Explainer: Why we need Mizrahi heritage month

Growing up in Sydney in the 1970s and ’80s, I’d never heard of a Mizrahi Jew. Instead, the word Sephardi was used as a catch-all to describe all non-Ashkenazim. But the term Mizrahi has been commonly used in Israel – initially, unfavourably – since the 1950s.

And since 2014, the stories of Mizrahi Jews have been formally recognised, with Sydney being the first in the diaspora to hold a community-wide event commemorating the expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands and Iran. Internationally, November is also the annual celebration of Mizrahi Heritage Month.

Meaning eastern, the term Mizrahi refers to Jews from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia; countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Yemen, India, China and Singapore. The stories of the once-thriving Jewish communities in these countries – as a collective, as well as by individual country – has to a large extent been unknown, and for many years went unrecognised.

But ten years ago, the Israeli government enacted a law designating November 30 as an annual, national day of commemoration for the one million Jewish refugees who were displaced from Arab countries and Iran in the 20^th century. After the 2014 Israeli legislation was passed, JIMENA – Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa; a not-for-profit organisation based in the San Francisco Bay Area – saw an opportunity to dedicate a whole month to honouring and promoting the heritage, history and rights of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. With that, Mizrahi Heritage Month was born.

Around the same time, the term Mizrahi, as distinct from Sephardi, started gaining traction in diaspora communities. As Hen Mazzig, an Israeli-Mizrahi writer, educator and commentator writes in his 2022 book, The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto, the term Sephardi (from the word Sfarad, or Spain, in Hebrew) primarily refers to the Jews who left the Iberian Peninsula around the time of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions (1492 and 1536 respectively) and ended up in the Middle East and North Africa.

In contrast, Mizrahi comes from the older term, Adot Hamizrah – communities of the East – and recognises the fact that Middle Eastern Jews were not all expelled from Spain and Portugal. Rather, many of them had lived in the Middle East for millennia.

Mazzig explains that the term Mizrahi was coined in the early years of the State of Israel by the Ashkenazi establishment, in response to the mass migration – and often, escape – of Jews from Arab and Islamic Lands. At first, the term was used disparagingly. The Ashkenazi establishment disregarded Mizrahi culture, seeing it as inferior and backward, and Mizrahi Jews were oppressed and marginalised. (“I want to thank my third-grade teacher who said Mizrahim have no culture. This one’s for you," writes Mazzig in the opening to his acknowledgements.)

Starting in the 1970s, and with the formation of the Israeli Black Panthers – a movement of second-generation immigrants to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa, who protested against discrimination against Mizrahim – Israeli Mizrahim began to reclaim the term Mizrahi, using it as a way to bring awareness to the socio-economic gaps between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim in the country. In the 1980s, Mizrahi music became popular, and by the ‘90s, Mizrahi was widely used in Israeli media, society and popular culture.

Today, Mizrahim make up more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews and Mizrahi culture is synonymous with Israel culture. As Matti Friedman wrote in a 2015 article for Tablet magazine, “in the country’s [Israel’s] early decades, Mizrahi music was deemed primitive and generally kept off radio and TV… In 2015 it isn’t accurate to say that Mizrahi is a sub-genre of Israeli pop… or that it threatens the mainstream. It is the mainstream. It is Israeli pop.” Performers such as Omer Adam and girl band A-wa have taken the rhythms of Israeli Mizrahi music to the world.

The situation in the diaspora, where Mizrahi Jews are a minority, is very different. We may blast Mizrahi dance tunes with their catchy choruses at our Australian simchas, but many Australian Jews have little understanding of the history, culture, and traditions of their Mizrahi brothers and sisters.As recently as last week, an Ashkenazi friend who told some acquaintances about my Indian-Iraqi heritage was met with these responses: “I didn’t know there were Jews from India in Sydney!” and “But aren’t all Sephardim the same?”

At a communal level, too, Mizrahim still often go unrecognised. The Gen 17 Australian Jewish community survey, published in 2018 by the JCA in Sydney and the ACJC in Melbourne, included a question about Australian Jews’ country of origin. Not one Sephardi or Mizrahi country was listed, effectively lumping all Mizrahim in the category of “other” and providing no data about the Mizrahi community.

Which is why Mizrahi Heritage Month, and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies’ (NSWJBD) annual commemoration event, held on or around November 30 to remember those Jews who were expelled or fled their homes in Arab countries and Iran in the years surrounding the establishment of Israel, are so significant.

They give local Mizrahim a voice to share their stories and culture, feel seen, and tell a history that has been overlooked; one that is especially salient in the current political climate where Jewish indigeneity to the Middle East is being disputed.

But the November 30 commemoration and other Heritage Month events are not just for Mizrahim. They also give the wider Jewish community a chance to engage with the richness and diversity of Jewish culture, and to enhance their understanding of our collective history.

The NSWJBD has been a diaspora-leader in commemorating the expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands and Iran. Spearheaded by Lynda Ben-Menashe, NSWJBD’s then-Community Relations Manager, Sydney’s inaugural November 30 event was held in 2015. “We were the first outside Israel to hold a whole-of-community event, and 400 people turned up,” says Ben-Menashe. The event has been a fixture on Sydney’s communal calendar ever since.

Almost a decade later, there is still no other Australian city which holds a community-wide commemoration. But earlier this year, representatives from the NSWJBD met with Victoria’s JCCV and members of Adelaide’s Jewish community. All expressed interest in creating an annual November 30 event, with Melbourne hoping to hold its first event in 2025.

In Sydney, this year’s event (renamed ‘Honouring Jewish refugees from Arab Lands and Iran) will take place on December 1. In a shift from previous years, where the event was themed according to the stories of Jews from individual countries (last year’s was Turkey), this year’s theme is the “importance of artefacts and testimonies in showcasing Sephardi and Mizrahi history and culture”.

The reason for the change, explains Joshua Moses, Chair of the NSWJBD’s Organising Committee, is to emphasise that artefacts and testimonies are crucial to telling the Mizrahi story, and that collecting testimonies is especially critical while older community members are still alive.

One of the purposes of the evening is to remember the stories of persecution. But another, equally important purpose, is to appreciate and celebrate Mizrahi culture and heritage. “That’s why we always have a musical component and why last year, and again this year, we’ll serve Mizrahi food,” says Moses.

In Australia, there is more awareness of Mizrahi stories than ever before. And those of us who may have previously called ourselves Sephardi – including Joshua Moses and me – now identify as Sephardi-Mizrahi or simply Mizrahi. (Somewhat confusingly though, Mizrachi synagogue in Bondi remains squarely Ashkenazi. And Sydney’s Sephardi Synagogue follows the Iraqi mode of prayer, and most of its congregants have no connection to Spain or Portugal.)

But there is still a long way to go until the term Mizrahi is clearly understood, and until the accompanying story is afforded equal importance in the broader Jewish story. Hen Mazzig – who was also a guest speaker at the NSWJBD’s 2020 commemoration event – encapsulates it best when he writes: “The Mizrahi community… just want to be included in the greater narrative of our tribe. We want our faces, histories, and traditions to be seen as an integral part of the Jewish experience, rather than an alien or exotic permutation.”

EVENTS
Honouring Jewish Refugees from Arab Lands and Iran will be held in Sydney on December 1 at 7pm Free entry, book tickets here

Melbourne (in-person): Shabbat lunch, Saturday November 30 at the Sassoon Yehuda Synagogue. All welcome, RSVP essential

National (online): NCJWA’s Women’s Voices Webinar: What my Mizrahi heritage means to me – Tuesday December 3 at 7pm Free, book tickets here