‘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.

But Kadoury’s approach was different. “I grew up knowing there was nothing to be ashamed of – that Jews had lived in Iraq for thousands of years while maintaining their culture and tradition. They never assimilated. The history gave me strength.”

Kadoury noticed that instead of attending prayers at school, the Chabad students were allowed to daven at Yeshiva in Flood Street in Bondi. He asked if, likewise, he could pray at the Sephardi Synagogue in nearby Woollahra each morning. There, Kadoury would be surrounded by the familiar pronunciation and tunes he grew up with; so different to the accent and melodies at school. He was told no, without explanation.

So he tried a different approach. Could he at least pray in a Sephardi minyan at school? The answer was yes – as long as Kadoury could get 10 male students together to form the requisite quorum. Kadoury gathered more than 20 boys who were willing to join a Sephardi minyan, and a Sephardi teacher who was prepared to lead the service. But the school reneged. “We don’t want to create a separation between Sephardim and Ashkenazim,” Kadoury was told.

While others might have backed down, Kadoury did the opposite. “I just wanted to be left alone to pray. But the more they pushed, the harder I pushed back.”

Following Ashkenazi tradition, Moriah students stood up while the Kaddish prayer was being recited. But the Iraqi-Sephardi custom (unless you are leading the service) is to sit. These days, when Kadoury prays in an Ashkenazi minyan – as he often does, as Kadimah Synagogue’s current President – he follows the community and stands during Kaddish. But at school, forced to abandon his custom after he’d fought not to, Kadoury refused to conform.

In a Gandhi-like state of passive resistance, each day, when Kaddish was recited, Kadoury sat down. Warnings soon became after-school detentions. And when Kadoury still didn’t crack, the school changed tactics: Kadoury was regularly made shaliach tzibbur, prayer leader. “And if you’re leading an Ashkenazi minyan, you’re going to follow the Ashkenazi custom,” Kadoury explains. He had no choice but to capitulate.

It wasn’t just during tefillah that Kadoury was marginalised. In Jewish history classes, the teaching of Sephardi history stopped with the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. “And the last we heard of Iraqi Jews was probably the Babylonian Exile, after the destruction of the First Temple,” Kadoury says wryly. “That was it.”

While other Sephardi kids probably didn’t realise the omission of their history until they were older and had  finished school, Kadoury was more aware. “I got really upset,” he says. He pressed his teacher: “What about my culture? Why aren’t you teaching Sephardi history?”

“Sit down and shut up, you’re being rude,” his teacher replied.

Kadoury was sent to the deputy principal’s office for his disobedience. The incident sparked a series of events which led to him being suspended from school for a week. His mother was overseas at the time, but she returned, furious, with a lawyer in tow. It was only after the threat of legal action that the principal backed down.

More than 30 years later, Moriah students still don’t have the option to pray in a Sephardi minyan. But the school has moved forward in other ways of acknowledging Sephardi-Mizrahi culture since Michael Kadoury and I were students.

Kadoury and his Yemenite wife have chosen to send all their four children to Moriah. Their eldest son, who graduated last year, was often encouraged – in stark contrast to his father’s experience – to lead a prayer service at school in the Sephardi-Yerushalmi style.

Last week’s Moriah High school assembly featured an item commemorating the plight of Jews from Islamic Lands, followed by a Sephardi shuk selling Iraqi babas (date biscuits), Moroccan sfenj (doughnut), Yemenite malawach (fried flatbread) and Persian tahdig (crispy rice).

Sephardi history, culture and traditions are slowly being integrated into the classroom and daily life. And earlier this year, Kadoury, together with Moriah teacher Michael Sassoon, founded and co-funded an inaugural prize for Years 7-11 students for contribution to Sephardi-Mizrahi life at school, or in the wider community (named the Kadoury-Sassoon Prize, a nod to the prominent Baghdadi Jewish families, the Sassoons and Kadoories).

These changes mirror a global shift, with the Jewish world finally recognising its exclusion of non-Ashkenazi stories from the narrative of the Jewish people.

In 2014, for example, Israel’s parliament adopted a law which designated November 30 as an annual National Day of Commemoration for the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were displaced from Arab countries and Iran in the 20th century.  In the UK, in 2020, the Board of Deputies of British Jews launched a commission to learn more about the experiences of Black Jews, Jews of Colour and Sephardi, Mizrahi and Yemenite Jews. The commission’s landmark report on racial inclusivity in the Jewish community, published in 2021, makes almost 120 recommendations.

As for Michael Kadoury, he remains a proud Sephardi-Mizrahi Jew. As the second Sephardi President of Kehillat Kadimah, Michael doesn’t feel any of the discrimination he suffered at school. The Kadimah community has embraced his culture, fully supporting Michael’s desire to pray in a separate, Sephardi minyan during the High Holy Days.

But why has he chosen to speak publicly about the coercion and intimidation he experienced at school now, after all this time?

The answer, he says, is that although the tide is turning, Sephardi-Mizrahi Jews are still fighting for recognition and inclusivity. Many Australian Jews still know little about the rich culture and history of Jews from Arab lands and Iran, or the racism Sephardim-Mizrahim experienced in Israel and in the diaspora.

Michael Kadoury remembers his mother being called by the Yiddish racial slur, shvartzer, while he was growing up; I know other Sydney Sephardi-Mizrahi Jews who were similarly referred to by this derogatory term.

There’s still a long way to go before Sephardi-Mizrachi Jews are treated as distinct yet equal members of the wider Jewish community; their culture celebrated, their history and traditions embedded in school curricula and public displays; the testimonies of  elders captured before it’s too late.

There’s a long way to go before Sephardi-Mizrahi families don’t feel the need to relocate to Israel for seven years – like Michael Kadoury and his wife did – in order to instil in their children a deep pride and connection to their Sephardi-Mizrahi culture and traditions, which they felt they could not get in Australia.

At least, not yet.