Posts by Raif Melhado
265 posts
Almost got him! A student seems to have corrected his notes once he realized that he had copied my words down too exactly.
Fascinating eBay find. The author grew up speaking Judeo-Spanish as a kid, and then they moved away from the neighborhood and the family gave up using their language even at home. As an adult he came back to it, realizing how much he had lost over many decades. He spent several years working on this dictionary as a hobby, with a focus on words that regular people used in everyday speech.
Some Sephardi communities have a special name for the embroidered bag in which one keeps his Tallet. A few years ago I saw such a bag from a member of the Amsterdam community going on eBay. Do we have a name for it?
Over the Yom Tob I finished reading “French, Jews, Turkish Jews” by Aron Rodrigue. I’ll share a brief reaction to it for the benefit of the group:This book is, at its core, a study of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and its work creating elementary and junior high schools in the Ottoman Empire. Its scope is between the antecedents of the founding of the AIU in 1860 and the takeover of non-Mus...
Last year I read a half dozen books about the Surinamese Jewish community. One thing I found interesting was the prevalence of using the name “Purim” as a slave’s name. All the people with the name “Purim” in Suriname were slaves of Jews.After this paragraph appears in Ben-Ur’s book, she discusses the volatile career of a man named Purim who was enslaved by Ribca Mendes Vais. And frequently butt...
H/T to my wife for finding this wonderful gem. It’s a 1956 episode of “Crossroads,” a series highlighting clergy people in American history. This one is devoted to Gershom Mendes Seixas.The watching is fabulous: like one of those B movies that’s “so bad it’s good.”
How many Sephardic synagogues were in Manchester before 1950? What rites?
Crowdsourcing: name and location of S&P reform congregations in which there either was a breakaway to pursue reform principles or the entire community did so.
This looks interesting. Hot off the press: just published yesterday. I have enjoyed both Ben-Ur and Klooster's other writing. Seems like it would be good:
In Serels’s book on the Jews of Tangier there is a case in which some Jewish butchers are accused of selling meat that isn’t kasher.The term used for such meat is consistently “nebela,” which makes sense philologically. It made me wonder: what has been the term used in Western Sephardi communities for “meat that is not kasher”? In the US the term “treif/a” is so ubiquitous it’s eclipsed any alte...
Picked up a beat up copy of Dembitz’s “Jewish Services in Synagogue and Home,” 1898. I admit to buying it entirely for the photo in the flyleaf, which depicts Mikveh Israel in the building from which its Teba was taken.
Just finished reading Stillman and Stillman’s translation of Romanelli’s “Travail in an Arab Land.” Although it is outside the core topic of this group, it concerns Italian and Moroccan Jewry, which interacted extensively with our Nacao, and it features a handful of Portuguese individuals residing or imprisoned in Morocco in the 1780s.The author of the work is Samuel Romanelli (1757-1814), a prof...
At work one of my colleagues kindly offered to make us a sandal. And the ritual committee went for it. So this beauty went into service this week!
Remind me of the name of the cloth that goes behind the parchment of a Sefer Torah? Not the faixa, but the long bolt of cloth that remains on the Sefer.In the clip below, it’s the red cloth:chazzanut-esnoga.org/Miscellaneous/Faixa.mp4
Mongadim Lesimha!
Congratulations to Roy Shasha for putting these lovely volumes together!
As a matter of idle interest: who is the first person of Sephardi ancestry bearing the title “Rabbi” or the equivalent to arrive in the US?Meaning: the first Ashkenazi fitting this description was R. Abraham Rice. Who is the first Sephardi and when did he come?
I have a student who, upon learning about how his name is pronounced with Ngayin, is now going by the nickname “NG Hammer.” And that pretty much feels great!
Oh, this one is a gut-puncher. I had the fun of knowing Hazan Sherman for the past 12 years. He brought joy to many, and his voice reading the tefilla in our Minhag will live on in my mind as long as I am still here. Barukh Dayan Ha’emet.https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/hackensack-nj/philip-sherman-11401160?fbclid=IwAR0ijOInJNfQbzMu2lBPPsYvTZoF-TiR69nPJiqpnZ4LSnNnWxrahtoWB3I
This is an inscription by the Keter Shem Tob, Rabbi Shemtob Gaguine, to his friend Shabbetai Hakohen (Hamoud?), Manchester 1943. Any ideas who the friend is?
Yale University Press is having a summer sale too. The discount Y23SUMMER gets 50% off, plus free shipping in some cases.I did a search for “Jewish” and found several titles of relevance to this group. Due to having bought a bunch of stuff recently in the Princeton University Press sale I had to be muted, and I only got one book: the biography of Menasseh ben Israel which was $14.10 with tax and...
A gentile colleague is going to visit Portugal, Spain, and Morocco over a 3 week period.She's interested in checking out the Jewish sites because she works at a Jewish institution.What would you recommend as a "must-see"?
Princeton University Press is having a 50% off sale with coupon code “May50.” I just tried it and it worked! Titles I got of interest to this group are:1) David Sorkin’s “Jewish Emancipation,” which includes many Sephardi perspectives on Jewish civil rights that are not usually covered2) Matt Goldish’s “Jewish Questions,” on the Sephardi Teshuba literature of the Early Modern period.3) John Efro...
Just came across this interesting gem from the Keter Shem Tob. It’s a florid apology that he can’t advise the Rabbi of Belfast on a matter because he doesn’t know Yiddish.
If anyone has bookplates of notable people in our Nacao, would you mind sharing pix of them here?