A tale of two cultures

Valley’s Sephardic Jews adjust to differences in traditions of Ashkenazic community

Visit a typical Jewish home in the Valley for a traditional Shabbat evening, a Passover seder or a Hanukkah dinner, and you’ll likely find gefilte fish, matzoball soup, potato pancakes, beef brisket or roasted chicken among the evening’s culinary delights. These, after all, are what we have come to know as «traditional» Jewish foods.

Visit a Sephardic home, however, and the menu most likely would include freshly prepared dishes such as roasted lamb, tabouli salad, a variety of cooked, spiced vegetables and, depending on the holiday, couscous.

Food is just one way in which the Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish cultures are separate and distinct. Although Sephardim and Ashkenazim follow the same Jewish laws, each culture has its own unique language and way of life. Their worship services, wedding customs, languages and family traditions all have subtle differences, brought on largely by the regional separation of the cultures over several centuries.

Sephardic Jews – descendants of Jews from Spain and Portugal – now live in countries all over the world. They were forced to flee Spain in the late 15th century during the Spanish Inquisition. Spain’s rulers at the time, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, decreed that all Jews be exiled from the country or forced to convert to the national religion of Catholicism. About 100,000 Jews emigrated to neighboring Portugal – which subsequently also ordered their expulsion – and countries such as Turkey, Greece and Morocco. Large concentrations of Sephardim still live today in Israel, Turkey, Morocco and portions of the United States, including New York City, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Although the Valley’s Sephardic population is small, its members remain in close contact with one another, often gathering for holiday celebrations that enable them to share their common traditions. Many of them concur that food is just one of several differences between their Sephardic heritage and that of the predominant Ashkenazic Jewish community here.

Ashkenazic Jewish heritage stems from communities in Eastern European countries such as Germany, Poland and Russia. Much of this population was wiped out during the Holocaust, but the descendants of those who survived now thrive as the strongest segment of Jewish culture in the United States, having emigrated here mostly during and immediately after World War II.

These two Jewish cultures have melded together over much of the past half-century in America. The assimilation of Sephardic Jews – as their numbers are smaller – has been the greatest, according to Hank Halio, author of «Ladino Reveries,» a book filled with tales of the Sephardic experience in America.

«Intermarriages with the Ashkenazim and other ethic groups eroded much of our culture. Yet those who strayed still have a yearning to hear, read and remember their culture that was lost to them, lamenting that their children and grandchildren will have no knowledge of their heritage,» Halio writes. «Sad to say that the progeny of first-generation Americans will only hear of our wonderful Sephardic family experiences, but never truly appreciate them.»

Mercedes Roussell, a Sephardic Jew originally from Morocco, agrees. Roussell, who has lived in Phoenix for 10 years, says Jewish religious services here are «completely different from what I was used to as far as singing and liturgy.»

«Sephardic services are absolutely more musical and talkative,» she says. «Here, they read (aloud) the first verse and the last (lines of many different prayers), and in between you don’t read at all – just silently. In Morocco, they read everything. … Most of it is singing.»

Roussell says it took time to adapt to the different Ashkenazic services she found in the Valley. She attends the Chabad-Lubavitch Center because she says it offers services most similar to what she knew as a child. And despite what may seem a difficult religious transition, Roussell says she has «grown up religiously» since coming to Phoenix, and now attends services more regularly than she did in her homeland. And while she still honors some Sephardic traditions from her native Morocco – such as foods, Mimouna and a more Orthodox level of observance, she has been forced to adapt to the prevalent Ashkenazic ways of prayer here, she says. (Mimouna is a Moroccan Sephardic tradition in which Jews open their homes to strangers on the last night of Passover. People go in and out of Jewish homes to sample sweets in celebration of the new season, Roussell says. It has become a major event in Israel.)

Iraqi-born Sid Abed, who has lived in London, New York and most recently Montreal before coming to the Valley in 1978, says he enjoys the diversity within the American-Ashkenazic culture, a diversity that the Sephardic culture simply does not have. Even though the Sephardic culture is steeped in rich tradition, it does not include the different religious denominations – Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Reconstructionist – into which Ashkenazim have split over the past several decades.

«I came from a tradition where there was a separation between men and women, at least in the synagogue. (Sephardic Judaism) is more of an Orthodox tradition,» Abed says. «In a Sephardic tradition, you’d never have a female cantor or a female rabbi, or any woman ever going up to the bimah (platform) as you have here in the Reform movement. And I have no problem with that. I think women should be involved in Judaism. It’s their religion too.»

