In Honor of the Yemenite-Israeli war hero, Avigdor Kahalani, on his 76th birthday. At the beginning of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, more than 1,400 Syrian tanks crossed into the Golan Heights, threatening to overrun the 170 antiquated Israeli tanks that stood between them and the destruction of Israel. Stepping into the breach Lt. Avigdor Kahalani’s bravery and leadership miraculously turned the tide and Israel emerged victorious. Kahalani, it should be noted, had been seriously wounded in the 1967 Six Day War, but twelve surgeries and a forged health certificate convinced his superiors that Kahalani was still fit for combat, B”H. A character based on Kahalani’s inspiring story is featured in Rabbi Yamin Levy’s novel, Sebaba.
Click here to dedicate a future issue in honor or memory of a loved one.
Thank you to Sephardi World Weekly Patrons Professor Rifka Cook, Maria Gabriela Borrego Medina, Rachel Amar, Deborah Arellano, and Distinguished ASF Vice President Gwen Zuares! Become a Patron today!
During Passover, Iranian regime-backed Houthis expelled almost all of Yemen’s last Jews. They continue to illegally imprison Levi Salem Musa Marhabi. Don’t turn away. Don’t close your eyes. Don’t let another group of Jews become forgotten refugees. Join the ASF’s campaign to #FreeLeviMarhabi.
Born in Casablanca in 1963 to a Moroccan Jewish family with roots extending back to Portugal, Patrick Drahi is the Moroccan French-Israeli founder and controlling shareholder of Altice, the European based telecom group. Drahi made news this week by purchasing “a 12.1% stake in UK telecom giant British Telecom (BT).” Ranked by Forbes as the 60th wealthiest person in the world, Drahi is deeply involved in Israeli ventures and companies. In 2013, he founded i24 News, and he owns the Israeli cable television company HOT. In fact, Drahi’s manner of acquiring HOT might signal his plans for BT: “He first entered the Israeli market by buying a small stake in Hot from Bank Leumi and then began gradually increasing his holdings until he eventually achieved control of the company. BT is one of the world’s biggest telecom companies and some market sources believe it is only a matter of time until he increases his stake in the company.”
Shalom Shabazi (1619-1720) was a legendary Yemenite Jewish poet and author of the piyyut, Sar Hami’munah (“The Appointed Minister”), an elegy written for a dear, departed friend and scholar that moved from Shabazi’s personal mourning to meditations on human mortality. One of Israel's first Mizrahi music bands, Tzlilei Ha’Oud (“The Sounds of the Oud”), made a popular recording of the piyyut in the 1970’s. Then, in 2006, saxophonist Daniel Zamir (with a little help from friends like bass maestro Omer Avital) extended, elaborated, and refined the piyyut into a soulful, thoughtful, and playful jazz workout.
Rachel Yanait and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1913. Yitzhak later founded the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem and served as Israel’s 2nd President
(Photo courtesy of the Jewish National Fund/Wikipedia)
Living in pre-state Israel, Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi (1886-1979) was an author, educator, co-founder of the Jewish defense organization Hashomer, and a Zionist activist who “saw great importance in bringing Jews of Arab origin to the ‘state in-the-making.’” Her efforts took on a special urgency after the Farhud, the Nazi-Islamist anti-Jewish pogrom that demonstrated how, “time was running out for the Jews of the Arab world.” Since access to Baghdad was blocked, Ben-Zvi turned her attention to the Jews of Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus—especially the young women who, thanks to her efforts, “would become Hebrew teachers and immigration activists themselves.” Ben-Zvi couldn’t understand why others didn't share her passion: “(H)ow could we have neglected these Jewish communities that are so close to us, until now? Damascus, located just an hour from the Israeli border and Beirut, which is just three hours from Haifa!”
About their upcoming film, “Ariel”:
Synopsis - In the world of the Ottoman Sultans, a poor child from Jerusalem makes an unimaginable desert journey to Cairo and back to save his mother and siblings from a rapacious aristocrat. He has nine days…
The Impact - Greater Sephardi Jewry is a deeply ancient community long ignored in the West. Most people are shocked to find out that at the dawn of the 20th century the most Jewish city in the world wasn’t New York or Tel Aviv—It was Baghdad, whose population was as high as 25% Jewish!
We’re excited to bring this long-gone world of Middle Eastern Jewry to life, educating audiences about this rich tradition with a dynamic story of family, love, and resilience.
