When 850,000 Jews were expelled from their homes across the Middle East – from Morocco to Iran – it spelled the end to thousands of years of continued habitation. Most found their way to Israel, while some moved to France, the United States and Canada, where they started new lives. Several years ago Sephardi Voices was founded by Henry Green, a professor of Judaic and religious studies at the University of Miami, to preserve the Sephardi legacy and create an audio-visual archive to document the stories of the abandoned Sephardi communities. In Canada, Richard Stursberg, the former executive vice-president of CBC/Radio Canada, serves as chair of its international board.
Tell me a little bit about Sephardi Voices. I’ve heard it described as the Sephardi version of the Shoah Foundation. Is that more or less what it is?
A little bit.
One my oldest friends is Henry Green. He had become very interested in the whole disappearance, essentially, of the Sephardi Jews. He wanted to be able to document the history of all these people and these different cultures before they kind of vanished. He told me the story. This is a story which is almost completely unknown. It’s really remarkable how many people were displaced and how little known the story is.
In any event, he wanted to put the collection and archiving of these personal stories and recollections onto a larger and more formal footing. He asked me if I could give him a hand putting together an organization for it, a board for it, a strategy for it, because I know a thing or two about how to put organizations together.
I said, yes, and over the course of the last couple of years, that is indeed what we’ve done. The Shoah Foundation’s objective was to record as many testimonies as they could of the people who survived. This is similar only in the sense that we want to be able to record the memories and testimonies of people who were displaced.
Who was displaced and when did this happen?
The displacement began right after the creation of the State of Israel and went all the way, in different ways and across different countries, depending on geopolitical events, all the way up to about 1979, with the coming into power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran.
For this to work, you have to interview people who are old enough to remember what it was like to live, to go to school and work in Baghdad, or Alexandria, or Cairo.
Time is passing. People who left in 1949 are going to be almost in their 90s. So there is a certain kind of urgency to this.
When you look at the total number of communities, there were a lot of them and they were different in character. The Jews living in the Rif Mountains of Morocco were kind of peasant farmers, whereas the Jews living in Cairo or in Iraq were cabinet ministers, business people, professors – a sophisticated population.
So the notion was to try, to the extent we could, to cover not just the different countries, but the different cultures.
So it’s not just the story of their displacement?
What we wanted was not just the story of when they were pushed out and what happened, but we wanted at the same time to capture the very cultures and the fabric of people’s lives before these people. These are ancient cultures.
The notion was to capture the culture, the stories, the language, and the very kind of fabric of these lives, because when these old people die, their worlds will vanish.
What sort of stories have been told?
There’s one man who is in his 90s, who left Baghdad in his 30s. He lives in London. He said, “I have lived in Britain for over 60 years, but I am still an Iraqi. I lived in Baghdad for 2,500 years.” He was one of the Babylonian Jews that lived there for 2,500 years.
One of my favourite stories is from a person I already knew before I was involved in Sephardi Voices. I said, “David, you should come and get interviewed.” And the story he tells is extraordinary. They lived in Alexandria and Cairo and had big houses in both cities.
One day his father says to him, “What would you like for your birthday?” “I would like a dog.” “OK, I know a man who has dogs. Let’s go see if he can get you a dog.”
And the man he knew who had dogs was King Farouk. So he took David to the king’s palace and introduced him to Farouk, who said, “I understand you would like to have a dog.”
His father was a very wealthy man. He controlled most of the grain trade across North Africa. After Nasser came to power and the fiasco of the Suez crisis, most of the Jews who had been in Egypt forever, were scapegoated as fifth columnists. His father was arrested and tortured and tried as a spy and condemned to death.
His mother bribed the jailers.
They were home, and men arrived at the door with his father. They said, “You must go now. If you do not go now, not only will he be killed, you will all be killed.”
His driver had made arrangements with a fisherman to take them out of Egypt on a fishing boat. They spent three days covered in a tarpaulin, as the fishing boat made its way across the Mediterranean to Marseilles.
Many of the stories are astonishing stories. They’re astonishing not only in terms of their human quality, but also because of the staggering change. It’s amazing to me that during the 1930s, the prime minister of Egypt, who was a Muslim, would show up for the High Holidays at the Great Synagogue in Cairo. He showed up because he wanted to show respect for the community.
And that’s all gone.
In 1948, there 75,000 Jews in Egypt. Today, there are less than 100.
So you’re not limited to Canada?
No, it’s an international organization. Currently we have board members from Israel, the United States, Canada, Britain.
When these different populations were dispersed, 50 per cent of them ended up in Israel, 25 to 30 per cent ended up in France, about 15 to 20 per cent in North America, and others in other places.
What kind of resources to you have?
We’re in the process right now of raising money. One of the reasons we like to talk about it is to encourage people to do this. We’ve set up charities in Britain, the United States, Canada and we’re in the process of putting a charity together in Israel, so if people want to make a contribution they can get good tax treatment.
The idea behind it is not just to record these things, but also to create an organization which will not only house all these testimonials, but create an archive for study. It will create a set of arrangements for communications, for developing curricular materials for schools, so this extraordinary story can be understood.
We set up a panel of oral history experts from around the world who created a protocol for the interviews to ensure they are accurate and consistent.
How do you find potential candidates for interviews?
This interview with The CJN is part of it. When Henry was in Canada recently, we got him on radio shows in Toronto and Montreal.
If you go to the Sephardi Voices website, people can pass their information to us.
Have you started the interview process in Canada?
Yes, we’ve done a lot of interviews in Canada already. This has been going on for a few years, but it’s only now that it’s being formalized into the kind of structure I was talking about earlier.
Do you think these testimonies could one day be used as the basis of a compensation claim?
That’s not why we are doing this. Our view is that this is a completely apolitical undertaking. We don’t want to become involved in political debates about who is meaner to whom.
Did you know much about the Sephardi history before you got involved in this project?
No. I had never heard about this.
When Henry was explaining it to me and I began to look into it and read about it, I was struck by the size of the catastrophe and that it was unknown.
This is not just a catastrophe for the Jews. It was a catastrophe for the countries themselves. This was a complete catastrophe for Egypt to lose this kind of population. It was a catastrophe for Iraq. It’s not just that you lose diversity, which is bad for everybody, but you also lose people who are integral to the political, economic and intellectual life of the country. I was fascinated by the fact that nobody had heard about it. I was fascinated by the nature of the human rights catastrophe and fascinated by the catastrophe for the countries themselves. n
This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.