We Came Here with Nothing

“The Star of David is a part of me,” says 16-year-old Soheil to his Islamist gang friends in a Berlin suburb. They have discovered that he is Jewish and are not pleased. But Soheil stands his ground, proudly wearing his Persian grandmother’s Star of David and studying his heritage at the local synagogue. He doesn’t understand their hatred, but it fuels a love for his people that eventually leads him to run the IDF’s European Desk.

Of the ten films shown at the 24th New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival last week, “Wet Dogs,” (2020), based on Arye Sharuz Shalicar’s remarkable life, was the most poignant for me. That the German teachers at his high school in the early ‘90s were aghast at the slightest sign of antisemitism made it even more so.

The film festival was held at the Moise Safra Center, which has become my second home. Hosted by charismatic opera singer/actor David Serero, the festival just elevated the warmth, vibrancy, and soul that the center provides to Judeans on the Upper East Side of NYC.

Serero also directed and produced the inspired jewel of the festival: the award-winning documentary “The United States of Elie Tahari.” Born in Jerusalem to Persian parents in 1952, Tahari lived in a refugee camp and then a kibbutz before arriving in NYC by himself in 1971. The 19-year-old couldn’t speak any English, had $60 in his pocket, and had to sleep on benches in Central Park. But through hard work, determination, and a lot of chutzpah, Tahari went on to build a billion-dollar fashion empire.

“I’m very grateful to this country,” says Tahari in the film. “The American flag is a symbol of freedom—the freedom to express ourselves.”

It all started with his invention of the tube top — yes, that was Tahari — which enabled him to create his signature line of iconic, elegant chic. “I make quiet clothes so the beauty of the woman can shine through,” says Tahari.

But from the beginning, the money he made was sent back to his family in Israel, until he could afford to bring them here. “It’s all about the family,” says Tahari.

A version of Tahari’s story — “We came here with nothing” — runs through most of the films. It is familiar to nearly all Jews because it is very much our story—the Jewish immigrant story. But for some reason it’s not the story that others tell about us. In that story, we are merely the beneficiaries of “Jewish privilege.”

Tahari, the self-made fashion mogul, turns that oxymoron on its head: “I had a lot of challenges, and that makes you strong.”

“In Your Eyes, I See My Country” (2019) follows the journey of Israeli musicians Neta Elkayam and Amit Hai Cohen as they travel for the first time to Morocco, where their grandparents were born. They grapple with feelings of dual identity — with feeling at home in Morocco — while they attempt to heal the wounds of exile carried by their parents.

The filmmaker, Kamal Hachkar, sees the film as a way to build bridges between cultures, a goal of the American Sephardi Federation (ASF), which sponsored the festival.

As many Ashkenazi Jews (myself included) are just beginning to trace our ancestors’ exile from the land of Israel — feeling zero connection to our grandparents’ birthplaces (in my case, Russia) — many Sephardim feel a deep desire to connect with the cultures of their families’ past.

“In Search of Ladino” (1981) explores the songs and memories of Ladino-speaking Holocaust survivors in Israel. Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish, upheld the culture of many Sephardic Jews for generations. The film festival in general offers a panoply of languages—Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French, German, Arabic—cultures, and music, as well as aspects of Judean history that are not well known, like the fact that 46,000 Greek Jews were sent to concentration camps.

Amir Arison, who stars in NBC’s “The Blacklist,” is one of six winners of this year’s ASF Pomegranate Achievement Award. “What unites us is that we’re one people of survivors for millennia,” Arison said at the award ceremony. “I’m honored to be part of a tribe that has survived. I know I am up here because I stand on the shoulders of my great-grandparents. The fact that I have the freedom to pursue a life in the arts is not lost on me.”

It is precisely this pride in being Jewish — in understanding what it means to be part of a people that was forced into exile from our homeland — that makes the Safra Center so special. You can’t replace that pride with other people’s pride; that pride needs to be nourished, and it’s something the Sephardic world has mastered.

Perhaps before we can begin to truly heal the world, we first need to heal our own souls. We’re never going to be able to do that fully; we’ve been through too much. But understanding that Judeans embody a beautiful, complex mosaic — that precisely what has led to hatred and persecution is also our greatest strength; that assimilation and conformity erodes our souls — is a lesson that is needed now more than ever.

The Sephardic Film Festival shows the power of film to help that process. “Art is our one true global language,” said Caroline Aaron, who plays Shirley Maisel in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” upon accepting her ASF Pomegranate Award for Lifetime Achievement on Stage & Screen. “It knows no nation, favors no race, and acknowledges no class. It speaks to our need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what world is possible.”

I watched the final film on the day of the Tel Aviv terrorist attack. Perhaps the greatest lesson we can teach is that creativity and innovation will always transcend hate. And that only light can inspire the vision to create.

Karen Lehrman Bloch is editor in chief of White Rose Magazine.