About the book: Historically the plants of the Bible have been of great interest for botanical studies, for their medicinal qualities, for cooking, for building gardens, for inspiration, and as metaphors for teaching.
The Bible often provides both social and symbolic meanings for plants, but sometimes the ambiguity of language means that the species mentioned cannot be specifically identified. The Bible was written in Aramaic and Hebrew, it was first translated into Greek in the second century B.C.E., into Latin in the fourth century C.E., and later into the many languages of the world. As we will see, the story of those translations has affected our understanding of the plants.
In this book I include the Hebrew name and the Latin scientific name for each of the plants, as well as the common name in English. Along with the images, I include a biblical reference to the plant with my interpretation of the verse, focusing on the five most mentioned plants: fig, grape vine, olive, date palm and pomegranate.
About the author: Gloria Abella Ballen is an artist and author creating award-winning art books such as The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet and The New World Haggadah, the latter with Ilan Stavans. Both titles won Best Book Awards with The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet winning multiple awards. Abella Ballen has graduate degrees in art from SUNY-Buffalo and the National University in Mexico City and has done specialized studies on studio art and theory with Larry Rivers and John Cage. She has exhibited in individual and group shows in the US, Israel, Japan, Latin America, and Europe, and has received a number of awards, including the UNESCO prize in painting, the Latin American Graphics Biennial, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pan American Graphics Portfolio Award among others. Abella Ballen currently lives in Santa Fe, NM.
Join us and artist Rafram Chaddad who will discuss the history of Tunisian Jews from Carthaginian times to today and present his works, telling the personal story of his family, through the larger perspective of current life in Tunisia.
Thursday, June 24th @ 9AM PDT ◊ 12PM EDT ◊ 5PM London ◊ 7PM Jerusalem ◊ 8PM Dubai
About the speaker: Rafram was born on the island of Djerba, Tunisia and grew up in Jerusalem where he also finish his visual arts studies. An artist since 2004, Rafram has been living and creating in various countries in Europe, as well as Israel and Tunisia. In recent years his works were exhibited in several museums and galleries across the world (including the Herzliya Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum, the CAMeC Museum, ACC Galerie, Mucem and more). Rafram’s works are influenced by biographical elements and Jewish themes. For the past ten years Rafram has also engaged with the idea of food as culture, teaching a course on food at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and formerly head of the Slow Food Movement in Israel. 4 year ago Rafram returned to live in Tunis, where he continues to pursue his art. Rafram has been working in the last year on a widespread food book that connect food relations in the broader region. Rafram is also author of a book on his incarceration in a Libyan prison while in Libya to document the remnants of the Libyan Jewish community. Rafram is a member of the ROI Community and served as a research advisor on the Diarna Geo-Museum’s 2016 expedition to Tunisia led by Chrystie Sherman.
During the pandemic, Nani decided to do a resurrection project of a very old language called Ladino, a Jewish-Spanish dialect from the middle ages that her grandmother used to speak. One of her 1st and best memories is of her and her grandmother together in the kitchen, speaking Ladino & singing songs about aubergine recipes.
Nani represented the NL at the EU Music Festival VN, performed at the Kennedy Center USA, Jodhpur RIFF festival IN, Jazzahead DE, North Sea Jazz NL, Roccella Jazz IT, TEDx NL & hosted 3 WOMEX panels. The Dutch NPO network released a mini documentary about her musical work in 2018. Nani also composed music for BBC4 and NPO documentaries. Nani is a professor at the London Performing Academy of Music, she chairs of the Amsterdam Artist Collective and founded Why DIY Music and Nova Productions.
The Department of Anthropology & Archeology at the University of Calgary, King’s College London, the International Network of Jewish Thought (Universidad Complutense of Madrid), & the American Sephardi Federation present:
Sephardi Thought and Modernity 2021 Webinar Series
A monthly lecture from February through June 2021, presenting different experiences of Sephardi modernization in different places and times.
On Wednesday, 23 June @ 12:00PM EDT
(10:00AM MDT) PLEASE NOTE NEW DATE AND TIME
Yuval Evri (King’s College London) and Angy Cohen (University of Calgary): Foreign in a familiar land: language and belonging in the work of Jacqueline Kahanoff, Albert Memmi, and Jacques Derrida.
The intention of this series is to spark the interest in processes of Jewish modernization not exclusively mediated by Europeanization. The questions we will be dealing with are related to non-dichotomic identities, multiplicity and loss of language, colonization, social transformation, and intellectual responses to it. We will approach these questions by looking at Jewish-Arab influences, the Sephardi response to European modernization, the responses of the rabbinic leadership and the work of Sephardi intellectuals.
