Moise Gadol

Born in Ruse (Ruschuk), Bulgaria, to a Sephardic family and educated in Alliance Israélite Universelle schools, Moise S. Gadol cofounded Ruschuk’s first Zionist society and then settled in New York, where he established the country’s first Ladino-language newspaper, La América, which he edited from 1910 to 1925. The newspaper had as its mission the goal of supporting Sephardim in the United States; it published articles on suffrage, feminism, socialism, and also against rising fears of “white slavery” in the Sephardic community. In addition to La America, Gadol’s Oriental Publishing Co. printed a number of his Ladino books, notably a Ladino Haggadah (1918) and Libro de embezer las linguas Ingleza y Yudish (Book for Learning Yiddish and English), a guidebook for Ladino-speaking immigrants in Yiddish and English with Ladino transliteration and translations that included sections on immigration law, American vernacular life, and business.