The Lost Identity Of The Sephardim 289

Chapter 6 The Lost Identity of the Sephardim in The Land of and the State of Israel

Language is the man. Turkish proverb quoted by Moşe [Moshe] Grosman in his article entitled: “Komo se yama loke avlamos,” El Amaneser, 4, 27 July 2008 ⸪

The Weekly Hed Ha-Mizraḥ and its Readers

In previous chapters of this work, we dealt with the history of the Sephardi community in and paid attention to the dramatic change that its sons and daughters underwent with the modernization processes that operat- ed in their city of birth as they did in the entire . This sweep- ing process of modernization was accelerated by the advent of the British Mandate over Palestine\Eretz Ysrael – The – (1917/1920–1948) and the establishment of leadership institutions of the Zionist in The Land of Israel and in the Diaspora: Ha-Va⁠ʾad Ha-Leʾumi [the National Commit- tee] – the executive arm of the Elected Assembly of the Yishuv in The Land of Israel in 1920–1948; and the Jewish Agency: the administrative and representa- tive body of the World Zionist Organization – which operated throughout the Jewish world. We examined and found how the Sephardim turned from the dominant group in the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem to a minority group, and how they lost the position of leadership they had held until close to the end of the nineteenth century, in effect experiencing a process of immigration even though they did not leave their birthplace. In the current chapter*, I wish to discuss the reaction of the Sephardim in The Land of Israel to the Holocaust that struck their Jewish Spanish speaking brothers in the Balkans and especially in Salonika, that was known as a “city and mother in Israel” and as “Jerusalem of the Balkans” – which had been the capital of Ladino culture since the Expulsion from (1492) and where the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population had been annihilated in the

* The initial version of this chapter first appeared in the annual El Ladinar, 5 (2009): 19–66. The chapter below is printed with the permission of the editor of El Ladinar.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004279582_008 290 Chapter 6

Holocaust. In my opinion, one must examine the response of the Jewish Span- ish speaking Sephardim in The Land of Israel to the Holocaust and its terrors against the backdrop of their conscious and willing relinquishing of the basis of their socio-cultural identity: their Jewish Spanish language, and adopting or, at least, coming closer to Hebrew as their regular language, over the course of the twentieth century. Our discussion deals with the information that the Sep- hardim – and we must emphasize, Hebrew readers – in The Land of Israel could receive from the pages of the weekly Hed Ha-Mizraḥ, from its founding in 1942 until 1949, right after the establishment of the State of Israel; with the processes of memory and perpetuation, as expressed in memorial books that were published, in Hebrew, by people in Israel coming from Salonika, about twenty years after the end of World War II;1 the testimony survivors gave in the anthology Be-Netivei Sheʾol;2 and on an examination of a sampling from two literary works: poetry3 and prose,4 written in Hebrew by natives of The Land of Israel stemming from Sephardi families.5

1 Saloniki, Ir Va-Em Be-Yisrael [Salonika, City and Mother in Israel] (Various authors, Tel Aviv: Ha-Makhon Le-Ḥeker Yahadut Saloniki, 1967); David A. Recanati (ed.), Zikhron Saloniki [In Memoriam of Salonika: The Greatness and Destruction of The Jerusalem of The Balkans] (Tel Aviv: Ha-Va⁠ʾad Le-Hotza⁠ʾat Sefer Kehilat Saloniki, 1972) [Hebrew]; S. Refael et al. (eds.), Lo Nishkack [We Shall Not Forget] (Tel Aviv: Organization of Greek Extermination Camp Survivors in Israel, The Next Generation Division, 1986–2005) [Hebrew]. 2 S. Refael (editor and interviewer), Be-Netivei Shʾeol [The Roads to Hell: Greek in the Holocaust. Testimonies] (Tel Aviv: Organization of Greek Extermination Camp Survivors in Israel, 1988) [Hebrew]. This collection contains sixty-two survivor testimonies that were published in Hebrew. I have chosen to focus on the testimonies of three of them, who, in time, published their life stories as books: Yaʿakov Handeli (ibid., 182); Jacques Stroumsa (ibid., 378), and Ḥaim Refael (ibid., 467). 3 A. Perez, Siniza i fumo. Siklo de poemas dedikado a la memoria de Saloniko, Edision bilingue (Jerusalem: “Sefarad” Publishing, 1986) [Ladino and Hebrew]. 4 S. Refael, Golgotha, Holocaust monodrama, Sh. Refael, G. Yefet-Atar, V. Atar, First per- formed at the Tzavta Theater, Tel Aviv, 2003. English version performed in New York, 2008 [Ladino and Hebrew]. 5 In the course of the current discussion I concentrated on Hebrew-language publications. My colleague Shmuel Refael has already discussed poetry in Ladino written by Jewish Spanish speakers. See S. Refael, Un grito en el silencio: La poesía judeoespañola sobre el Holocausto en lengua sefardí: Estudio y Antología (Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2008), in which the author makes himself the mouthpiece for the scream of the Jewish Spanish speaking Sephardim who were annihilated in the Holocaust, in the face of the silence and the lack of a sense of sympathy for suffering brethren, which was their lot and which Sephardi Holocaust survivors encountered in The Land of Israel and in the State of Israel. Similar notions were expressed by the Turkey born Selim Salti, founder and president of the