Joy's Sephardic Journey

David Suissa

Publisher & Editor-in Chief, Jewish Journal

Dear David,

Mazal Tov on accepting your new position as Jewish Journal’s Publisher & Editor-in Chief. BlesSing you with much success.

I’ve always enjoyed reading your personal family stories. In this week’s issue, November 3-9, 2017, I appreciate your “Sephardic Journey" story. 

"While the film festival is sure to attract Sephardic Jews, it’s also an opportunity for Ashkenazi Jews to learn more about their Sephardic brethren.”

I share with you here how I learned “more”.  From knowing nothing about Sephardim, for the March 8, 1992 day-long "Timbrels of Miriam” annual women's conference held at University of Judaism (now American Jewish University/AJU), I was proud of programming many workshops (that did make it into a Jewish Journal story) including those that were Sephardic themed.  Into this Ashkenazi university I brought in women who spoke of their Sephardic ancestors, telling their stories. I brought in the wise Sephardi elders who shared their own mystical stories. I hired Sephardi artists both to display and sell their art, and another to teach amulet making.

Three months after Timbrels of Miriam, for the 500th anniversary of the Alhambra decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion, the order for the expulsion of practicing Jews),  I took a Sephardic journey, a cruise to many countries for the Sephardi Jews on board to explore and remember their own heritage.  I was probably the only person without family members on board from the LASHA support members of the LA Sephardic Home for the Aging.  Being Ashkenazi, I recall being surprised that so many families had the Ashkenazi names, Levy and Cohen. We visited the synagogues in countries where their ancestors had prayed. In Rhodes, black and white stone pebbles covered the synagogue dirt floor.  To get to the women’s section upstairs, we had to climb a narrow curved wrought iron metal outdoor staircase. Outside the shul in Rhodes were names engraved of the community members who had perished in the Holocaust.  

For my Timbrels of Miriam conference, I hired women from Rhodes to speak and mentored them to present for an audience.  (Sarah Treves went on to be president of her shul's Sephardic Sisterhood.) As moving as this cruise experience was for me, it must have been so much more for the Sephardim. 

Until a couple days before I boarded the ship in Venice, I had been studying for the prior month “Art and Architecture of the Synagogues” at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. I loved experiencing live many of the world’s synagogues that I’d been learning about, and spent a couple days alone in Venice to further explore. (A few years earlier I’d taken my family to visit the Jewish Ghetto in Venice.) It was amazing to see that congregants had to travel by boat to the Sinagoga Ebraico in Venezia. I recall also seeing Ralph Amado, z”l (from LA) touch the beautiful old, thick, dark wood bannisters in the shul. That was 25 years ago. When I was Arts Editor of the Jewish Calendar Magazine, it was my publisher David Epstein who suggested to me that I would appreciate this Sephardic tour. He had heard me say, I don’t know anything about Sephardim!

My career as a percussionist took a leap from the night I performed 18 years ago in Los Angeles with Vanessa Paloma (and Jordan Charnofsky), who now lives in Morocco and beautifully performs Sephardic music, singing and playing her harp. I was happy to see Vanessa a couple years ago at a Converso conference I attended learning about Sephardi women at American Jewish University, AJU. 

Twenty years ago I met Moroccan musician Gerard Edery on the plane to Morocco. For my birthday I chose to go to the World Festival of Sacred Music in Fes, Morocco and the Festival was awesome. I love to perform with the hand-made percussion instruments that I bought in Morocco.  Again I met Jewish brothers and sisters who were not Ashkenazi. Because I loved Gerard's passionate Sephardic Ladino music that I first heard on the plane, I tried increasing his musical bookings in greater Los Angeles. 

I lit a candle at Fes Tomb of Tangiers born, Soulika 1817-1834 - Sol Hatchouel HaTsaddiqah (aka Laila Zoulikha in Arabic). A beautiful Jewish teen, beheaded by the King of Fez because she refused to give up her Jewish identity. Soulika, buried between two other tzadikim, is inspiration for Moroccan Jewish culture because of her resistance, passion, faith and martyrdom. “Execution d’une juive au Maroc”.

In the Fes cemetery I met a Jew minding the little school on the grounds and he kindly brought me to pray at the Sa’adon Synagogue, Fes. I was the only female. I met an elderly French-speaking man at shul who is the uncle of a Sephardi friend in LA, Joshua Bitan. They had a resemblance with their gingi colored hair, so I asked, and I was right!  :)  Years ago Joshua invited me to do Public Relations for world renowned Sepharadi-Israeli artist Rafael Abecassis, who was born in Marrakesh, Morocco in 1954. I arranged for an exhibit of Rafael's gorgeous colorful mystical-motif art with him in Los Angeles. I had the best time touring Abecassis to enjoy art in LA and later visiting him in Israel, and sent others to meet Abecassis. His commissioned art hangs in my home.

