We were lucky enough to have a few articles published in this week’s edition of the Forward. One is an article I wrote about the Jews in Yemen, one is a slideshow and audio presentation by Rachael, and the last is an article written about us and our experiences.

My article:

Caught in Strife, Yemen’s Jews Cling Fiercely to Their Ancient Heritage

Letter From Sana’a

Yahya Yousuf al-Marhabi idly breaks off leaves from a branch of qat and adds them to the walnut-sized ball of pulp puffing up his cheek. As he sits on the carpeted floor of his living room, the television facing him shows Yemeni soldiers loading an artillery shell into a cannon and firing it toward rebel positions in the hills that surround his former home, Sa’ada. When an on-air reporter mentions the name of the rebel leader — the recently killed Abdul Malik al-Houthi — al-Marhabi spits.

“Dog,” he mutters under his breath.

Read more here

Rachael’s audio and photo essay:

The article about us:

Obsession With Yemeni Jews Inspires a Mideast Odyssey by College Grads

By Gal Beckerman

Josh Berer made a decision when he arrived in Yemen: He would tell people he was Christian. He had taken this precaution before — when he lived briefly in Jordan — but now, in the heart of the Arab world, where antisemitic rants blared at him constantly from loudspeakers and “Jew” was synonymous with evil, it was a necessity.

And it worked. Except for those few times when a Yemeni would begin to question him about his “religion.”

“Suddenly I found myself having to defend the concept of the trinity,” Berer said.

It was just one of the absurdities that Berer, a Canadian Jew and recent graduate of the University of Washington–Seattle, encountered during his time in Yemen.

But the ploy enabled Berer and his girlfriend, photojournalist Rachael Strecher, to spend time with the last remnants of Yemen’s endangered Jewish community. Berer’s report and Strecher’s photos are featured in this issue of the Forward.

Read more here

]]> http://joshberer.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/home-again-home-again-2/ Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:04:18 +0000 Josh http://joshberer.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/home-again-home-again-2/

We are now back in the United States, after spending the past two and a half months in Yemen. The past week has been an absolute roller-coaster of emotions, stress, and insanity. I had been abroad for almost a year and a half, and I was more than ready to be home. Being abroad, especially in Yemen, makes you miss silly things: the ability to purchase Neosporin, knowing where to find packing peanuts, Vietnamese food, not having to bribe some crooked shmuck to get anything done, being able to write emails without worrying about whether the Ministry of Information is reading them, and so on. Some of those are sillier than others.

We arrived in Yemen the day before Eid al-Fitr, and left the day after Eid al-Adha. Our time there was bound on each side by the two most important holidays of the Islamic calendar.

In Yemen we spent the vast majority of our time with the last community of Yemenite Jews. I was working on a project of recording folklore, the stories of the last Jews of the oldest diaspora in the world. Over the coming months I will be translating those stories and slowly putting them online. However, I could not post anything on this blog about our experiences and the friendships we made, because the government keeps a very close watch on those who have contacts with the Jews, and we promised and swore that we were not journalists. Things could have been bad had I posted pictures and stories before we had actually left the country.

I would like, therefore, to publish the stories I would have published in Yemen, but could not. The following posts are all back-dated.

I would like to thank Mori Yahya Yusuf Marhabi, rabbi of the Sana’a community, who helped us countless times, and whose friendship I will not forget. Saying goodbye to him and his family was among the most emotionally difficult things I have done in recent memory.

These posts reflect not only my first experience doing fieldwork in folklore and linguistics, but also months spent in a community of people who became our close friends. Yemenite Jewry is a unique and ancient minority, and its survival in a war-torn and poverty-stricken corner of the map is of great importance to me. I feel that a piece of Jewish life dies whenever a community such as this is destroyed by emigration, and therefore the preservation of life there is crucial for the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Jewish people.

All photographs by Rachael Strecher

In January of 2007, war between the Yemeni government and the Houthi rebels reached the Jewish community of al-Salem, in the province of Saadah. The rebels, who adhere to the Zaidi sect of Shia Islam, posted notices on the Jews’ homes threatening them with death if they did not leave the country, or convert to Islam. The government stepped in, and relocated the entire community, now numbering 67 individuals, to Sana’a. They were given homes in a protected compound across from the American embassy, known as Tourist City. The government provides them with monthly stipends and food supplies. Those stipends are designed to provide them with just enough to survive, but not enough to save anything, which could allow them to leave. Their situation is one of stagnation.

The leader and rabbi of the community is Yahya bin Yusuf Marhabi, and he was our first main contact, and became our close friend over the three months we spent in the community. He is the lynchpin of Jewish life here: he is the only one who knows the halacha of Kosher slaughter, circumcision, and many other basic services needed for a Jewish community to survive.

The majority of the community is from the Marhabi clan, but there are families from the Zindani and Habib clans as well. All have family in Israel, many have family in New York. I have a family tree, drawn for me by the rabbi’s brother Dawud, but I’m not posting it online, as it could be used for the wrong purposes.  For those curious about the genealogy of the community, contact me and we can discuss it.

Despite being provided homes and food, the Jews here don’t work, as they cannot afford start up costs for the trades they know. Many of them are silversmiths, some are carpenters and mechanics. All of those trades require workshops and expensive equipment. This lack of employment breeds boredom, and thus contemplation of better options in Israel or America. They do very little day to day, except chew qat.

