By most accounts, it’s both a celebration of heritage and resilience over decades.
And yet, the community-at-large has struggled to infuse it in our cultural memory.
Across the world last week, communities marked Yom HaPlitim (Day of Refugees), the commemoration of Sephardi heritage and the tragic and triumphant story of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
In the city where more than 60 percent of the 37,000 Canadian Sephardis live,more than 200 people turned out to mark the occasion, with representatives of Federation CJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), Sephardi Voices and the Communauté Sépharade Unifiée du Québec (CSUQ) gathering on Nov. 28—two days before the date officially designated by the Israeli government as Yom HaPlitim.
Nov. 30 was chosen because it was the day after the 1947 United Nations vote for the partition of Palestine.
After the establishment of Israel, one million Jews were forced to leave countries “such as Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen, amid violence, persecution and dispossession. These expulsions often involved confiscated property, loss of citizenship and cultural repression dismantling thriving civilizations,” said CSUQ president Esther Krauze. She called the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, “a profound historic injustice marked by the eradication of millennia-old communities after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.”
Such local events seek to shed light on the harrowing expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, and are an opportunity to reflect on a crucial yet often overlooked part of Jewish history, said Federation CJA president and CEO Yair Szlak.
“The Sephardi experience is a powerful story of resilience and adaptation, reminding us of the incredible contributions that refugees have brought to our communities.”
Henry Green is chair and founder of Sephardi Voices, a Canadian, and a professor of Judaic and Religious Studies at the University of Miami and founding director of the Jewish Museum of Florida.
Sephardi Voices is a digital archive, containing testimonials from survivors, video presentations, photos, and a special tribute to the Mashaal family—recognized for their philanthropy and commitment to preserving Sephardi heritage.
The Voices project came to fruition in 2015, but the seeds were planted years earlier, when Green looked at Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation collection of interviews of some 52,000 Holocaust survivors, but noticed “less than 100 of the interviews were of Jews during the Holocaust who lived in the Arab world.
“I said to myself, ‘if not now, if we’re not going to collect the stories of these people, we never will have them’.”
The initiative proves a commitment to preserving and honouring the rich history of the Sephardi people while promoting a better understanding of the diverse experiences within the community, said Krauze.
To date, some 500 interviews have been conducted in Canada, United States, Italy, England, Israel, and France. The rich digital archive holds stories, timelines, and a stunning collection of portraits by photographers Liam Sharp and E. Tomas Lopez, who “managed to in a short time to create a trust, a kinship with their subjects, because we all know what it’s like not to be home,” says filmmaker David Langer, who gave Sephardi Voices its distinct aesthetic in portraits, videos, films and the website.
The Sephardi Voices collection will be held at the National Library of Israel. “We hope there will be an opening next year,” said Green, “and they are now going through the catalog,” including the Victor and Edna Mashaal Canadian Collection, an archive of interviews, portraits, and photographs of Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews who immigrated to Canada and which was gifted to Library and Archives Canada in 2022.
Victor and Edna Mashaal are “pillars of the Iraqi community” in Canada, said longtime president of Sephardi Voices international, Richard Stursberg, who lauded the couple’s determination to make their family heritage known and understood in the larger community. Their own family trajectory paralleled that of the beleaguered Jews of Arab lands in the last century, their journeys intertwined with that of the Iraqi Jewish exodus, which saw its peak in 1950 when more than 121,000 Jews fled the country after being forced to relinquish their citizenship and assets.
Born in Baghdad in 1938, Victor Mashaal left Iraq as a small child, shortly after the bloody Farhud pogrom of 1941, living in Tehran for eight years followed by a short stint in London before settling in Montreal in 1951. Edna was born in Haifa to a family that left Iraq in the 1920s to settle in Palestine in anticipation of an eventual independent Jewish state, not seeing a future for the Jews of Iraq, and arrived in Montreal in 1959. The couple met at an Iraqi social club launched by Victor’s father in a house on Montreal’s west island; it was there that the roots of their Canadian family was started, with three children and growing construction, business, and investment interests contributing greatly to Montreal and Canada for more than a generation.
Victor’s brother Albert Mashaal said it’s important “to remember Baghdad. Remember that 148,000 Iraqi Jews left when the exodus started after Israel became a state. Remember that there were 40 synagogues in Baghdad!”
Israeli Consul-General Paul Hirschson was also emphatic: telling The CJN, “even 100 years ago, a third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish. Baghdad was a Jewish city. That’s more than the percentage of New York.”
Currently, according to Sephardi Voices, there are six Jews left in Iraq.
Green and advocates in communities throughout the world are now pushing to make Yom HaPlitim an annual commemoration. “I’m very, very motivated to make the Federation, to make all these organizations take responsibility and leadership, that just the way we have Yom ha-Shoah commemorations, we should have Yom HaPlitim as a community event… marking the ethnic cleansing of one million Jews in one generation.”