Series organized by Yuval Evri (King’s College London) and Angy Cohen (University of Calgary).
“Registration is now open for this year’s Sephardic Birthright Trip! For 10 days, you'll be able to travel around the country with amazing people with Sephardic, Greek, and Turkish backgrounds, all while exploring everything Israel has to offer. You’ll be able to ride camels in the desert, raft down the Jordan River, explore the Old City in Jerusalem, and a whole lot more. The trip is totally FREE and anyone between the ages of 18 and 28 who hasn't been on a Birthright Israel trip before is eligible. Even if you’ve been to Israel before on a non-birthright trip, you may still be eligible. The trip will follow all related COVID-19 Health Guidance as required by the US Centers for Disease Control and the Israel Ministry of Health.”
You can sign up now at sephardicbrotherhood.com/birthright. Registration takes less than 10 minutes and no final commitment is necessary. When registering, make sure to write “Sephardic Israel” as your “referred by” group and Amazing Israel as your trip provider.
Jews lived in the Middle East, and particularly Iran, even before the advent of Islam. Iran has a long history with varying dynasties, dynastic changes, and evolving borders and Jews have been there continuously throughout these changes. Throughout the ascent of Islam in its different forms, Jews were integrated at times more and at times less economically. There were times of intellectual and spiritual growth as well as suppression and persecution. All this will be addressed and discussed in a historical context.
The course is divided into seven units:
1. The Ancient Period – the settlement of the Jews in Iran, Acaemenid, Parthian, and Sassanian times
2. 7th to 9th Centuries – The emergence of Islam, Islam and the Jews, Dhimma, and Jewish religious streams
3. 13th to 18th centuries – Mongols, Jewish Persian poets, Safavid times
4. Mid-18th century to 19th century – Invasion, dynasties, and persecutions
5. The latter part of the 19th century – Interactions with World Jewry, legal status and conversions
6. Early 20th century – Modernization and education, constitution revolution, Zionism
7. The 20th century – Pahlavi dynasty, Revolution, Mashadis, and Migration
Dr. Daniel Tsadik
Dr. Daniel Tsadik, a former professor of Sephardic and Iranian Studies at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, has been awarded The Prime Minister’s Prize (Israel) in 2020 for the Encouragement and Empowerment of Jewish Communities in Arab Countries and Iran for The Jews of Iran and Rabbinic Literature: New Perspectives, published by Mosad Ha-Rav Kook.
Tsadik researches the modern history of Iran, Shi'ah Islam, and Iran's religious minorities. A Fulbright scholar, he earned his Ph.D from the History Department at Yale University.
Dr. David Yeroushalmy
Born in Tehran, David Yeroushalmy completed his primary and part of his secondary education at the Alliance Israelite school in Tehran. He immigrated to Israel in 1961 and upon completing his secondary education he enrolled in the Department of Middle Eastern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Completing his B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and in Political Science, he served in the Israeli Army as an officer. He pursued his doctoral studies at Colombia University New York, in the Department of Middle East Languages and Cultures. He specialized in Persian and Hebrew languages and literatures. D. Yeroushalmy was appointed lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel-Aviv University, where he has been teaching Persian language and Iranian history and culture. His Book entitled The Judeo-Persian Poet Emrani and His Book of Treasure, was published by E.J. Brill Publishers, Leiden, in 1995. Dr. Yeroushalmy's current research focuses on the communal and cultural history of Iranian Jewry in the course of the nineteen-century.
Ms. Lerone Edalati
Lerone Edalati is a member of the Mashadi community of New York. In addition to her role as Associate Director of Donor Relations at ISEF, she researches and records the history and current practices of the Mashadi Jews. She holds a BA from NYU in Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a Broome & Allen Fellow at the American Sephardi Federation and is currently gathering oral histories of Iranian Jews in NY.
Dr. Hilda Nissimi
Dr. Hilda Nissimi is the chair of the Generatl History Department at Bar Ilan University. Her most current research focuses on the formation adn change of identity layers in crypto-religious communities, with a particular focus on Mashadi Jews. Her book, The Crypto-Jewish Mashadis, was published in 1985 and remains the main text on the study of that population. She has written numerous articles on identity and forced conversions.
This course is made possible with the support of The Shazar Center, Israel.
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
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.
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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).