There are roughly 250 Jews left in Yemen, however only 67 of them live in the capital. The remainder of the community lives in a village called Raida, 50 km north of Sana’a. Due to the ongoing rebel insurgency in the north of the country, Raida and its surroundings are currently closed to foreign visitors. This community is the last remnants of a diaspora of more than 2000 years, the longest in Jewish history. They are also the last native speakers of Judeo-Arabic in an indigenous context, ie outside of Israel.

Getting access to the Jews was more difficult than you would think. The government controls access very carefully. We did not go through official channels to meet with them, and one day we were sitting in Yahya’s living room and the door busted in and two military police officers demanded to know who we were and what we were doing there. We were hauled out to their office and interrogated for three hours. We were told that in order to see the Jews we must have a tasrih (permission) from the Ministry of the Interior. They took down our names and passport numbers, then came to our house (!) and took down our roommates names and passport numbers. They took down the name and number of our landlord, and my roommates’ bosses numbers as well. No fooling around. The following day I went to the Ministry of the Interior.

Now, you must understand something about Yemeni bureaucracy. It is the explicit goal of every person you talk to to either a) get money from you if they don’t have a desk or office, or b) pass you off to someone else if they do have a desk and office. Their pass-the-buck skills are legendary. Our interrogators told us specifically, and multiple times, go to the Ministry of the Interior. At the Ministry of the Interior, when I explained to the official there exactly I wanted from him (“Josh and Rachael can visit the Jews” signed and on official letterhead. Not hard.) he started to give me a long explanation about why he can’t give that particular tasrih, because Tourist City falls under the jurisdiction of the Military Police, not the MoI. Nevertheless, I had him write his name, title, phone number, and his boss’ name and phone number on official stationary, which I took back to the interrogators at Tourist City. They called him, and his boss, and permission was granted, alhamdulilah. After that, they were very nice to us.

All photographs by Rachael Strecher

In February of 2009, Said Bin Yisrael moved to Israel from Yemen with his family, following threats of violence against his family. He arrived with a bachelor from Saadah named Dawud. In Israel, Dawud and I became friends, and when I returned to Yemen I mentioned him to Yahya Yusuf, the rabbi of the community here. It turns out, unbeknownst to me, Dawud is Yahya’s brother, and had in fact returned to Yemen. He became one of our best friends during the time we spent with the community.

Dawud is a qat chewer for the ages. He can consume a truly impressive quantity of qat, and has been known to travel long distances to find the best deals. One day, we came with him to the market at al-Hasaba to buy a massive bundle. For me, his skills in finding the best quality product are impressive, although I imagine it is expected of most Yemenis.

Upon return from the qat market, we sat in the park in Tourist City, chewing, sipping, spitting. Such is life.

In this video, the widow and father of murdered Yemenite Jew Moshe Yaish Nahari speak about Moshe and the day he died. Violent antisemitism is, for most American Jews, a thing of the past, something one reads about in books. The community in Raida lives amongst this hatred day to day, and it is because of this murder that the community is disappearing at so fast a rate. The video was made by my friend Ammar Basha, for the human rights group HOOD.

We are now back in the United States, after spending the past two and a half months in Yemen. The past week has been an absolute roller-coaster of emotions, stress, and insanity. I had been abroad for almost a year and a half, and I was more than ready to be home. Being abroad, especially in Yemen, makes you miss silly things: the ability to purchase Neosporin, knowing where to find packing peanuts, Vietnamese food, not having to bribe some crooked shmuck to get anything done, being able to write emails without worrying about whether the Ministry of Information is reading them, and so on. Some of those are sillier than others.

We arrived in Yemen the day before Eid al-Fitr, and left the day after Eid al-Adha. Our time there was bound on each side by the two most important holidays of the Islamic calendar.

In Yemen we spent the vast majority of our time with the last community of Yemenite Jews. I was working on a project of recording folklore, the stories of the last Jews of the oldest diaspora in the world. Over the coming months I will be translating those stories and slowly putting them online. However, I could not post anything on this blog about our experiences and the friendships we made, because the government keeps a very close watch on those who have contacts with the Jews, and we promised and swore that we were not journalists. Things could have been bad had I posted pictures and stories before we had actually left the country.

I would like, therefore, to publish the stories I would have published in Yemen, but could not. The following posts are all back-dated.

I would like to thank Mori Yahya Yusuf Marhabi, rabbi of the Sana’a community, who helped us countless times, and whose friendship I will not forget. Saying goodbye to him and his family was among the most emotionally difficult things I have done in recent memory.

These posts reflect not only my first experience doing fieldwork in folklore and linguistics, but also months spent in a community of people who became our close friends. Yemenite Jewry is a unique and ancient minority, and its survival in a war-torn and poverty-stricken corner of the map is of great importance to me. I feel that a piece of Jewish life dies whenever a community such as this is destroyed by emigration, and therefore the preservation of life there is crucial for the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Jewish people.

All photographs by Rachael Strecher

Rabbi Yahya Yusuf reads news about the war that rages in their former home while his father Yusuf Musa and Suleiman Marhabi listen. They can’t read Arabic letters so he reads the news to them.

Photograph by Rachael Strecher

I wanted to come back to Yemen to record the folklore of the last Jews of Sa’ada, in Northern Yemen. It seemed like a relatively easy project, and so I budgeted three months. The community had been relocated to Sana’a a few years back, and they were relatively easy to contact.

