26 May 2017 In memory of Nicos Stavroulakis (Daniel Hannan), A”H, Renowned Scholar, Painter, Engraver, Chef, Restorer of the Etz Hayyim Synagogue on Crete, and Co-Founder of the Jewish Museum of Greece
Born to a Syrian Jewish family living in Cairo, Haim Sabato has become one of Israel’s leading novelists by developing a lyrical voice deeply rooted in Jewish sources that speaks in a distinctly Sephardi register. In this podcast, Marcela Sulak reads a Shavuot story from Sabato’s third novel, The Dawning of the Day.
Nestled at the base of the first mountain ridge-line of the northern Iraqi highlands lies the purported tomb of the Prophet Nachum. Shavuot was known locally as the “festival of the pilgrimage.” During the Shavuot season several thousand people—some sources say almost the entire Jewish population of Mosul and surrounding villages—would arrive en masse. Young and old came together in special holiday dress and camped in the compound’s guest houses or in tents spread out in the surrounding fields.
In 2012, a team of Diarna researchers documented the shrine as part of a 10 day expedition to Iraqi-Kurdistan. Today, the tomb and many of the sites they digitally preserved are threatened by ISIS, which exploded the mosque containing Mosul’s purported shrine to Jonah — a brusque reminder of the precariousness of physical preservation.
Every day the synagogues, schools, and other structures that once composed Jewish life in scores of countries are decaying or being destroyed, and the last generation who remembers them is passing on. Diarna, as seen on the cover of Newsweek, is in a race against time to capture site data and record place-based stories before even the memory of these communities is forever lost.
Contact us immediately by email or phone (212-548-4486) if you have documentation or stories to share, expertise to contribute, or are otherwise interested in supporting our work. Donations to ASF on behalf of Diarna will help ensure that Jewish historical sites in the Middle East and North Africa are digitally preserved and made accessible to this and future generations.
Rabbi Haim Shaki’s Trezoro de Djudaizmo (Treasure of Judaism) published in Cairo, 1907
(Photo courtesy of Stroum Center for Jewish Studies)
Between the 16th and 21st centuries, the rabbinic text, Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), was translated into Ladino over fifty times. In many Sephardi communities a section of the text is chanted each Shabbat between Passover and Shavuot, a tradition that was continued in the New World even as the meaning of the tradition shifted, “While initially chanted in Ladino for congregants to understand, now Pirke Avot is chanted in Ladino in Seattle because it forms part of our rich, distinctive Sephardic tradition.”
Winner – Pomegranate Award for Directors – 20th New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
Winner – Audience Award – Beirut International Film Festival
Official Selection – IDFA, BFI London Film Festival, DOCNYC, Haifa Film Festival
A documentary by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum
With Tilda Swinton as the Voice of Gertrude Bell
Executive Producers: Tilda Swinton, Thelma Schoonmaker, Ruedi Gerber
THE TRUE STORY OF GERTRUDE BELL AND IRAQ
She was as controversial as the history she made
Voiced and executive produced by Academy Award winning actor Tilda Swinton, Letters from Baghdad tells the extraordinary and dramatic story of British spy, explorer and political powerhouse Gertrude Bell, who was the most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day. Bell traveled widely in Arabia before being recruited by British military intelligence to help draw the borders of Iraq after WWI, establish the modern state of Iraq and reshape the modern Middle East in ways that still reverberate today. Among her accomplishments, she created the Iraq Museum to preserve the priceless cultural artifacts and antiquities of the region. This was the museum that was infamously ransacked during the American invasion in 2003. Many of the ancient sites that Gertrude Bell visited and photographed, such as Palmyra, Nineveh and Nimrud, have since been destroyed by ISIL. She left over 7000 photographs, including stunning panoramas of these sites. Nicole Kidman portrays Gertrude Bell in Werner Herzog’s upcoming film Queen of the Desert.
Using stunning, never-seen-before footage of the region from 100 years ago, rare documents from the Iraq National Library and Archive and more than 1600 letters written by Bell and her contemporaries, the film chronicles Bell’s extraordinary journey into both the uncharted Arabian desert and the inner sanctum of British male colonial power. All dialogue in the film is excerpted verbatim from original source material.
More influential than her friend and colleague T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia), why has she been written out of the history she helped make?
Wednesday, 21 June from 5:00-7:30 P.M. Coolidge Auditorium
Thomas Jefferson Building
10 First Street, SE
Washington, DC 20540
The program is a mock appeal of Shylock’s case from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, taking place after the play itself ends. Actor Edward Gero will portray Shylock. The appeal will be heard by five judges including Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Professors Suzanne Reynolds and Richard Schneider of Wake Forest University Law School; former U.S. Ambassador to the OECD Connie Morella; and Micaela del Monte from the European Parliament. The case will be argued by Michael Klotz of Jones Day; Law Librarian and Professor Teresa Miguel-Stearns of Yale Law School; and Eugene D. Gulland of Covington LLP. Assistance will be given by James Shapiro of Columbia University and Michael Kahn of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. This event is the last of three events hosted by the Law Library to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice.
The event is made possible by a generous donation to the Library of Congress from the American Sephardi Federation. The Library also gratefully recognizes a contribution received through the Friends of the Law Library of Congress from Thomson Reuters. Additional support was provided by Mr. Robert S. Roth, Jr.
Please click here to make a complimentary registration*
*Registration is not a guarantee of admission. Seating is available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Tickets are limited to one per person.
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 September 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).
