Benoliel Brothers - Family History

Heat. Heat. [Music] Everybody wants to know about the Benal family background, about your parents, your grandparents, how you got to this country, how they got to this country, the siblings in your family and such. So, Rabbi, if you can give us uh a flavor and some color on your mom and dad, your grandparents, and make us understand what it was like growing up in the Benal family back years ago. Okay. Sure. Thank you, Harry. We'll begin with u with my mother's side of the family. My mother is Mimmon and her father was Kaham Abraham Mayon who was originally the Kaham in Tehag, Turkey. And um in 1924 uh the uh original the small sphartic community in Seattle um proposed to him and offered him to come to Seattle to come to United States to be the Kakam in Seattle. And uh he was uh very positive uh to accept the uh the offer mainly because as I understand uh his sons were teenagers and would be u of the draft age and that would be just a calamity to be drafted into the Turkish army. So u in 1924 the family uh came over um to uh Seattle Washington. Uh my mother at that time was 9 years old and um she has many stories about the the coming over to uh to Seattle. But in in in brief and just as aside uh she used to reminisce that uh teardag the home uh home homeland the home city was beautiful a beautiful city on the u on the water and um I heard from her or from others that the shul the betet and teardag was literally on the water. In other words, uh you could hear the lapping of the of the water under under the boards the boards of the floor of the of the shul. And many years later, I heard from a cousin that he read in one of the books of uh of of that water is conducive to prayer and he says like the shul in te where the shul was built on the water. So that was amazing. But anyway, they came to Seattle and um my uh my grandfather I was not zed to know him. He passed away uh only a few years after that. And um so we go to my father. My father shalom was born in Manchester, England. And uh that's a different branch of safaradim. So the safadim of of the Balkan states of Turkey, Latino speaking and there are the uh the Safhadim of England originally from Gibralar and Morocco u but they were also Spanish speaking and uh he came over as a young man uh through Canada and um he was uh told it's a little story maybe won't get into details there of how he came to Seattle but he was informed by the rabbi by in Vancouver that there was a sphartic community in Seattle and um he came to Seattle and met my mother and they were married in 1936. Uh first on my mother's side um when Ri Abraham and his uh and his wife came uh over from Turkey u they brought with them initially uh six of their eight children um five boys and uh and our mother. The two oldest uh were the two uh firstborn sisters. They were too old to come under the family passport. So they had to wait and uh they came in later through Canada and it was a long story of how all that uh worked out. Um so my mother had um had five brothers and two sisters as we were uh children growing up in Seattle. uh all but one of those eight siblings uh one who unfortunately uh for health reasons had to to move to a different uh a different environment. Uh they they were all uh married and raising families in in the neighborhood surrounding uh uh basically within uh walking distance to the sphartic people. So as we were children growing up, we were surrounded by uh aunts and uncles, cousins. Um I didn't count the cousins, but certainly more than 20. Uh interestingly enough, uh many more boys than girls. Uh just as an example, among the three sisters, my mother and her two sisters, there were 11 boys and and two girls. So, uh, we were all very, very close, tight-knit, uh, growing up in a in a the comfort of, uh, of that surroundings. I just want to embellish a little bit on the Benal side of the story. uh coming from a very well-known successful and prominent Benolio family in Morocco. They were from uh Tettoan and Tenier and immigrated at some point to uh to Gibralar. In Gibralar, the chief rabbi Riitsk Levie um was my father's great-grandfather. uh the chief rabbi of Gibralar's daughter married our our his grandfather uh Mosheim Benabiel and they they were the ones who moved from uh from Gibralar to Manchester at that time Manchester was a a business hub because of the industrial revolution. all the merchants who were involved in in cotton and in wool and in uh in textiles um had to have representation where the mills were being developed in Manchester. So all throughout the Mediterranean you saw a tremendous outflow towards Manchester that included our our benal side of the family and um but the the origin was definitely Moroccan.