Decades before that, in 1965, I had studied art in Spain, and gone to shul, and met descendants of conversos, who had to hide their ancestral identity. In Toledo, Spain I was shown a private Shabbat altar with candlesticks in a garden's well hidden secret old stucco prayer room. A lady recognized me as being Jewish because I was wearing a mezuzah and invited me in.

This last summer, July 14, 2017, I met many more converso (Marranos, cryptos/hidden) descendants. I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico and at Nahalat Shalom attended their monthly Sephardic Shabbat service and dinner. That Shabbat many family members of conversos from across the US (CA, VA, NM, and also Mexico) had converged in Albuquerque to take a 6 hour Spanish language test that would help enable them to get Spanish citizenship, and they were guests at Nahalat Shalom. The test was a requirement for citizenship now being offered by Spain/Sepharad to the descendants of Jews who were expelled from the country more than 500 years ago during the Inquisition. Erev Shabbat I heard many meaningful and mystical stories about these people tracing their lineage and discovering their family ancestral Jewish history and now reclaiming their faith and culture.

The new citizenship offer to welcome Sephardic Jews home began two years ago. The University of New Mexico and the synagogue have a strong support system for people exploring their rights as Jews.  I shared with  the shul's leadership about the few Sephardic musicians I do personally know who could perform Ladino songs in Albuquerque. Ten years ago I had spent a week in spiritual retreat with musicians of Nahalat Shalom at this same Sephardic supportive NM university. 

In the 1980’s I wrote a story in the Jewish Calendar Magazine (LA's only Jewish magazine at the time) about LA Moroccan Judaic artist, Annette Sabbah, whose Moroccan inspired Judaica is worn world-wide and seen in museums.  The story I wrote accompanied Annette's hand-made kipa into the Israeli Museum's women's permanent exhibit.

http://joys-prose.blogspot.com/2006/11/annette-sabbah-hiddur-mitzvah.html

I’ve learned from watching female Sephardic congregants on my side of the mechitzah at my Chabad shuls, how they bring their heart to the Torah and Torah to their hearts (and not only point to Torah). Sort of like bringing the Lulav and Etrog to the heart, the 7th direction in Sukkot’s shaking ritual. 

On Pesach at Seder, Ashkenazi friends also use scallions in a Sephardic ritual representing slavery before Exodus. 

On Chanukah I sing  and perform “Ocho Kandelikas”. 

For decades on Pesach I wish I could eat Sephardi rice so that I can travel to Japan on Pesach with my potter friends during Spring break. 

Traveling the world, I have totally loved seeing ‘teeks/tiks’, the Sephardi round Torah cases aka sefer Torah Tiks. I was fascinated seeing lady’s scarves placed inside teeks and inside the hekha’l (aron kodesh) although I do not know why.

I love eating beurekas, baklavah, babaganoush, hummous, couscous, and also Yemenite malawachs.

Learning Hebrew when I first moved in 1974 to California from NY, I took two separate Hebrew classes every week, one by an Ashkenazi teacher and the other by a Sephardi teacher, so I could learn the different pronunciations of Hebrew vowels and consonant. (When I was a young teen, I tried teaching myself Hebrew from 'Learn a Language' records.) I recall being surprised in the 1970's to learn that my Chabad rabbi's Ashkenazi father was the leader of a NY Sephardic congregation.

I've enjoyed participating in private piyutim gatherings, where we quietly sang prayers. 

My beloved Renewal Rebbe Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, z”l, encouraged us, his disciples to use a Sephardic Siddur. My hands, heart, mind and soul have loved what I have discovered about Sephardic life.

These are many of the experiences I have had, and when I stand back and see them together, I realize that I have absorbed Sephardic traits into my Ashkenazi life.  L'Chaim. 

I have done a lot of exploring to "learn more about my Sephardic brethren, when I didn’t even realize that is what I have been doing and also helping others to learn about aspects of Jewish culture.

BlesSings, 

Joy Krauthammer

11.7.2017

Joy's Sephardic Journey to Morocco 

World Festival of Sacred Music in Fes

Sa'adon Synagogue in middle of collage. 

Fes cemetery in middle on right. 

collage by © Joy Krauthammer 

Fes Tomb of Tangiers born, Soulika 1817-1834 - Sol Hatchouel HaTsaddiqah 

(or Laila Zoulikha in Arabic)