‘I suffered more discrimination for being Sephardi than from antisemitism’

A former student at Moriah College tells ELANA BENJAMIN how the school discriminated against him over his Sephardi background and how, 30 years on, it has changed for the better.

It’s no secret that until recently, Jewish Australia was a cultural desert when it came to Sephardi-Mizrahi traditions and history. Dominated by the Ashkenazi majority, Sephardim-Mizrahim – Jews from South East-Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Iran – were mostly invisible to the wider Eurocentric community. Still, I was shocked when Michael Kadoury – the son of Iraqi Jews, and, like me, a member of the Class of ’91 at Sydney’s Moriah College – described the overt discrimination he experienced during our high school years; discrimination I didn’t hear a word of at the time, or in the years which followed.

In 1980, following the untimely death of his father, Kadoury emigrated from Israel to Australia with his mother and three siblings. Kadoury was seven when he started at Rose Bay Public School, where, with little English, and wearing kippah and tzitzit, he experienced antisemitism. He moved to Moriah in Year 4 and was no longer harassed for being Jewish.

But at Moriah,  Kadoury faced a different type of prejudice: the school operated on the basis that Ashkenazi culture was the default Jewish culture, and that the Ashkenazi Jewish way was the right and proper way. (This practice would later be coined “Ashkenormativity”.) “I suffered more discrimination for being Sephardi [from other Jews] than from antisemitism from non-Jews,” Kadoury told The Jewish Independent, reflecting on his school and university years.

Light-skinned and green-eyed, Kadoury wasn’t immediately identified as Sephardi, so he easily blended in. But that changed after his bar mitzvah – at least during compulsory morning prayers. Following Baghdadi tradition, Kadoury wore a small pair of tefillin (“mine are about one-eighth the size of other people’s tefillin,” he explains), and put a tallit over his head. “So I clearly stood out,” Michael says. (Moriah’s practice, following Ashkenazi tradition, was that students didn’t wear a tallit during weekday tefillah.)

There were other Sephardi kids at Moriah at the time. But, as Michael points out, there’s a big difference between being Sephardi and showing you’re Sephardi. In a 1988 PhD on Sephardi Jewry in Australia, Naomi Gale observed that Australian Jewish day schools do little to evoke Sephardi pride. In that environment, most Sephardi students were ashamed of their heritage. To be Sephardi was to be second-class. Backward. Primitive.