Looking back, I could have done this much better. Prior to coming to Sana’a, I was living in Istanbul, a cosmopolitan hub of life and information. There, anything can be found, but in Yemen my chances of finding professional-quality equipment for recording severely decreased. Cameras here cost twice as much as the same model in Istanbul, and higher-end models simply don’t exist.

I mentioned the idea of stories to the rabbi, and he responded with, “That sounds great, we can use my video camera.” Wow. Unexpected. It seems that a relative brought Yahya a camera from abroad! In addition, he would speak to some of the elders of the community and ask them to come tell stories. At this stage, I was feeling very positive about the whole project.

The following day, we gathered in the rabbi’s house and set up the first meeting. The camera the rabbi had was a Sony DCR-HC62, and we set it up on a chair, for lack of a tripod. However, there was no power cable, so we had one battery’s life, and that was it.

At this point, I had no idea how long each story would be. I was assuming they’d be around five to ten minutes. In the end, each story came out to around 15 minutes, with some going as long as 30. The first day, however, we had only enough battery for two stories, totally 40 minutes. The storytellers that day were Suleiman bin Musa Marhabi, the rabbi’s paternal uncle, and Musa bin Saalem Marhabi, the rabbi’s cousin.

After that first day of shooting, I looked up the make and model number of the rabbi’s video camera on YouTube. Several people had uploaded videos to test their cameras, and the quality was pretty poor, archivally speaking. Since I want these videos to last, and serve as archival material, the quality, particularly the audio, is of the utmost importance to me. On this particular camera, it seems the built-in mic is close enough to the deck to pick up the whirring of the tape and record it as a constant buzz onto the audio track.

The first day also made some other problems known: since we were in the rabbi’s crowded house, people kept filtering in and out, knocking on the door each time. People also left their phones on, which caused annoying feedback on the tape. Since family members wanted to watch the stories, and they were all chewing qat at the time, the rustle of the plastic qat bags was also audible on the tape. We learned, that day, that a closed room with no disturbances is the best option.

Ammar, a friend of mine, works as a filmmaker, so I hired him to shoot the videos, as he has a semi-pro camera and high-quality audio equipment. He did all the technical, audio/visual set up, and the end result is archival quality. We were shooting on a Sony DSR-PDX10 MiniDV camera, and in addition to the lavalier mics we attached to the subjects, we also recorded audio independently with a Sony PCM D50.

On Wednesday, November 11 we went to Tourist City in Ammar’s car to theoretically pick up three storytellers: Musa, his brother Yusuf, and his uncle Suleiman. Our plan was to pick them up and take them to my house in the Old City, where we could sit undisturbed for as long as we wanted, and shoot as many stories as they could remember in a day.

Field bag. In it I carried my laptop, external hard drive, cables, PCM D50, MiniDV tapes, note pad, and passports. Rach carried the cameras.

We drove up to the rear gate, and Musa met us outside. We went inside the compound, but since the guard at the rear gate doesn’t know me, and doesn’t know I have tasrih (permission), he made a big show of stopping us, making us wait, then making us go around to the main gate and so on. We waited there ten minutes, during which time the guard called his boss, who reconfirmed my tasrih. By this time Musa told us that his brother Yusuf couldn’t do it until 2, and Suleiman couldn’t go because he was at the Department of Passports. Things start to look awfully flaky.

So we left empty handed, with plans to go back around 2.

After 2, I started calling Musa. No answer. I called him every 10 minutes until 3, and then I called the rabbi and asked for Yusuf’s number. Yusuf acted flaky and uncertain on the phone, saying he’ll call when Musa comes back. Of course, he never calls.

That weekend, the 13^th and 14^th, I went to Tourist city for Shabbat, which was a good time to talk to them about their no-show, because they couldn’t go anywhere. Musa spun me some hogwash about losing his phone, apologized, and agreed to sit down to tell stories on Sunday the 15th. After Shabbat I called Ammar and confirmed that we were on for Sunday, inshallah.

Thankfully, that actually worked. We got the equipment into Tourist City without complications, set up the cameras in Musa’s house, and he, Yusuf, and Suleiman sat on the bed and told us 5 stories, totaling 2 hours of tape. There were no technical hiccups, and with the exception of Musa’s mom coming in to offer us tea, no disturbances.

All in all, it was an excellent lesson in fieldwork, and I have a growing list of things I want to do better the next time. Getting them to actually sit down and tell stories was obviously the most frustrating. Obviously, I would have liked to stay longer and get more stories, but circumstances beyond our control conspired to send us home.

I am now working through the transcription. In terms of the final product, I plan to have four transcriptions of each story: in Arabic letters, Judeo-Arabic, IPA, and the English translation. I realized that if I wanted to have text in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic (ie Arabic written in Hebrew characters) I’d have to physically retype each word with the language setting on Hebrew. So what I’m working on now is just authoring a new Unicode Arabic font, which is essentially just a slightly modified Hebrew alphabet. Since it would be encoded as an Arabic font, not a Hebrew one, I could just copy-paste the original Arabic text and then change fonts, thus saving weeks of work.

SIL International has a long and useful list of freeware programs to help field linguists catalog their data, and I’ve found some useful data-entry programs: who did what where, how long etc.

All photographs by Rachael Strecher

The holiday of Simchat Torah celebrates the completion of the Torah. It is a festive holiday, one of singing and dancing. It is tradition to parade the Torah in circles around the synagogue, singing all the while. In Yemen, the synagogue is the rabbi’s living room, so we paraded the Torah around a podium in the center of the room.

