When Ellen Gould Ventura was 18, a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, her mother divulged a secret that changed her life.
She told her that she is Jewish and, more particularly, that she is a Seph-ardi Jew.
For Ventura, a Toronto-born singer, writer and actor, everything suddenly made sense and fell into place.
“I had felt this in my soul,” she says.
Ventura’s discovery of her ancestral roots forms an integral component of Mashala, an hour-long documentary on the soulful performer, scheduled to be broadcast on Vision TV on Oct. 3 at 10 p.m. and again at midnight.
Mashala, directed by Cyrus Sundar Singh, moves easily between Ventura’s Jewishness and her band, Mashala, which performs Sephardi music.
It was cre-ated after she and her hus-band moved to Barcelona in 1998.
Ventura describes Mashala “an exercise in diversity,” and she is right.
The musicians come from Morocco, Chile, Italy and Venezuela, and the sounds they produce are a haunting mélange of Jewish and Arabic melodies.
In Mashala, they perform at street cor-ners, squares, recording studios and concerts.
Far from regarding the band members as only fellow musicians, Ventura considers them as the “broth-ers” she never had.
Ventura’s personal history is complicated.
After her parents separated, Ventura’s mother settled in southern Spain, taking her two daughters along.
In the wake of her mother’s startling revelation, Ventura was slow to re-late com-ple-tely to her Jewish background. But today, she fully embraces it, at least through music and culture.
“It’s a homecoming,” she says.
The songs she sings are inflected with a definite Hebrew intonation, and Ventura revels in them.
A member of Barcelona’s progressive Jewish community, she claims that Mashala’s eclectic repertoire is representative of the “brotherhood” of Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Certainly, Mashala reinforces her identity. “This is how I express my spirituality,” she observes. “It’s about connecting and finding the thread, and passing on the thread so that it doesn’t get lost.”
Mashala is one of several documentaries on Jewish topics that Vision TV began to air from Sept. 29 onward.
Further information on these programs can be obtained on the website www.visiontv.ca.
