Ranting

ladino, (d)juezmo, (d)judio, (d)judeo-espanyol is an endangered jewish language spoken by sefardi jews in communities in israel, the balkans, turkey and the americas. although historically written in rashi script (or solitreo, rashi’s cursive form) judezmo is mostly written phonetically, with latin letters.

ladino is at very precarious point in it’s history and at risk of dying, but is experiencing a revival on the internet!!

feel free to add anything you know of, and i’ll keep this updated as i find more things!

book resources

alice’s adventures in wonderland in ladino. sometimes these things tend to have kind of stilted, unnatural language (i have read the yiddish version from this same series and its not ungrammatical, just, like, uncomfortable). that being said, lots of interesting vocabulary could be learned from it! 

un ramo de poemas // a bouquet of poems by haim vitali sadacca a bilingual book of poetry by a beautiful poet.

beginners ladino by alla markova one of the only beginners textbooks of ladino, and it comes with audio. a physical copy is ridiculously expensive, but there’s a kindle edition for $30 which is a little more reasonable.

internet resources

the muestra lingua section in ladino of esefarad, a blog that’s mostly in spanish about sefardi topics. the ladino section in particular really focuses on sephardi history and culture and is very interesting.

şalom, a turkish jewish magazine, has a small section in ladino. it looks like they only post the most recent articles online (there are two articles, but they’re from this week) so check often and save articles for studying.

aki yerushalayim, an israeli ladino magazine. they also only have their most recent issue online, but they only publish twice a year so you have plenty of time to study it, and their international subscription is only $40.

diksionario de ladinokomunita is the best online ladino dictionary i’ve seen so far. it’s still not amazing but certainly better than any of its competition and it’s a work in progress by the members of ladinokomunita.

two websites for different parts of the same group, ladinokomunita. first, their yahoo groups page, which is pretty popular, several hundred members and several posts a week. then there’s their website, where they’ve got like 10 or 15 articles about sefardi topics. these are the same people who are building the dictionary above.

a quick barebones video lesson on how to write solitreo, the cursive version of the rashi hebrew script traditionally used to write judezmo.

http://www.solitreo.com/ladinotype/ is a great website for translating romanized Ladino into Solitreo characters. 

my paternal zayda worked in a labor camp during the war but came home when he could, on sundays. it was on one of those rare days home that he married my bubbe. they fled from targu meant to a displaced persons camp in germany in 1947, fleeing the russians (either present or encroaching?) in the middle of the night. there’s a note on the back of an old photo, that they wrote to my eldest aunt (who was an infant at the time): ‘this picture was taken a few days before leaving romania for a long, hard and unknown trip. decision to leave: july 16 at 2pm. departure: july 17 2am. baggage: none, except our sweet daughter’. my zeida and bubbe made it to the camp, and he sold cigarettes illegally to make money. then they came to canada, and had three more children.

i don’t know much about my mom’s maternal family, from schedrin and taboschnik. they (my maternal great grandparents) likely came over in the 1920’s. the family myth is they met on the boat to america, where they would go on and settle down in chicago after encountering each other again years later. we do know that one of my grandma’s parents was VERY religious, though. that probably comes from the fact that schedrin was founded by the third chabad rebbe. it always had a strong lubavitcher presence.

i want to say i really love your account. it breathes so much life into our past, and makes my heart warm. i hope this ask isn’t too long, im on mobile so it’s hard to see. much love <3

Much love to you also <333 And thank you for your support!

I searched Taboshnik and Tabashnik in Russian and found the village Tabachniki (Tabačniki) in Belarus, 8km of the town Jeziaryšča in the Vitebsk region. I am not sure if this is really your village and I couldn't find anything about the Jews from there. The Vitebsk region in general was full of them.

But I can tell you surely something about Targu Neamt. Jews were a constant presence in the town’s life until the end of World War II. Following WWII (which did not affect them to a large extent) and the installation of the communist regime, most of them decided to leave, thereby leaving behind a wonderful heritage that is slowly disappearing.

Jews were first mentioned in Targu Neamt in a document from 1660s, and the oldest tombstones in the Jewish cemetery are dated 1677 and 1689. Under the Ottomans, Jews in Târgu Neamț were organized into an isnaf (guild) led by a staroste.

The first blood libel allegation in all of Romania occurred in Targu Neamt in 1710: Jews were accused of killing a Christian child and using his blood for ritual Passover use. Consequently, 5 Jews were killed and another 22 arrested, “denounced” by a monk and two Jewish converts. After an appeal to the prince of Moldavia, the case was investigated, its falsity demonstrated, and the arrested Jews freed.

In 1821 Greek rebells, in a violent uprising against the Turkish rule (Zavera), crossed Moldavia, set fire to the town, and murdered half the Jewish population. In 1899 the Jewish population reached 3,671 (42% of the total). After Jews achieved emancipation in 1919, they participated in municipal life, electing two members to the municipal council in 1930 through the Union of Romanian Jews. In July 1942, the Romanian forest engineer Gheorghe Cojoc arranged with authorities for Jews from the town to work in forests near Targu Neamt, saving them from deportation to Transnistria.

In 1947, some 2,900 Jews lived in Targu Neamt. Their numbers then diminished due to communist persecution and emigration, mainly to Israel. Until 1985 there were nine synagogues still standing in the town, but then eight of them were torn down in the urban renewal that transformed Targu Neamt into a carbon copy of almost every other town nearby. In 1992, just 34 Jews lived there; and in 2004 there were 30, with one beautiful functioning synagogue.

Jewish Astronomical Manuscript, Barcelona, c. 1391

Choral Synagogue in Moscow, Interior photograph of c. 1976

Dress of a Jewish female dancer. Bukhara. Late 19 cent. Velvet, kundal, coloured embroidery, ribbon, satin, batting. From the Akilov family, Samarkand, Tashkent.

After prayer in the synagogue of Simferopol, Crimea, 1991