The Torah used by this community is more than 300 years old. It has survived more than four wars, and like the Jews of Tourist City, is a refugee. There are actually two Torahs, but one is unfit for use in services and thus lives in a closet. However, for the service it was brought out and paraded around.

Prior to their exodus from the north, the Jews had another Torah, more than 500 years old and written on deer’s hide that had been prepared in such a way that it turned bright red as it aged. This is a unique trait of Yemenite Jewry. The Houthis stole, defaced, then destroyed this Torah, following the Jews’ flight from Sa’ada.

In Mizrachi Jewish practice, a metal or wooden case is traditionally used to hold the Torah. The case is designed to open in such a way that each end of the scroll is held in place. In their exodus from Sa’ada, this case was abandoned, and the Torah is now wrapped in a series of textiles, then covered in bubble wrap, and then finally a blue tarp.

The following evening, Mori Yahya went to the market and came back with two massive garbage bags full of junk food and candy. On the morning of the holiday, the entire community assembled in the rabbi’s living room and candy was handed out to the kids, who started little stashes in every pocket and nook they could find.

All photographs by Rachael Strecher

The alphabet that the Jews in Yemen learn first is Hebrew, and in fact many older members of the community cannot read or write Arabic letters, despite being native speakers of that language. Instead, they write Arabic in Hebrew letters, a tradition that is true of all Jewish communities in the Arabic-speaking world. There is an entire body of literature, commentary, and poetry written by Arab Jews in this dialect of Arabic known as Judeo-Arabic.

In the tiny community that remains in Yemen, Jewish learning dimly flickers and the traditions are passed on as they have been for more than 2000 years here. It is the oldest diaspora community of Jews in the world.

Saalem bin Musa Marhabi teaches the older children the weekly Torah reading, while the younger kids learn the alphabet in another room.

All photographs by Rachael Strecher.

On October 27th, Abdallah (Ovadia) bin Suleiman Marhabi got married to a young woman named Bracha, from the village of Raida. He is 24, and was one of our closest friends (being the same age as us) in Yemen. The wedding was spectacular. Since the community has close contact with the government and the security apparatus, the wedding was attended by many upper-echelon government officials. Every so often, an entourage of well-dressed men would arrive, walk to the podium where Abdallah and his family sat, shake their hands and have their pictures taken.

Held in a long hall full of cushions provided for gat-chewing comfort, a large contingent of Jews from Raida also attended, many of whom were Abdallah’s age. Some of them remembered me from when I was there two years earlier. We spent hours there, bouncing between people, chewing gat and enjoying the festivities.

The previous day, the groom’s family drove to Raida and had a smaller wedding there. As foreigners, we were unable to go, unfortunately. The government provided them protection in the form of a truckload of soldiers who accompanied the cars to the village. Before they left, the kids were horsing around on the jeep, and the soldiers seemed happy to oblige. Most Yemenis have never seen a Jew, let alone a Yemeni Jew, so the soldiers assigned to the convoy were genuinely intrigued.

The wedding was gender-segregated, and on the women’s side, the daughter of a neighbor of the Jews from Saadah painted the women with naqsh, a henna-like decorative embellishment used around holidays and special occasions. Bracha sat on a podium alone, looking bored.

All photographs by Rachael Strecher.

Gamil holds his peyot aside as he gets a haircut Nov. 25, 2009.

Photos by Rachael Strecher.

Last night, in another secret operation, sixteen Yemenite Jews arrived in Israel. And, like before, they are now staying in my building in Beer Sheva, the Merkez Klita Yeelim. They comprise members of the Jaradi, Nahari, and Hamdi clans.

The Jewish Agency threw them a small party in the building, full of Yemenite food. Many relatives came in to greet them, mostly from Rehovot.

I didn’t take any pictures. Instead, I let the kids pass my camera around and take pictures. Not surprisingly, almost all the pictures were blurry, save a few.

The girl on the right is Saadia ben Yisrael’s daughter Leah. She arrived in February. She’s sitting next to Aharon Nahari, from the family of Moshe Nahari, the Jew who was gunned down in December, sparking this exodus. She spent the time explaining to him the differences between Yemeni Judeo-Arabic (their native language) and Hebrew, which she now speaks fluently. She started with the food. “Bisbas. Ze harif b’ebrit.” Hot sauce. It’s harif in Hebrew.

Aharon Nahari. I gave him the camera and he took a lot of pictures. He was really excited to talk about their trip (which he technically isn’t allowed to do). I’m not going to give any details, suffice to say that he was really jazzed about the airplanes.

More Naharis.

Not bad photos for nine-year-olds.

Notice the bulge in the guy’s cheek: there was gat aplenty, in addition to the food.

This is Dawood (David), from Sa’ada. He arrived with Saadia in February, and according to Saadia, does nothing but chew gat all day long. He always has this deer-in-headlights look that you see now.

The guy on the right, Ezra, has been in Israel since the early 90s. He’s originally from Sa’ada, but spent time in New York working in the jewelery industry. He now lives in Rehovot. He also was the only one who spoke fluent FusHa (Modern Standard) Arabic, as opposed to just the local dialect. When he mentioned jewelery, my ears perked up. He learned filigree work from his father and grandfather. I got his contact information and he invited me to visit him in Rehovot.