The stories, interviews and testimonies are both heartwarming and harrowing.
Cairo-born Irène Buenavida left Egypt with her family in 1966. Born months before the State of Israel was proclaimed, as a child she experienced the terror of bombings and constant fear of violence against Jews. Forced to flee a few months before the Six-Day War, she told her family story to Sephardi Voices with detail, vigour, sadness and pride.
She recalled putting newspapers on windows “to avoid being heard in the street. We heard in Arabic: ‘Jews turn off the lights and keep them off or we will come and slit your throats.’” She hid underground with her siblings until the sirens stopped, she told interviewers, in an eerie parallel to life in Israel for many children today.
There are also fond memories of Shabbat gatherings and holidays at Cairo’s fabled Shaar Hashamayim synagogue, but over the years, “more and more Gamal Abdel Nasser made it very difficult for us. We no longer had the right to go to schools, to put mezuzot in our homes, participate in any Judaism in Cairo.” In 1966 her family fled, leaving property, memory, friends and family behind, as they resettled in Montreal.
After a career in banking and service to the Jewish community, including efforts to mark Yom HaPlitim, she documented her experiences in her 2015 memoir No Return (Depart Sans Retour). She told interviewer Lisette Shashoua. “When we left, we weren’t allowed to have a passport because we were Jewish, so they gave us a pass with a big red stamp: Sans Retour.”
“Deep down, we are all refugees from Arab countries,” she said. “There are a million of us and we have to fight for that. We must continue, that our cause is recognized. That we were expelled from a country that we did not want to leave.” Buenavida was killed in a car accident 15 months after her testimony to Sephardi Voices.
Steve Sebag, Federation CJA board chair, said that federation is working on an education package to be rolled out in community schools in December, part of initiatives already underway.
Sebag is the first Sephardi in that seat, a francophone Montrealer acutely aware of his family and community’s trajectory. “I think we did a very poor job worldwide of celebrating or highlighting, I should say, the traditions and the past of Jews that lived in Arab countries for so many years,” Sebag told The CJN. He says that “is a bit to our credit, not wanting to be victims and to be seen as victims. We just decided to roll up our sleeves, come to a new country and start over and make it. But we also did our cause a disservice.”
While Jews began leaving other countries in the 1950s and ’60s, mass emigration from Morocco really came in the ’70s, “contrary to other places like Iraq, where in the early ‘50s, overnight it was no longer safe to be a Jew in Iraq, after having a presence for 30 generations, for millennia.” Moroccans today make up the lion’s share of Montreal’s Sephardi population. With a population once estimated at 300,000, “Jews were a very integral part of society” in Morocco, says Sebag, “and today we are talking about 2,000-3,000 Jews.”
The lesson of Yom HaPlitim is alive today, says Sebag, as Jewish communities around the world face unprecedented challenges. “Leaving is not the solution. We must remain firm and live with dignity and free where we are. We have an obligation to our children to stay strong, to stay engaged and to stand united in our communities.”
Consul-General Hirschson agreed with Sebag, telling The CJN, “When the Jews from Arab countries and Iran came to Israel, we did not look at them as victims, because from our point of view they were coming home… That’s why for decades the stories weren’t told.” But in the last 20 years he added, and with the recent recognition in the calendar in Israel, “We have been doing the research and we have been learning about this critically important part of our history.”
The photos and testimonies on display speak of hardship and the scars of loss, something project organizers wanted to illustrate. “Each one of the last generation of Sephardi to leave their homes in Islamic lands had a unique yet often similar story to tell,” David Langer told The CJN, “people who left with nothing to live another day in a new world. It is the classic story of the migrant. And each individual, often elderly, has the story of a life lived on their faces. I found this to be beautiful and brave. I wanted that as a metaphor in their portraits—no smiling, high contrast, black-and-white imagery that reveals something through the dignified beauty of the lines etched on a face. There is no mask here.”
The stories are profoundly personal for many who gathered in Montreal last Thursday night said Krauze. “The Sephardi community in Quebec that constitutes the heart of the CSUQ, is directly linked to the Arab world.”
“Despite the pain of exile,” Krauze continued, Sephardi refugees showed extraordinary resilience, rebuilding their lives in communities in Israel and in the diaspora. “These stories of displacement, loss and survival are at the heart of our identity, and Yom HaPlitim reminds us of the importance of passing on this legacy to future generations, as the story of these Jewish refugees remains unknown and insufficiently recognized, perpetuating an injustice towards these individuals and their heritage.”
Yom HaPlitim takes on even more significance after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Krauze added.
“As we witnessed the worst atrocities against the Jewish people around the world… It is not just a day of remembrance, but a call to action, and a symbol of our resilience and hope” she says, that includes keeping the hostages still held in mind and a call to “Bring them home!”
