Dear Friends,

Happy New Year. Over the last few months, Sephardi Voices has moved into new territory with exhibitions and 2020 is going to be another busy year. We had our first multi-media portrait exhibition, Iraqi Jewish Voices, at the Museum of Jewish Montreal followed by Sephardi Voices – A Canadian Refuge, a portrait exhibition with stunning B & W portraits by Liam Sharp at the Miles Nadal JCC in downtown Toronto. Sephardi Voices was also fully engaged this fall with presentations, lectures and tributes.

We honored 96 year old Naim Dallal, the founder of the Toronto Iraqi Club, at the Holy Blossom Temple. For the second year, we partnered with the Prosserman JCC in Toronto during Holocaust Education week by presenting Lessons from Arab Lands –The Resurgence of Antisemitism with speakers Flo Urbach, Carol Bassoon Zaltman, and Lisette Shashoua from Montreal. I had the privilege of presenting Sephardi Voices to the Young Professional Organization’s annual conference with Israel Consul General Galit Baram.

I had the opportunity of presenting a paper at the prestigious Humanities and Social Science conference at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv. I showed selections of our Sephardi Voices video collection, including short vignettes of Cynthia Kaplan Shamash, David Cohen, and Edwin Shuker. As a result of the presentation, Sephardi Voices was featured in a Channel 13 television news item and an article in Israel Hayom, Israel’s leading daily newspaper.

While I was in Israel, I met with Yoel Finkleman, the Curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. I was pleased to hear that the Shashsa Collection, Sephardi Voices’ first collection of interviews, portraits, and archives is now deposited in the National Library of Israel.

Over the next few months I look forward to inviting you to more exhibitions, presentations, lectures and films. I hope to see you at The Forgotten Exodus – An American Refuge, our next portrait exhibition opening on February 8, 2020 at the University of Miami Gallery in the Wynwood District of Miami.

Finally, please visit our website, www.sephardivoices.com which is now in English and Hebrew.

Executive Director,

Henry Green

The photographer behind the Sephardi Voices exhibit of Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim lands is J. Tomas Lopez—an artist with a lifelong passion for documenting trauma, displacement, and suffering as told through stunning photography.

The new exhibit—focusing on Sephardi Jews in Miami—is on display at the University of Miami Gallery Wynwood Design District in Miami on February 3 to February 28.

At the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, nearly 100,000 Jews were living in Iran; today, less than 9,000 remain. Roland Sabet left Iran in 1953 for New York, and his family members were among the tens of thousands that left Iran in the wake of the overthrow of the Shah. The imprint of his Persian Jewish heritage and his immigrant experience in the US is an indelible one, and mirrors the narrative of other Iranian Jewish refugees.

Check out some highlights of our events of 2019.