In October of 2007 I had the opportunity to visit Raida, the last village in Yemen with an indigenous Jewish population. There were at the time roughly 280 Jews living there, 2 synagogues, a Jewish school, and a Jewish quarter in the village. Many of the tall metal gates that surround the courtyards of houses had Hebrew Bruchim ha-Bayim, Welcome, inscribed upon them, instead of the usual Arabic Ahlan wa-Sahlan. Raida is an incredible time capsule of Jewish life in the Middle East, a way of life that has almost completely vanished in the wake of Israel’s creation. I wrote about my experiences in the village here.

I stayed with Said Bin Israil (Saadia Ben Yisrael) and his family while there. He was one of the leaders of the Raida community and a teacher in the school, his sincerity and hospitality made my visits to Raida the most memorable and incredible experiences of my life to date.

In early December, events began in Raida that will eventually mean the end of the community there. I wrote about this several posts back, stating that these acts of violence will finally break the camel’s back, and force the emigration of the last Jews of Yemen.

Sure enough, the first family to leave Yemen arrived in Israel 4 days ago, in a secret operation carried out by the Jewish Agency. And sure enough, that family is the very same Ben Yisraels I stayed with while in Raida. As if that coincidence was not enough, it turns out that they are living, at least temporarily, in the apartment building I live in. Right down the hall from me.

So a couple nights ago Rachael and I paid them a visit. It was really amazing to see him again, and wearing a suit and pants, as opposed to a thoub! Right away I started asking about his trip, did he go through Jordan, was it direct, etc, and he gave me this embarassed smile and said he couldn’t say, he was sworn to secrecy.

I brought with me Saadia Gaon’s Siddur, which has large sections of Judeo-Arabic commentary; I thought he might like to have a look. He did, and we spent a while pouring over it, checking out the different sections. Jewish books are hard to come by in Yemen, and they depend on whatever books they can get from New York or Jerusalem from time to time, and those books rarely have Judeo-Arabic, Saadia’s native language, written in them.

His kids are about the cutest thing in the world.

He told me that in the weeks before they left Yemen, there were representatives of the Jewish Agency in Raida, trying to help them to come to Israel, and representatives of the Neturei Karta, an anti-Zionist Hasidic sect, trying to get them to stay in Yemen or come to New York. It was as though a covert war of words and ideologies was raging over the last Jews of the Arab diaspora, in a tiny village in a forsaken corner of the Middle East.

All photos by Rachael Strecher, except this one, courtesy Reuters:

On Thursday, December 11th, 2008, Moshe Yaish Nahari was gunned down on the street in Raida, Yemen. This event will be the catalyst that provokes the final exodus of Yemenite Jewry, the oldest Jewish community in the world, and it will be gone forever, lost to the sands of time.

His killer, an mentally unstable former Yemeni Air Force pilot, called upon him to accept Islam, and when he refused he opened fire with his Kalishnikov (which non-Jews in Raida carry like a fashion accessory) and shot Moshe 5 times. The man, Abd al-Aziz al-Abadi, had killed his wife two years prior and managed to escape jail time by paying off his late wife’s family.

The judge in the case was originally pushing the death sentence, but when the Sheikh of al-Abadi’s tribe vowed to execute every last Jew in Raida, the judge apparently has backed down. The entire Jewish community has received death threats. Saadia Hala, the man I stayed with when in the village, had his house firebombed, and a grenade lobbed at his door.

The Forward has an excellent article about the murder here.

This is the straw that will finally break the camel’s back. The Jews are currently in the process of selling their homes, and moving to Sana’a to await the next move, out of the country. Many will come to Israel, because they will recieve support and assistance, others will go to Jewish communities in America or the UK.

I have wanted, for some time now, to return to the village and do a major project of oral history and story recording within the community, it seems that perhaps that the boat has sailed and I have missed my window. The nature of the project, therefore, is changing. Now there is a potential for a great project documenting their new lives here in Israel, almost 60 years after the vast majority of their coreligionist countrymen arrived on Israeli soil.

Today I went to Machane Yehuda, the Jewish market in Jerusalem to try and find some gat from a Yemenite store, the stimulant chewed in Yemen on a massive scale. I didn’t have high expectations, because the lack of a multimillion-dollar-a-day habit in Israeli society would probably mean the quality wouldn’t be to Sana’a standards.

This is what I found.

This was 30 shekels, or about 8 bucks.

This is crap gat.

To be sure, of the above pic, only the leaves in the bowl were chewable:

Washed and ready.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I found a Jewish prayer book from around the year 850, written by an incredibly influential and brilliant Egyptian rabbi, Rav Saadia Gaon, with large portions of translation and explanation in Judeo Arabic, Classical Arabic written in Hebrew characters. This particular book was reprinted in 1941 in Jerusalem.

This is an interesting piece of research material because it provides a window into what cutting-edge Arabic Jewish discourse and discussion and prayer was like in the Cairo/Baghdad of the Middle Ages.

In this post I’ve chosen a random sampling of Judeo Arabic and I’m going to transcribe a small section of Hebrew characters into the Arabic characters and then try and translate it to English. Thing about Judeo Arabic is, there are Hebrew phrases scattered in, particularly relating to God and prayer. In this (helpful) printing, the Hebrew words are spaced a little wider out. Note that only one column is Arabic, the left side is Hebrew.

