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17 July 2020 

This edition of the Sephardi World Weekly is dedicated in Memory of Rabbi Arnold B. Marans, A”H, who passed away on his 92nd birthday last Sunday. Born in Brooklyn, Rabbi Marans played a pivotal role in bringing together the first-generation American Sephardic Jews of the Greek, Turkish, and Rhodesli communities into a unified American Sephardic community. Centered at the Sephardic Temple of Cedarhurst, Rabbi Marans’ “learning and teaching established… unprecedented success for Balkan Sephardim as he became a great champion of their religion, culture, social development, and expansion.” He also served as Chaplain at the Sephardic Home for the Aged and as President of the Sephardic Geriatric Foundation ~ The American Sephardi Federation—especially our Board Directors who are also members of the Sephardic Temple: Martin Elias, Dr. Joe Halio, Cliff Russo, Dr. Alan Matarasso, and Jeff Beja—extend our deepest sympathy to the Rubisa, their 5 children, 25 grandchildren, 26 great-grand children, siblings, and their families. En pas descansa.
 
 Click here to dedicate a future issue in honor or memory of a loved one. 
 
The Sephardi World Weekly is made possible by generous readers like you. Show your support by becoming a Patron via Patreon and your name will appear in each edition along with timely, thought-provoking articles on Greater Sephardi history, the arts, and current affairs. Click here to become a Patron today!. Thanking you in advance! And thank you to Sephardi World Weekly Patrons Maria Gabriela Borrego Medina and Distinguished ASF Vice President Gwen Zuares
 
The 11th Annual Axelrod Israel Jewish Film Festival  
Featuring 10 North American and regional premieres of award-winning films


Stream on All Devices, Including Your SmartTV

Sunday, 19 July - Thursday, 13 August 
 
Sign-up now!
Memoir unveils double lives of Jews living incognito in fanatical Islamic Iran” 
By Renee Ghert-Zand, The Times of Israel
 
Esther Amini’s fascinating memoir, Concealed: Memoir of a Jewish-Iranian Daughter Caught Between the Chador and America, explores the difficulties of “a mid-20th century modern, Western child of immigrant parents” as she comes to terms with “the trauma of [her parents’] Middle Eastern past.” The source of the trauma was the crypto-Jewish experience of Mashhadi Jews who, up until 1925, lived double lives, “Because of the fanatical brand of [Shi’a] Islam dictated by the local imams and mullahs… Jews dressed and acted as Muslims in public while privately practicing the Jewish religion.”

Click here to purchase a copy of Concealed: Memoir of a Jewish-Iranian Daughter Caught Between the Chador and America by Esther Amini
Book cover: Concealed: Memoir of a Jewish-Iranian Daughter Caught Between the Chador and America by Esther Amini
(Photo courtesy of Esther Amini

 
Feature of the week: Remembering Rabbi Arnold B. Marans, A”H
 

Rabbi Arnold B. Marans, A”H
(Photo courtesy of 5 Towns Central
 
Rabbi Arnold B. Marans passed away on his 92nd birthday, July 12, 2020. He was born in Brooklyn and raised among the Sephardic Spanish-Jews of New Lots. The Great Depression, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the birth and growth of Israel, and his role in the conciliation among Balkan Sephardic Jews of New York, helped shape his religious, communal, and personal life. 
Please click here to continue reading Distinguished ASF Board Member Dr. Joe Halio’s sensitive and appreciative remembrance of Rabbi Marans, A”H. 

Kurdish Jewish Hakham Rabbi Zechariah Barashi, pictured here at age 116 in Jerusalem, immigrated to Israel in 1936  
(Photo courtesy of Joseph Samuel/Diarna Geo-Museum)

 
 
How Kurdish Jews made their way to Jerusalem, shocked Herzl, began to thrive” 
By Aviva and Shmuel Bar-Am, The Times of Israel

A chance meeting between British geologists looking for “flint and steel in the rocks of … Kurdistan” and a group of local Jews gave birth to an unexpected wave of Aliyah to Israel. The Brits asked the Kurdish Jews for their opinion of the Balfour Declaration, but the Jews had never heard of it. Now informed, however, they figured it was time to go. Aviva and Shmuel Bar-Am explain how, once in the country, Kurdish Jews became prominent politicians, generals, and singers, while the Barashi Construction Company, “built pre-State Israel’s Burma Road… bypassing the main highway to Jerusalem which was under siege… [and] cleared the area in front of the Western Wall to create the large plaza where worshipers congregate today.”
Sephardi Gifts:
Concealed: Memoir of a Jewish Iranian Daughter Caught Between the Chador and America
By Esther Amini


Esther Amini grew up in Queens, New York, during the freewheeling 1960s. She also grew up in a Persian-Jewish household, the American-born daughter of parents who had fled Mashhad, Iran. In Concealed, she tells the story of being caught between these two worlds: the dutiful daughter of tradition-bound parents who hungers for more self-determination than tradition allows.

