For 30 Years, I Thought I Was Sephardic. I Was Wrong.
I knew I wasn’t Ashkenazi, so for nearly 30 years, I thought I was Sephardic. I wasn’t alone.
I knew I wasn’t Ashkenazi, so for nearly 30 years, I thought I was Sephardic. I wasn’t alone.
Ethan Margolis, co-founder of Arte y Pureza (Art and Purity), a Seville, Spain-based flamenco troupe, says three influences stand out as soon as you begin reading about flamenco: Sephardic, Arabic and Indian.
Noshing on a bagel while shlepping his groceries, the klutz fell on his tush.
What brought the first, mainly Sephardic, Jews to Charleston was its remarkable religious tolerance, not to mention the economic prospects elevating them to a new aristocracy to which their Ashkenazi kinsmen who followed greedily aspired.
He calls them the \”other\” Jews. That\’s because Neil Sheff is partly one of those \”others\” (i.e., Sephardic Jews). In promoting the fifth annual Los Angeles Sephardic Film Festival, Sheff, whose ancestors came from the island of Rhodes, promises that anyone who comes to the festival will learn much about a culture that is often forgotten.\n\n
Reuben Dahan lives just down the block from his nearest synagogue. Yet every Shabbat, for the past seven years, Dahan, an Israeli immigrant who grew up in Petach Tikvah, has gone the extra mile, literally, to worship at a place he calls his spiritual home.
Today\’s schools tend to have only limited resources for music instruction, and Jewish day schools are no exception. And in an American Jewish community dominated by Ashkenazic-descended households, Sephardic culture remains a mystery to many Jewish children. Happily, the Maurice Amado Foundation has stepped in to address both of these problems.
When you grow up in the States, all you know is Ashkenazi Jewish culture,\” laments Moroccan-Jewish musician Ron Elkayam. \”But that is such a small part of the continuum of Jewish life.\”
The Sephardic Arts Festival will take place this Sunday at the Skirball Cultural Center, and it\’s a welcome sign for Los Angeles\’ some 100,000 Sephardic Jews.\n