Also present are Arabic diacritical marks denoting certain Arabic letters and pronunciation guides. This is an easy diagnosis when looking at a this siddur, since the Hebrew wouldn’t have those particular marks, one can tell the JudeoArabic from the rest easily, without having to scan and find clues in the text, a preposition here, a definite article there. These marks also help transcribe the text more easily. I’ll go into more detail about how to switch the alphabets over later.

وكانت الفصول يح فقت فلما زاد هذا صارت يظ. وكذلك في عهد ابانا لم يكونوا محتاجين ان يقولون “מקבץ נדחי עמו”
لاجتماعهم ولا “בונה ירושלים” لآنها كانت مبنية ولكنهم بدلًا من هاتين كانوا يسلون في دوام الملك والنصر في الحروب حسب الحاجة في كل جيل. فأن توهم متوهم ان ههنا فنون آخر جير هذه اليح مما

“And it was only in the sections of Yeh, and when it increased it became Yidth, as it was in the time of our fathers, who were not in need of saying, “מקבץ נדחי עמו” for they were together, nor “בונה ירושלים” because it was built, but instead of saying either of those, they sought the favor of the king and helped during the wars, according to the need of each generation. If there was suspicion against them, with these or other types of Yeh regarding…”

So jibberish, or what happens when you flip to a random page and pick a paragraph. I’m pretty sure I screwed up the translation, I have no idea what these Yeh and Yidth things are, and I translated fasul as ’sections’ but it could be ‘months’ and a ton of other stuff. The first part of the Hebrew says “Gather the Exiles ” and the second reads “Build Jerusalem”.

-UPDATE! My man Ezra comes through with the clarification!

Yeh and Yidth are numbers, abbreviations for 18 and 19. 18 in Hebrew, besides being the numerological sign for ‘life’, is also a collection of prayers said daily: the 18 blessings, or Amidah, from עמד/عمد ‘amd – pillar or support, as it is said standing.

The Hebrew of the first line, facing column, translated by Ezra: “and when the sections/paragraphs were only 18, and when they were added upon they became 19.” So just based on this first paragraph and nothing else, it’s possible that it’s discussing factional politics in Israelite times, before the Jews were scattered.

So I got my first look at real Judeo-Arabic, the Arabic dialect spoken by the Jews of the Arab lands. It is written in Hebrew letters, but is the transcribed Arabic dialect of the country in which it was spoken, but with some Jewish words, Hebrew and Aramaic mostly, thrown in. These two particular examples are Iraqi, and were shown to me by Rabbi Avi Navah of Kadima Heschel West Hebrew Academy in the West San Fernando Valley. He was born in Baghdad and a year later his family fled to Israel and he was raised speaking Judeo-Arabic at home but Hebrew everywhere else. He brought the Hagaddah of Passover, the prayer book used during the Passover feast to tell the story of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, and Shir ha-Shirim, the Song of Songs. It says on the front עם תרגום ושרח ערבי “‘em targum ve-sharakh Arabi” -With Arabic translation and explanation. Note this is the same as Arabic مع ترجمة وشرح عربي “Ma3 targema wa-sharh Arabi.” The ayin and the mim in “with” reverse themselves when you go from Hebrew to Arabic. This is why Judeo-Arabic is cool. Its a bridge language between two cultures who have serious problems right now, and in 50 years this language will be mostly extinct.

A lot of our knowledge of medieval Judeo-Arabic, and thus the dialectic Arabic spoken on the streets of Cairo, Baghdad, Tunis, or Sana’a for a thousand years of Jewish life, comes from the Cairo Geniza, among other genizas, or book storage archives. The geniza was typically an attic in a Synagogue or house of learning in which damaged or unusable books could be stored, since they could not be destroyed as they contained the Holy Name. As they grew over the years and the language gradually changed, the genizas have become a massive archive documenting linguistic evolution, as well as a way of life that has ceased to exist as a result of Zionism.

In our world, the information contained within those hundreds of thousands of books is being digitized and uploaded to the internet for all to peruse. Check Genizah.org for one major example of digitization. The Princeton-Penn-Cambridge Combined Geniza Project also is working hard to make geniza data available.

Some people are doing great research in this field and are preserving the study of this sadly moribund beautiful language. Among them were Dr. Joshua Blau, Dr. S.D. Goitein, Dr. Benjamin Hary, Dr. Noam Stillman, Dr. Ofra Tirosh Becker, Dr. Judith Rosenhouse, and others.

Also:

Omniglot

Wikipedia

Jewish-languages.org

For the past several weeks I’ve been slowly working on Yemenite filigree, with mounting levels of frustration. I can’t get the solder to bind. I got Yehuda Tassa’s DVD on basic filigree and it showed me why I was screwing it up. I’m doing a bunch of things wrong, and so in the next few weeks I’m going to try and correct them and get the right materials.

I decided to try and get a preview of what being able to actually do filigree work would be like, if only i could make it work. To do this, I decided to use superglue in place of solder.

First I bent some 20 gauge silver wire into a loop. Then I did that again, and soldered (not glued) both rings closed. I put one of the rings around the head of a hammer and hit it against a brick till the wire took on the shape of the hammer’s 8-sided shape. After that, I heated that ring up and hit it with a hammer till it flattened. Then I glued the two rings on top of each other.