Exploring the roots of her father’s deep silences and explosive temper, her mother’s flamboyance and flights from home, and her own sense of indebtedness to her Iranian-born brothers, Amini uncovers the story of her parents’ early years in Mashhad, Iran’s holiest Muslim city; the little-known history of Mashhad’s underground Jews; the incident that steeled her mother’s resolve to leave; and her parents’ arduous journey to the U.S., where they faced a new threat to their traditions: the threat of freedom. Determined to protect his daughter from corruption, Amini’s father prohibits talk, books, education, and pushes an early Persian marriage instead. Can she resist? Should she? Focused intently on what she stands to gain, Amini comes to see what she also stands to lose: a family and community bound by food, celebrations, sibling escapades, and unexpected acts of devotion by parents to whom she feels invisible.

In this poignant, funny, entertaining, and uplifting memoir, Amini documents with keen eye, quick wit, and warm heart how family members build, buoy, wound, and save one another across generations; how lives are shaped by the demands and burdens of loyalty and legacy; and how she rose to the challenge of deciding what to keep and what to discard.

 
Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, An Exile's Journey
by Joyce Zonana


Dream Homes chronicles Joyce Zonana’s quest to find a sense of home among people, foods, and places as far from her native Cairo as Oklahoma and Katrina-stricken New Orleans.

After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, newlyweds Felix and Nellie Zonana flee Cairo with their infant daughter Joyce, eventually settling in Brooklyn. Growing up, Joyce swiftly realizes that her Jewish family and their Egyptian culture are neither typically American nor typically American-Jewish; they eat kobeba instead of kugel and speak French instead of Yiddish. Struggling with her feelings of isolation from other Americans and frustrated by never getting full access to Egyptian-Jewish culture, Zonana sets out on a life-long journey to find her place in the world.

She meets her extended family living in Colombia and Brazil and travels to Cairo to get a glimpse of her parents’ past. After she and her mother survive the devastation of Katrina, Zonana comes to see that “home” is not a location, but a spiritual state of mind. Zonana’s heritage and quest are also evoked in numerous photos and family recipes.

 
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Upcoming Events or Opportunities:

The Axelrod Performing Arts Center and CHAI FLICKS present:

The 11th Annual Axelrod Israel Jewish Film Festival  
Featuring 10 North American and regional premieres of award-winning films!

Sunday, 19 July - Thursday, 13 August 
Stream on All Devices, Including Your SmartTV


Sign-up Now!


The Axelrod Israel Jewish Online Film Festival Includes:

10 Award-Winning Films
(Ticketholders will be emailed information on each film,
as well as how and when to view it) 

Zoom Talk-Backs 

Under the Stars Movie Event
(Planned Pending Approvals) 

30 Days CHAI FLICKS Streaming on all devices

Check back soon for the APAC Israel Jewish Film Festival's collaboration with the ASF's New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival

Congregation Shearith Israel and the 
American Sephardi Federation present:


Tisha B'Ab Services
With a special lecture by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik
and live-stream from the sanctuary


Please stay tuned for more details...



The Fast of Ab services as conducted at Shearith Israel (The Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue of New York) are uniquely dramatic and moving.  The service is conducted in a darkened sanctuary. The traditional Western Sephardic melodies chanted for the Book of Lamentations and for the Kinot (elegies) are incredibly beautiful and emotionally moving.  In most years large crowds fill the room for an experience that is unlike any other.  This year, with the help of the American Sephardi Federation, Shearith Israel's Fast of Ab services, together with a special lecture by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, will be  presented via live-stream from the sanctuary.  Although there will not be large crowds of people inside the synagogue this year, we hope you will be able to experience a small degree of the unique beauty and drama of this special service.

Unlike the well-known evening service, the morning service of Tisha B’Ab is truly a hidden gem.  This year you will be able to experience a portion of the morning service and hear some of its most beautiful melodies from your home or office, as we expect to offer the kinot, a discrete section of morning service containing about 25 dirges and elegies, via a Zoom webinar.  

Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust and the 
American Sephardi Federation present:


Children of the Inquisition
Film and Discussion

Thursday, 30 July at 2PM EDT

Sign-up Now!


Children of the Inquisition follows a diverse group of descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions as they unravel their complex and often hidden Jewish identity. Each is on a personal quest to discover and explore his or her distant Sephardic roots.

Panelists include Joe Lovett, Doreen Carvahal, David Gitlitz, Keith Stokes, and Carlos deMeideros.


The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:

The Crypto Experience
The Global History of Secret Jews

An online course presented in 10 minute episodes.
Learn at your own pace.


Please sign-up now!
Total cost of the course is $75.00

The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience is proud to present “The Crypto Experience,” an online course on Crypto-Jews. It is part of a series of online courses on a variety of topics that make up the robust Jewish experience.

For hundreds of years there have been descendants of Crpto-Jews, who have covertly kept some of their traditions while maintaining a very different public persona. It is a question of identity, be it Huegenot, Catholic, Sephardi, or Mashadi. Professing one faith on the outside and another on the inside speaks to our quest for defining identity today.

These questions of identity that we think are so new and so relevant are really rather old questions under different circumstances. In this course Dr. Hilda Nissimi (Bar Ilan University) presents an overview of crypto societies historically and in the context of today. She challenges the participants to ask themselves difficult questions like: What defines identity? If I project this outer self, how do I keep my real me? Who is the real me? Am I the me before the expression of an outer facade? Is it a new me?

The course discusses these questions as they pertain to Jews, specifically. What does it mean to be a Jew? What do I have to keep if I want to call myself a Jew? Am I allowed to change? Am I the person to decide? Who will decide? How can anyone decide under such circumstances?

In order to understand this in historic and cultural contexts, world-renowned scholars and experts in the field have joined Dr. Nissimi and will be presenting the challenges facing a range of crypto societies: 

Huegenots – Dr. Hilda Nissimi
Spanish-Portuguese Crypto Society – Dr. Ronnie Perelis (Yeshiva University)
Bildi’in of Morocco – Professor Paul Fenton (Sorbonne Université, Paris) 
Mashhadi Jews of Iran – Dr. Hilda Nissimi
Tracing Jewish Roots – Genie and Michael Milgrom
Growing Up Mashhadi– Reuben Ebrahimoff


For more information and other ASF IJE online course offerings visit: https://courses.instituteofjewishexperience.org/


The ASF Institute of Jewish Experience presents:

The Greek Experience
Explore the world of Greek Jewry from the ancient Romaniote to the Sephardim and others who made it to and through Greece.

An online course presented in 10 minute episodes.
Learn at your own pace.


Please sign-up now!
Total cost of the course is $75.00

Jews have been in Greece since before the Temple was destroyed. They were in Greece upon the founding of the Greek Orthodox Church. Community members, known as Romaniote, made their way through Venice, Byzantium, Spain, across the Ottoman Empire, and beyond.
 
Dr. Yitzchak Kerem provides an overview of the unique languages, liturgical nuances, and communal life of Jews across Greece. Dr Kerem spent significant time living in Greece and researching Greek and Sephardic history. Photographs, maps, and personal accounts provide course participants with a full picture of the unique nature of the Jews of Greece and its surroundings.
 
In the course, participants will look at major influential points in Greek Jewish history. They will explore The Golden Age of Salonika, a time when Greece’s northern city was a hub of Jewish scholarship. Kerem introduces the tension arising in the Greek Jewish community because of Shabtai Tzvi and the Sabbateanism movement that brought with it false messianism and conversion to Islam, at least outwardly.
 
The course looks at when the Alliance Israélite Universelle moved in and the Sephardic culture in Greece developed a rich secular culture with its own novels, theater, and music. 
 
This is part of the greater Jewish heritage and history that is often overlooked. ASF IJE online courses will bring to life all parts of the greater Jewish Experience.

For more information and other ASF IJE online course offerings visithttps://courses.instituteofjewishexperience.org/

 and your generous tax-deductible contribution will empower the ASF to fight for Jewish unity and champion the Sephardi voice in Jewish communal affairs at home and abroad, as well as in our programs, publications, and projects. 

Contact us by email 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 Street, New York, New York, 10011).

www.AmericanSephardi.org | info@AmericanSephardi.org | (212) 294-8350

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