Sephardi-Mizrahi history, right between the ears

Following the success of last year’s stage production of Yentl, Sydney’s Shalom Collective is set to make its first foray into visual arts with Recollections, a multimedia exhibition by acclaimed Israeli artist Dor Zlekha Levy that will coincide with this year’s Vivid festival.

But unlike Yentl, which invited audiences to celebrate Yiddish culture, Recollections is an opportunity for visitors to engage with Sephardi-Mizrahi stories, as Zlekha Levy’s work is inspired by the cultural history of Arab Jews.

Zlekha Levy’s maternal grandparents arrived in Israel from Iraq in 1951. (In 1950, the Iraqi government passed legislation allowing Jews to leave the country, provided they renounce their Iraqi citizenship and relinquish their assets. Between 1950 and 1952, the vast majority of Iraqi Jews – around 125,000 – were airlifted to Israel, after which only 6,000 remained.) Growing up in Tel Aviv in the 1990s, Zleka Levy was extremely close to his Saba Ezra and Savta Margalit, and to their story of leaving Basra for northern Israel.

“I think that as a youngster, through understanding my grandparents’ story and the story of Arab Jews, I could also see the bigger picture of Israeli society… and how the Middle East map was created,” says Zlekha Levy. But he stresses that his art doesn’t reflect his family’s story or even his own story. Rather, Zlekha Levy uses his personal experience as a starting point for exploring themes of memory, displacement and identity.

Sound is also a core element of Zlekha Levy’s art, and he’s specifically interested in music. “It’s so powerful to work with sound and memories,” he says. Indeed, the three works featured in Recollections are all audio-visual installations: Maqamat (2017, in collaboration with musician Aviad Zinemanas), Shomer (2019) and Omek Umk (2021).

Zlekha Levy notes that he and his Maqamat collaborator have very different family histories: Zinemanas’ father came to Israel from South America. “We worked on a shared emotional frequency because we both came from immigrant families, and we both grew up in a place which misses another place. This is what we explore – the concept of a flexible identity.”

In doing so, Maqamat focuses on the story of pioneering Iraqi-Jewish musicians who were forerunners of the Iraqi maqam – a musical trend that gained much respect and recognition in the Arab and wider world. But these musicians’ lives changed dramatically when they moved to Israel, where Arab music was treated as enemy culture.

One of the main elements in this work is the wheel of the maqam, which maps the names of the different Arabic scales in both Hebrew and Arabic.

In creating this wheel, Zlekha Levy amalgamated three separate maps which had been made by one of the Iraqi-Jewish musicians – Ezra Aharon – for his students in Israel. And what you hear in the work is an altered version of one of Aharon’s tunes, allowing Zlekha Levy to share Aharon’s music, together with visuals which tell the story of these musicians’ longing for who they were in Iraq.

Omek Umk also features Hebrew and Arabic, and it explores the relationship between those languages, as well as memory and hybrid culture. The heart of the work is a love song written in Arabic and Hebrew, inspired by Arabic love songs and simultaneously sung in both languages by a bilingual, Israeli-born Druze woman.

Zlekha Levy clarifies that the Arabic in his artworks – both audio and visual – is not the Judeo-Arabic which was used by Iraqi Jews. Rather, it’s literary Arabic; a common language for formal communication between speakers of different Arabic dialects. Zlekha Levy explains that his interest lies in using the past to explore the present and to ask questions about the future, so he chose not to use Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, which is considered to be a dying language.

Zlekha Levy’s final work in the exhibition, Shomer, reimagines the historic Magen Avraham Synagogue in Beirut and includes video works, projection pieces and 3D-printed sculptures. Visitors walk around the large-scale installation while listening to a soundtrack based on an interview with a Lebanese-born Israeli who recalls his memories as a child growing up in Beirut, and as an adult who returned to the synagogue during the 1982 Lebanon War.

Zlekha Levy’s work is about “giving forgotten voices a space to be heard.” But he didn’t create any of the works in Recollections for an Australian audience in 2025, so he’s curious to see how Sydneysiders respond. “It's a different time than when I created the work. It's a different place than where I exhibited the work. And I come with an open heart and good intentions, and I hope the exhibition is going to be powerful and meaningful.”

Recollections also contains local content created by Shalom Collective, including a video interview series with members of Sydney’s Sephardi-Mizrahi community. The series, with its blended Hebrew-Arabic title – Slicha Habibi (excuse me, my friend) – follows the format of the You Can’t Ask That Australian television series.

“We want to remind people that we have a very vibrant, diverse and rich Mizrahi and Sephardi community and culture here in Sydney,” says Shoshi Port, Shalom Collective’s Program Manager.

Yet Recollections isn’t only aimed at Jewish audiences. Zlekha Levy says he puts a lot of effort into making his art relevant to a broad audience. So, on one level, while the exhibition is about a period of time in Iraq and childhood memories from a synagogue in Lebanon, “it’s more about childhood memories in general and why we remember those distant places. Were they really so good? Did they exist like we remember them?” he says.

Shalom Collective is similarly hoping to appeal to a wide audience. While the organisation primarily serves the Jewish community, “secondary to that is to share our talents with the wider community who appreciate arts and culture, like we did with Yentl at the Sydney Opera House,” says Port.

To make the exhibition as appealing and accessible as possible, entry is free, much of it coincides with Vivid Sydney, and the gallery is located in a high pedestrian area, between Barangaroo and Circular Quay.

Although Shalom Collective conceived of the exhibition before October 7, "post-October 7, we have come to understand that showcasing and celebrating diverse Jewish stories is extremely important,” says Port.

“We’re not trying to be political, and we’re actively choosing not to make the exhibition a response to October 7,” she adds. Yet Zlekha Levy’s interest in “exploring being Jewish and Arab at the same time; not just as a historical fact but as a potential for the future,” is perhaps more relevant than ever.

“Our Arab identity is something most of us don’t directly explore here [in Israel],” says Zlekha Levy. “So, for me, what I saw at home and what I wish for my kids is to connect to this [Arab] identity, to realise the possibility behind it and to use it to explore ourselves, and then also to meet and discuss it with others.”

“If I really feel that story [about the homes we left behind in Iraq],” he continues, “can I connect to other people's pain about detachment, about longings for a home or a land? I think so. And of course, vice versa.”

To facilitate these personal insights and empathy for others, everything in Zlekha Levy’s work is intended to take audiences “to a place which is less binary, a place where you can explore a different point of view that can be also very personal.” Art, he says, has always been a force to explore the grey areas.

So, the exhibition is “not a place to learn historical facts about the displacement of Iraqi Jews or Lebanese Jews. It’s a place to experience a new way to long for something or to miss something.”

“I come to meet,” says Zlekha Levy. “Not to preach.”

Recollections by Dor Zlekha Levy runs from May 20 – June 15 at forumprojects Gallery, Walsh Bay Arts Precinct, Sydney. Zlekha Levy will be in attendance from May 20-25. Free entry, book tickets here.