The cover from the 1917 Brotherhood Gala brochure (Courtesy of David Saffan) The common answer today is: Yes. Even the Brotherhood’s own website indicates that the organization was established as a “volunteer mutual aid and burial society.”   But Ladino publications of the era tell a slightly different story.   During the early twentieth century, economic challenges, political changes, and war compelled many Sephardic Jews to leave the Ottoman Empire. Between 1908 and 1924, a

Benoun Torah Crown from the Kehila Grande of Rhodes For decades, artifacts and photographs related to the Jewish community of Rhodes have been carefully collected as part of a personal and communal mission to preserve its rich history for future generations. And despite the tragic deportation and murder of nearly all its Jews to Auschwitz, it is our role as their descendants to honor and remember their life stories, thus preserving the community’s legacy now and forever.  Tha

Correspondence clipping from Congregation Mikveh Israel discussing the plight of recently arrived Sephardic Jews to Philadelphia from the...

Next month, Stanford University Press will publish The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders . Written by...

Newly catalogued archives of the Jewish Community of Izmir, Turkey On December 17, 2024, an invaluable treasure of Jewish heritage was...

Like Lady Liberty and her torch, my mother holds aloft her own precious symbol, the jar of homemade Harosset, prepared well in advance of...

La Djente - The People. I am honored to introduce you to the new name of our beloved magazine. There is a Jewish idea that a person’s...

Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel, the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, learning with young students in Jerusalem A quick...

Republished with Permission from the Washington Post Americans spend more than half a billion dollars annually on 150 million units of...

It was 1951 when Victor Cadranel was attending a masked ball at the Athénée Royale in Élizabetheville, Zaire. Now known as Lubumbashi in...

An unusual cluster of synagogues bearing a typical architectural style dating from the 15th and 16th century exists in Izmir - Turkey....

The 1906 strike at one of the largest factories in Istanbul at the time has all but disappeared from the history of the city and the...

“Don’t forget me, my dear children, my beloved children, my only reason for living.” With these words Neama Cazes, a 54-year-old Jewish...