Under the leadership of Prof. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, the Leve Center launched the Sephardic Archive Initiative (SAI) in 2015, aiming to work in partnership with UCLA Library Special Collections to identify and acquire archival materials related to the Sephardic heritage, especially in California. As Project Manager of the SAI, I spearheaded efforts to catalog the archives of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel, the oldest and largest Sephardic congregation in Los Angeles. I also served as Project Manager and Co-Curator of the SAI’s first digital exhibition, “100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles,” a rich collection of 25 multimedia essays exploring the intersecting migratory, cultural, and urban histories of Jews from across the Mediterranean and Middle East, from Iran to Iraq to North African, Ottoman Anatolia and the Balkans that reveals a most complex story of Jewish migration and urban diversity.
The Jewish history of Los Angeles has, until now, been framed as an Ashkenazi story, centered the lives and experiences of Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe and their descendants. The stories captured in “100 Years of Sephardic L.A.” redirect us to an entirely different set of migratory journeys, challenging our sense of L.A.’s Jewish geography, its centers, its origin points, its relationship to a wider world. A Sephardic history of Los Angeles also challenges the established chronology and rhythm of California’s Jewish past, highlighting pivotal events, relationships, and leitmotifs that have been ignored in other accounts. By offering a first draft of this complex history, “100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles” necessarily rewrites the Jewish history of L.A.
