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These gilt-silver finials—which bear the Hebrew calendar year of 5502 (1742)—are considered the earliest dated finials from Iraq. On top of each finial is a miniature ḥamsa, a charm in the shape of a…
Some time ago I came here to the holy congregation of Amsterdam and I visited the schools of the Sephardim a number of times. There I saw “giants [in scholarship]: tender children as small as…
During the bitterest days of my European exile, I turn to the photo album where I keep, along with more recent memories, a few images from my childhood—images that enlarged and corrected, come back to…
Mar Abramowitz did not attend services in our temple. With a dozen or so other Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe he worshiped in a tiny downtown loft that was said, by those who had never been…
Notice, dear readers, that one of the foundations of Judaism is the belief (אמונה) in השארת הנפש, the abidingness of the soul, which means the immortality of the soul, for a person’s soul does not die…
It was in the early eighteenth century (1700–1706) when some Ottoman Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin left Turkey to settle in Vienna. A chronicle has preserved for us the names of the three…
I have noticed the change of the word “Oriental” to “Sephardi” in the masthead of the latest issue of the journal [La Amerika], “Organ of the Judeo-Sephardi (and no longer Oriental) Colony of America…
One must hurry to grasp it; yesterday, it did not exist; tomorrow it will be no more. Yesterday there were Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans, discovered by…
Dina has reached the age of seventeen, but her mind and manners are far beyond those years. She is comely and demure and full of charm. Two modest eyes and two wild braids. Why wild? Because they have…
Now I shall come to fulfill your desire by writing to you at length about the customs of the residents of the land of Israel; for although I also wrote to you by way of the pilgrims, and I sent them…