Sephardi Stories, on the Record
“Sometimes I still have nightmares,” says Juliette Glaser to her interviewer, as she sits in front of a video camera in her Miami living room, recalling in a confident voice her childhood memories from Cairo—where she was born in 1941 and which she fled 15 years later. “They were putting the city on fire during the revolution of 1952. They were getting rid of King Farouk. The city was black, and there was fire everywhere. I remember Egyptians walking in the streets, holding big knives, saying, ‘We’re going to kill the Jews, where are the Jews? Any Jews around here?’ And we would hide in the basement, turn all the lights off, just shivering, shaking of fear.”
The anti-Jewish policies continued to get worse in Egypt, and in the wake of the Sinai Campaign in 1956, her father, like many other Jews, was given 48 hours to leave the country. With only one suitcase for each family member, Glaser, her parents, and her three siblings left for France and later the United States.
Glaser’s recorded testimony is part of Sephardi Voices, an audio-visual history project currently under way to document and archive the testimonies of Jews displaced from North Africa and the Middle East in the 20th century. Started in 2009, the project is modeled after Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which has recorded the oral histories of tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors. With branches in Los Angeles, Miami, London, Paris, Jerusalem, and New York, Sephardi Voices has already collected 250 testimonies and is aiming to gather 5,000 in the next five years.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/130482/sephardic-stories-on-the-record?all=1