to burn the remaining Jewish properties in the city.”
Moroccan Royal Counsellor André Azoulay, Enrico Macias, OCP Chairman and CEO Mostafa Terrab, Sir Chalres Dahan, Morocco’s Ambassador the United Nations Omar Hilale, Morocco’s Deputy Counsel General Taha Kadri, ASF Board Member Raquel Laredo Benatar, Spanish Consul for Cultural Affairs Juan José Herrera de la Muela
(Photo courtesy of Chrystie Sherman)
Watch as Mr. André Azoulay, Counsellor to Mohammed VI, King of Morocco, accepts The American Sephardi Federation’s 2017 Pomegranate Award for Lifetime Achievement at Opening Night of the 20th New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival. Among the guests featured are ASF’s President David E. R. Dangoor, Association Mimouna’s Vice President Laziza Dalil, OCP Group’s Chairman and CEO Mostafa Terrab, Algerian-French recording legend Enrico Macias and his talented grandson Symon Mill, the Israeli-Moroccan musical duo, Neta Elkayam and Amit Hai Cohen, Kuwaiti star and human rights activist Ema Shah, and French-Moroccan baritone opera singer David Serero.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, is home to a small Jewish community that numbers around 200 souls. Jews are able to freely practice their faith in one isolated corner of the country, Sulawesi Island, but otherwise are compelled to hide their identity. One community member report being told: “‘We don’t want you to use your kippah in this country. If you continue to use it, we’ll kill you.’”
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
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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!
Sunday, May 21st at 7 PM Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, New York City
In honor of this year's Yom Yerushalayim, the 50th Anniversary of the liberation and reunification of the Jewish People’s eternal capital, The American Sephardi Federation is awarding the International Sephardic Leadership Award to former Mexican Ambassador Andrés Roemer. 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 Professor Ephraim Isaac.
And a special performance by David Serero!
Kosher hors d'oeuvres by Mexikosher NYC and refreshments to be served
Co-Presented with The Philos Project
RSVP Required
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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)
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
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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).