To make the filligree elements, bend the wire in half, and twist the two ends together and then twist the wire together until it’s reached the right level of twistiness. There’s more to it than just that in the traditional method, you have to ‘cure’ the wire through annealing (heating up to allow the molecules to rearrange and settle in their new shape) and then putting the wire in an acid bath, but since I’m cheating and doing a piss-poor job of adhering to tradition, i skipped those two steps. Then you simply twist them up into the shape you want. I did two elements in 20 gauge wire and then annealed them until their color changed (shouldn’t happen ideally) and then flattened them a bit, then sanded down the top to get a shine. I popped a little coil on top to cover the center.

Then its just a matter of winding up some high-gauge (therefore very fine/thin) wire into coils and arranging them in the frame.

These are my grandfather’s jewelery tools. I found them buried in a closet. I decided they would be useful in my ongoing experiment with Yemenite filigree work. I’m making a proper case for them, too.

]]> http://joshberer.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/yemen-empty-jewish-homes-destroyed/ Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:45:03 +0000 Josh http://joshberer.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/yemen-empty-jewish-homes-destroyed/

In the latest attack targeting Yemen’s few remaining Jews, rebel Houthi militiamen destroyed several homes that had belonged to the now-absent Jewish community in the northwestern Saada province.

“The Houthis destroyed part of my house and looted it,” Rabbi Yehia Youssuf told Reuters in the capital, San’a.

All 67 members of Saada’s Jewish community fled following threats from the Houthis, the rabbi says. Some locals say the Jews were threatened because they had been selling wine to Muslims – an accusation the Jews deny, according to Reuters.

A local said the Shi’ite rebels attacked the houses of other Jews after looting the rabbi’s.

Around 400 Jews remain in the majority Sunni state, the remnant of an ancient, close-knit community that, while remaining connected to Jewish intellectual and legal developments outside Yemen, managed to insulate itself culturally until the 20th century.

Read more at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1207486208257&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

These are some photos I’ve collected online of Yemenite Jews, past and present.

Today I was poking around on Flickr looking at pictures of Yemenis and to my great surprise I found the following picture. It was taken by Eric Lafforgue, www.ericlafforgue.com

This is Said Bin Isra’il Hala, or Saadia ben Yisrael Hala, and it is he who I stayed with when I visited Raida, the last surviving Jewish community in Yemen. He helped us get travel permits to the village, invited me and my two compadres into his home for Shabbat, we spent the weekend with him and his family and I will never forget his kindness and hospitality.

Since that trip, I’ve become mildly obsessed with Yemenite Jewry, and more specifically the silverwork trade they were known for.

These are the emails I sent home after returning from the village.

October 9 2007. Ramadan in Sana’a.

First of all I apologize for the group email. but this was cool:

So for the past three weeks my friends JB and Ezra and I have been playing human ping pong ball and bouncing to the interior ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Tourist Ministry, the American embassy, and various other bureaucracies in an an effort to get a travel permit outside Sana’a to a village in the north called Raida. In Raida is the last surviving Jewish community left in Yemen, about 400 people. It’s also one of the last surviving Jewish communities left in the Middle East, period. Basically its a bit of an anomaly. So finally after being passed off probably a dozen times to various ministries packed with bureaucrats grumpy from not eating all day, we found one guy at the tourist ministry who told us if we knew someone in the village who could drive us there and vouch for us, we could get permits. Ezra called his contact in the Jewish community here (there’re 7 families who used to live in a village called Sa’ada but were moved to Sana’a because there was a threat against them which the government took seriously enough to put them up in a nice hotel across from the American embassy indefinitely) and the guy said he would call the next day and we’d go and meet him. Ezra and JB pulled me out of class and we went to meet him at the hotel.

We walk in the lobby of this small hotel, and every chair in the place has a bona fide Yemenite Jew, complete with long thoub, kuffiya, and long tightly curled paot. All in all like 12 guys, the first Jews I’ve seen (other than JB and Ezra) for a long time. We went with Ezra’s friend Said (Saadia) and another guy, Faiz, both from Raida, to the ministry, got the permits, and then they were like ‘we’re going to get some food.” so we went with them and got some fish (easy way to get out of eating non-kosher meat) and then we were driving around Sana’a. i figured they’re taking us back to our place, and then suddenly we’re in the outskirts of the city, full of industrial buildings and car chop shops, and I said ‘um, guys? where are we going?”

“Raida.”

oh shit. We only have the clothes on us, no toiletries, Ezra’s wearing barely more than his pyjamas, and we’re planning on staying a week.

Whatever.

So we get to his house in Raida after an hour and half, and this gaggle of paot-sporting kids greets us at the door, none older than 6. For the rest of the night guys came in, we ate food and chewed gat, all the while speaking an odd mix of mostly Hebrew and Arabic. None of them spoke English, and they didn’t ever learn classical Arabic so they only spoke the dialect, but they all spoke very decent Hebrew, so Ezra and I would talk to them in Hebrew and when we came to a word we didnt know we’d switch to Arabic.

Sometimes we’d conjugate Hebrew verbs like Arabic ones, or use only Arabic prepositions. Basically it was a linguistic adventure. Unfortunately JB doesn’t know Hebrew and scrapes by in classical Arabic. He had a tough time. One thing I found so odd was that they referred to the local Muslim population as goyim, which I guess makes sense but, growing up in the Christian world, only ever meant Christians to me. We went to a bunch of Jewish houses, and met about 20 or so families left there. We saw the synagogue, and the school, which was a trip. There were a dozen kids singing the Torah parsha for the week, with their paot swinging back and forth. It was a time capsule of Jewish learning in the Middle East for a thousand years or more.