Abed, who belonged to the Congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, an Orthodox Sephardic congregation in Montreal, now belongs to Temple Solel in Paradise Valley. He says the Reform congregation gives him «a wonderful feeling … of camaraderie and togetherness.»

Hard to adapt

Not all Valley Sephardim share that point of view, however. Some find it hard to feel at home in such a foreign setting.

Born in Rhodes, an Italian island, Sol Menashe came to the Valley 19 years ago from Zimbabwe. Now in his 60s, Menashe grew up in a Sephardic Jewish culture and says it has been hard for him to adapt to a different way of practicing Judaism. Rhodes, according to Menashe, belonged to Turkey during the Spanish Inquisition era, and when Jews fled Spain, many of them sought refuge in Rhodes – including his ancestors. But when the Nazis rose to power in the late 1930s, Rhodes, which had been under Italian rule for many years, was no longer a safe haven for Jews. Many, including Menashe and his family, fled to Rhodesia before the island’s approximately 5,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps.

Menashe says he lived mostly among an equal mix of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in Rhodesia, but that he was able to maintain his Sephardic culture and Ladino language. Ladino, Menashe says, is «the original Spanish of the 14th century with a little Turkish and Hebrew thrown in for good measure.» Ladino is to Sephardic Jews as Yiddish, a combination of German and Hebrew, is to Ashkenazic Jews. Most Jews from Sephardic communities – whether South African, Moroccan, Turkish or Greek – all say they spoke Ladino in their homelands. Leaving the language behind, Menashe says, was one of the most difficult changes.

«Our songs are different,» he says. «Most of the songs of the (Passover) seder were sung in Ladino, not Hebrew.» Other holiday services were sung in Hebrew and Ladino, he says, with just one prayer read in English.

Coming from such a community, Menashe says he has had a hard time fitting in with the Valley’s Jewish community.

«I tried to join a couple of congregations here, but I don’t really feel at home (because) of the different pronunciations and different songs,» he says.

Rose Gurel, a Sephardic Jew from Istanbul, Turkey, also has found it difficult to adjust to a different Jewish culture, she says.

Gurel, who grew up speaking Ladino, came to the Valley six months ago. She and her family have yet to join a congregation, she says, but have attended services at a few different synagogues.

«We went to Temple Beth Israel for Shabbat. It was very different from our services in Turkey. It was very nice. I liked it,» she says. «It is very different from Turkey, because in Turkey, it’s very Orthodox. They are very serious in Turkey. The women and the men (cannot be seated together) in Turkish synagogues.»

Although she has liked the Reform services she attended in the Valley from an inclusion standpoint, Gurel says she feels lonely because of the language barrier and misses the sense of familiarity that comes with a Sephardic congregation.

Moroccan-born Jacky Sebag, who lived in Israel for 20 years, also misses the familiar aspects of a Sephardic service – especially the music, he says.

«I was raised with all the Sephardic and Moroccan tunes. It’s something that once you are raised with it, you don’t want to let it go,» Sebag says. «I came (to Phoenix) almost 20 years ago, and every time during the High Holidays, I … bring a Sephardic (prayer) book to services with me and sing my own songs.

«When I come across all these tunes on the High Holidays, it just brings back my childhood,» he adds.

Sebag says it has been difficult for him to adjust to the Ashkenazic format featured in Valley congregations. He attends services at the Chabad-Lubavitch Center in Phoenix because he finds them the closest thing to his Sephardic tradition. Several Sephardim interviewed for this story attend that congregation for the same reason. They say that while Chabad offers Ashkenazic prayers and melodies, it is Orthodox, which is what they were accustomed to in their former communities – regardless of their own personal levels of observance in the home.

Aside from what many Sephardim cite as the most obvious differences between their culture and Ashkenazic Judaism – food, language and music – there are other, more subtle differences between the cultures. For example, the Jewish tradition of naming one’s children after deceased relatives is Ashkenazic, according to Halio, who writes that Sephardim name their children after living family members. Marrying under a chuppah (wedding canopy) is an Ashkenazic tradition, Menashe says, explaining that Sephardic couples are draped in a tallit (prayer shawl) by their parents.

Rabbi David Rebibo of Orthodox Beth Joseph Congregation in Phoenix, who is a Moroccan-born Sephardic Jew himself, sums it up this way: «The difference is not so much in the content, but in the packaging.»

By Randi Barrocas for Jewish News of Greater Phoenix