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B'siyata d'shmaya - With the help of Heaven

 


A Message on Sephardic Pride and Responsibility

By Shelomo Alfassa

June 19, 2005

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and discuss Sephardic pride and responsibility, but first I want you to know a little bit about me and where I come from. My family are from Ottoman Rhodes and Turkey, they came to the United States in 1921. I was raised in a home with lots of Sephardic relatives, they spoke Ladino around the house. "Sephardic life" is in my blood, and over the past ten years, I have worked with various Sephardic organizations from the Sephardi Federation of Palm Beach to the International Committee for Judeo-Spanish in Paris; I have done all I can to be a good public citizen for my people, the Sephardic Jews. In the past I served as director of research for Sephardic House in New York at the Center for Jewish History and was a consultant to the American Sephardi Federation. I currently serve on the board of the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, the oldest Sephardic studies organization in North America. I am also the publisher and editor of the International Sephardic Journal, the world's first English language academic Jewish publication oriented solely to Sephardic topics.

One of the projects I have been working on lately is to have Holocaust education be inclusive to the fact that Sephardim living in North Africa and the Middle East were affected by the Nazis influence. While the entire world knew about the affects of the Holocaust in Central Europe, few knew it had extended outside of Europe. As an example of this, while most have heard of Kristallnacht, few had heard of the Farhud, where Arabs trained by the Nazis in Baghdad, killed, maimed and committed numerous atrocities against the Sephardim over the holiday of Shavuot in 1941. When I telephoned Holocaust centers around the United States to initially discuss the events which affected Iraqi Sephardim, very few Holocaust center directors even had heard of it. "The Farhud, what is that, some kind of food?" one ignorantly squawked.

People ask me, Shelomo, how come you always talk about everything from a Sephardic perspective? And I answer them with the words of the Talmudic sage, Hillel: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?"

  • First, "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?" This is a primary issue. We can not leave it up to non-Sephardim to defend and honor Sephardic tradition, while they are busy doing the same for their own people. It is up to us to be for "us." If we are not for us, no one else will be.
  • Second, "And if I am only for myself, then what am I?" As Sephardim, we realize we are Jews first. No ethnic or cultural division displaces the fact we are Jewish people first and foremost. When we observe a holiday, or attend an event with Ashkenazi friends, we honor and show respect to both God and our Ashkenazi brothers. It is not that we are only for ourselves, but we strive to honor the traditions and culture of our fathers, to ensure that we do not lose their traditions and culture-our Sephardic traditions and culture. This is something we have every right to do, and are even commanded to do. As God tells us in the Humash, "Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you."
  • Third, "And if not now, when?" This is one of the most vital sayings which lend credence to our plight. We must act-and we must act now. Assimilation, as well as indifference is destroying us. Assimilation is the "big gun" which must be unloaded. We can do it, we all have to make an effort.

In most of the world prior to 1900, our various Sephardic communities were fertile, they were perpetuating themselves by indoctrinating new generations of children with our customs and traditions. The old ways were being handed down, the traditional ways of the Sephardim were perpetuated from Rabat to Mosul and from Constantinople to Alexandria. Back when a young boy or girl reached an age in his or her community that was socially acceptable for marriage, the family made arrangements with another family, or the community marriage maker would set up the child with a potential partner. Like society itself, some things must change, life evolves; some changes are for the better, and some not so. We should realize marriage is the single most important key to keep precious traditions alive, it is through the union of the man and woman, the nuclear and extended family that culture is best made accessible for children. The plague of indifference has struck the Jewish people a severe blow. It had been rising ever so gently since the late 1950's, but in just the last few decades we have seen Jewish self-destruction grow into high numbers. The rampant assimilation the Jewish people have dealt with for decades must be suppressed. Assimilation is in no way a problem of North American Jewry, or even European Jewry. Countries in South America and Central America are undergoing this problem as well. Even locations such as Turkey, Greece, Italy, Australia, South Africa and even Israel experience this issue. No country is immune from this, no place where Jewish people exist is free from assimilation.

In addition to the general Jewish problem of assimilation, Sephardim have a unique issue which faces them. Sephardic culture has faded to such incredible ailing levels, that if we were animals we would be placed on the endangered species list! As we are now in the 21st century, there are only a few Sephardim still alive who were born in the "old country." Even their children, the first American born generation, are sadly at the upper limits of their age group. The unity of the Sephardic Jews is critical for various Sephardic cultures to survive in the future. This is the time to unite, this is the time to come together and make a stand, we should all shout: "we have a treasured heritage and we want it to survive."

As we all know, the OU, or Orthodox Union is the world's largest kashruth organization, but does anyone realize it was founded by Sephardim? Yes, not Ashkenazim, but Sephardic Jews, including Henry Pereira Mendes of New York City's Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, home to Congregation Shearith Israel, founded in 1654 by refugees fleeing the Inquisition in Brazil. If you went to the OU website, would you find any of this-no. If you asked, do you think they would remember-no. But this is not the only organization which the Sephardim founded, which seems to have fallen on the way side.

Although today it is now an arm of the Conservative Ashkenazi movement, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City was founded by Sabato Morais a Sephardic rabbi from Italy with the assistance of Henry Pereira Mendes. Morais received his rabbinical training in his native Livorno, Italy and served as the Haham of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation, Mikveh Israel, in Philadelphia from 1851 until his death in 1897. This Sephardic Jew was so important and so respected, that when he died a funeral took place in Philadelphia, where masses of Sephardim and Eastern European Ashkenazim, including thousands of Russian Jews, lost a day's pay to attend his burial on a rainy Monday afternoon. And in New York City, he was honored with a massive march in his honor, with thousands of people blocking the street from sidewalk to sidewalk. The New York Times remembered Morais as "the most eminent rabbi in this country…a powerful and aggressive factor in discussions of vast import and interest to millions of people; a deep, incisive, fearless thinker, speaker, and writer." But do you think Sephardim realize this, have we forgotten? Do you think non-Sephardim care to perpetuate Sephardic history? Acknowledging that if we are not there to remember important people, they will be forgotten-an author recently published a scholarly paper wit the bleak title, "The Funeral and Forgetting of Sabato Morais." So this begs the question, who is the keeper of our history? Who will be the keeper of our culture and heritage in the future?

The traditional Sephardic model since Maimonides has always been to be a "person of the world," a person who can work in modern society but a person who could hold on to his strong Jewish identity and who respected both the Jewish world and the larger non-Jewish secular world. The rabbis will agree; the Torah is the central marker of which all Jews rally around. Although some Jews will rally closer to the Torah than others, it still belongs to all of us. I say to you, whether you are religious, secular, or in between, no matter where you stand, remember you are part of a people with a splendid heritage, one that deserves to be perpetuated. You, the young Jew, you have been handed the torch, you must pick it up and carry it, run with it. Do all you can to imbibe in Sephardic history, read, write, participate in discussion groups. Act, visit Israel, support Sephardic organizations, attend lectures and programs which will teach and inspire you on your honorable Sephardic heritage; and most of all, be proud-be proud to be Sephardic, and be proud enough that you want your descendants to not only be Sephardic, but understand what it means to be Sephardic. We must keep the flame alive, and we can if we try.

 

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Mr. Alfassa is an international advocate for Sephardic Jewry. He is the founder and executive director of the International Society for Sephardic Progress.

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