#sefardic

Welcome to Cheshvan ✨🌑

This is one of the most negative months of the year, categorized by the element of water.

Think of the enormity of crashing waves, white created rushing rivers, and even the darkest depths of the sea.

Five centuries after they were expelled from Spain and eight decades after they were almost annihilated in the Holocaust, the small community of Sephardic Jews that lives on in the Greek city of Thessaloniki is looking to its past to help safeguard its future.

On Tuesday, Thessaloniki’s Jewish community signed a deal with the Spanish government’s Instituto Cervantes to create a small centre where people will be taught modern Spanish while also learning about Sephardic culture and the exiles’ still-spoken language, Ladino.

Many Spanish Jews came to Thessaloniki, which was then part of the Ottoman empire, following their expulsion by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The community endured and thrived over the centuries but came close to total destruction when the Nazis deported and murdered more than 90% of the city’s Jewish inhabitants.

Today, Thessaloniki’s Jewish community has dwindled to about 1,200 people, most of them the descendants of the Iberian exiles.

“The community here was built by Jews from Spain – places such as Toledo, Granada and Seville,” said David Saltiel, president of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki. “It was a community that spoke, ate and sang Spanish. After the Holocaust, only 1,500 Jews were left, but we’ve always kept that idea of our Spanish past in our hearts and we want to keep our traditions alive.”

Under the new agreement, the community will provide premises, memories and tradition, while the Instituto Cervantes – which promotes Spanish language and culture – will provide teachers and academic experts on contemporary Spanish and Ladino, which is also known as Judeo-Spanish.

While the project is mainly aimed at children and young people in the Sephardic community, it will open to those of all ages and faiths.

Cristina Conde de Beroldingen, director of the Instituto Cervantes in Athens, said the initiative was designed to help preserve Sephardic culture and language, and also to stop Thessaloniki losing a piece of its past.

Here is a fundraiser for earthquake victims co-organized by a sephardi person in Turkey: https://chuffed.org/project/96147-support-earthquake-victims-in-turkey-and-syria

And a song that mentions Frutikas

I made this master doc of sephardic resources!