The village is a crossroads and houses on a hill, all with the ubiquitous rebar extending from the roofs denoting the possibility of a second floor at some later date. The men here sit under the shade of buses or awnings, squatting and talking and thats about it. If it were not Ramadan they would be chewing gat. I will never cease to be shocked by the amount of time the average Yemeni can spend doing nothing but sit and chew a baseball size ball of pulped gat for hours upon hours. The non-Jewish men here all wear folding-stock Kalishnikovs over their shoulders like a fashion accessory.

The wind blows colored plastic bags out of the town and into the fields, where it forms a colorful mosaic caught on branches, a noxious wildflower field.

All the Jewish guys ride around on motorcycles, paot swinging in the wind, with thoubs on and traditional Yemeni kuffiyas wrapped around their heads.

They asked me if I wanted to get married, and I think they were serious.

So we came back after one night, with the plan to go back on Thursday with supplies and stay till Sunday. I’ll report about Shabbat with the last of the Yemenite Jews later.

love Josh

Mon, Oct 15, 2007

Hello again,

So as I mentioned in my first email we had decided to go back to Raida with supplies and stay the weekend, to spend Shabbat with them. So we did, and it was pretty eye-opening. We got in Friday afternoon without incident, and went to the synagogue around 5 to pray. The synagogue there is cool: no benches, just carpets on the floor and a hard rectangular pillow every few feet around the wall, to lean against. There was a table and a bench and a podium in the middle of the room. Many of the guys were chewing gat during the service, some were even smoking during the beginning, before Shabbat actually started.

The service was similar to other Mizrachi services i had been to in the past: more like a constant buzzing/murmuring of prayers with an occasional silence and intermittent collective AMEN!s thrown in than a ordered service with leadership. In other words, completely impossible to follow. so the three of us looked like morons sitting there with deer-in-headlights looks on our faces. after the service we talked with some of the guys (the women pray at home) and then walked home.

Saturday was pretty standard for religious families: wake up pray pray pray eat pray eat pray sleep. However the Torah reading was ridiculous and fed most of my thoughts for the rest of the trip. Basically it illustrated the vast differences in Jewish education here and in North America, and provoked a lot of thought. First of all, in America/Canada (at least the synagogues i’ve always gone to) the people called up to read from the Torah say two short blessings, once before the reading, once after. A person who is trained and has practiced the weekly portion actually does the reading. Then when the people who say the blessings come back to their seats everyone shakes their hands and says congratulations like they just accomplished some Herculean feat. Here, everyone who is called up reads, no practice, and no vowels. He just sight reads it. Then, the tradition is that the second to last person to read is under thirteen. I was told this, and thought, ok so a 12 year old a month from his Bar Mitzvah will do it. Wrong. In this case, it was a 6 year old and he did it like a champ. This is every week here, and people dont think this is particularly remarkable, it’s just how Jewish life and learning goes. And to think in America we piss and moan for 6 to 10 months prior to our Bar Mitzvahs to read one little portion, if that! In addition to this, for each person reading, a kid between 5 and 12 sat at the table next to the podium and after the reader finished each verse, the kid would read it again, but this time in Aramaic. Are you kidding me? I was floored.

These guys put our Judaism to shame, and made me feel like a stupid tourist. I guess in terms of the extent of Jewish education i have as compared to these guys, I am. I can say with certainty that the role Judaism and Torah plays in my life and the lives of my Jewish friends in North America, is but a shell of what it was for our ancestors. So I began to think. I thought about the causes and conditions that would allow this kind of commitment to learning Torah to exist. Some are sociological: the Jews here dont really exist within Yemeni society. Others are educational: they dont learn secular subjects, or even to read and write Arabic. Just Torah. The alphabet Jews here use is Hebrew, many of the kids dont learn Arabic script until theyre married and with kids. After a while I realized that this education and commitment came at a cost. The Jews here will always be their own community, and will never a) be permitted to or b) want to integrate into the general society. Each side views the other with mutual distrust and disdain, each believing the others religion to be deeply and irrevocable flawed. Yemen is a homogeneous society, and the Jewish community that exists inside it dimly flickers with equal homogeneity.

Sometimes I get frustrated here by the lack of scientific reasoning and lack of secular thinking. I realized this weekend I would probably get just as frustrated in time with the Jewish community for the same reason. Secular thinking and society has no place with them. They exist as they have for a thousand years or more; protecting the traditions and passing on the Torah and Talmud from generation to generation. It was all in all an amazing experience, and I’m incredibly fortunate to have seen this community while it exists, but made me really consider the place religion has in my life, and the life of my Jewish friends, and what the costs are. Ultimately, however, I concluded that its probably better, at least for me being a North American, to have a more solid foundation on secular thinking, as it is within that society that I plan to live.

An unexpected side-effect of this trip has been a guilty and reluctant resentment of Israel for what its creation meant for the Jewish community here. If I were studying here in 1930 there were 30 000 Jews in Sana’a alone. Nowhere in the Middle East can we see authentic Mizrachi Judaism exist, as a result of 1948.

Interesting side note of this whole thing: I noticed that the Tanakh used by the congregation was stamped “Neturai Karta, NYC.” For those unfamiliar with these guys, once so eloquently described by one Seattle Rabbi as “rats in suits,” besides being the most vociferous and vocal Jewish Anti-Zionists, they were also the Jewish delegation to Iran’s holocaust-denial conference.

Lovely.

Love Josh

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