Sephardi life in the Americas

NICOLE NOZICK

The Sephardi Jewish community in North America is thriving and growing, according to Rabbi Moshe Tessone, director of Yeshivah University’s Sephardic Community Program, based in New York City.

Tessone recently addressed the Vancouver Jewish community at Congregation Beth Hamidrash, where he spoke on the topic of Contemporary Sephardi Life in the Americas, at the invitation of the synagogue’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Ilan Acoca. Tessone also spoke with the Independent while he was here.

“We have seen substantial growth of Sephardic life [in North America] over the past ... 10, 15, even 25-30 years,” explained Tessone. This growth is most evident in what Tessone refers to as “strategic metro centres,” like New York City, south Florida and, to a certain degree, Seattle and Los Angeles, “where you have communities of Sephardic Jews whose number ... approaches 100,000 Sephardic Orthodox Jews or, in some cases, go beyond 100,000.”

Tessone said that, while the Sephardi population has increased dramatically in recent years, its character and composition also have been altered dramatically. A steep decline in Jews from a Spanish/Portuguese background – due mostly to an aging population – and a significant growth of new immigrants from the Middle East and South America has slowly and significantly changed the face of Sephardic Jewry in North America, according to Tessone. This change reflects the modern, broader definition of Sephardi to include Jews emanating from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar) as well as Jews from North Africa, the Middle East, West Asia, South America and further afield. “If we look at [the strategic metro centre] communities and compare them to the Sephardic communities that have traditionally been in the Americas, you see a shift from Judeo-Spanish emphasis.... The growth in the Sephardic communities is now coming from the Mizrahi or new immigrant communities who came in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s.... This immigration has augmented and replaced the more traditional Sephardic communities.”

The growth in the Sephardi population has directly resulted in the strengthening of Sephardi culture, tradition and customs in those communities, said Tessone. In his capacity as director of the YU Sephardic Community Program, he added, “I have seen that communities and schools that have traditionally been Ashkenazi are dealing with an influx of Sephardic students and are looking for ways to better serve them. This is a phenomenon that has grown ... dramatically over the past 10-15 years. You see the Jewish day schools in Manhattan, in south Florida, in Brooklyn and Great Neck, where they were traditionally serving an overwhelming majority of Ashkenazi students, over the course of the past five, 10, 15 years, the amount of Sephardic enrolment has grown from 10 percent to 20 percent and, in some schools, to more than 50 percent. These schools are reaching out, saying, ‘How do we give them a Sephardic minyan?’ There are basic differences in the services of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, so I believe that those schools have made great strides and are rising to the occasion.”

Tessone believes that the Sephardi tradition has remained vibrant and will continue to be relevant because it inherently looks to its ancestry as a model for living. In terms of Jewish tradition, observance, lifecycles, law, holiday observance and more, he said, “the mantra or the overwhelming guiding principle of the Sephardic Jews has been the expression chachamim minhag avoteinu beyadeinu, meaning our ancestors’ or forefathers’ traditional observance is in our hands. In other words, we’re here to follow our grandparents’ and our parents’ way of putting on tefillin, their way of observing Pesach, their way of observing the lifecycle of a wedding, or bar mitzvah or brit milah. That’s where you see the tradition of these communities moving forward.”

Tessone is encouraged by the way in which Sephardi customs have captured the interest of a new generation. “When the young generation says, ‘Hey, let me take this beautiful custom that my grandfather did and embrace it at my wedding ceremony or at my next Pesach seder or at Rosh Hashanah,’ that’s where it comes to life. That’s how we’re able to merge the old, the young and the new into the future, into contemporary life, by reliving these things and making it part of our community’s future. When the youngsters see their parents and their grandparents following the traditions that their grandparents did decades ago ... it lights a spark in them and they say ... ‘Why don’t we bring that into our home? Why don’t we do that on Pesach with our children?’... That’s the link that we’re trying to get going, that’s Judaism, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish. Through these traditions and these observances and these halachot, they can take the old world and bring it into the new world, and we’re here to facilitate that, that’s our mission.”

While Acoca told the Independent that the number of Sephardi Jews in Vancouver wasn’t necessarily growing, he said that his congregation – the only Sephardi congregation west of Toronto – has been “able to attract a lot of young families in the last four or five years, not only Sephardic, [but] some Ashkenazi consider themselves Sephardic now. They like the tradition, they like the homey feeling, the warm feeling of a small congregation and they [have] become an integral part of Beth Hamidrash, which is unique and special. You see everyone coming, whether is a social event, a simchah, from different backgrounds.”

Acoca also spoke of the importance of Sephardi tradition, and bringing that into the future. “It’s unique, it’s something that was ingrained in me by my parents, from the community where I grew up in Montreal,” he explained. “On [the] one hand, I was exposed to the Ashkenazi world, but on Shabbat, on yomim tovim, on Rosh Hashanah, on Yom Kippur, I was at home, which is the Sephardi community, the Sephardi congregation, and something that ... you won’t find in the Ashkenazi congregation.... I want my children to know, I want my community to know, there is a lot of history behind these traditions, the customs. They have to understand who they are and [we need] to educate them, to preserve their Sephardi identity.”

Nicole Nozick is a Vancouver freelance writer and director of the Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival.

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