Benoliel Brothers - Life After Costco

Heat. Heat. [Music] after I retired, the two years after I retired uh from working at Costco, uh lo and behold, the governor contacted me and said he had an opening on the board of regents. He heard that I would be interested. And so, uh, it began a six-year term serving on the board of regents at the University of Washington. Now, um, it's a big university with three campuses and, uh, 50,000 people. Um but I had a peculiar interest within the university and that was the creation for the first time of a sphartic studies program. Wow. At the university level, there was a young man, very talented, brilliant young man by the name of Devon Nar, N A R, uh, who was just finishing up his PhD at Stanford, uh, with an interest in sphartic history and sphartic uh, culture. and the University of Washington Jewish studies program hired him to come in and lead the for the first time a Sphartic studies program. This is about 10 years ago. Now we uh I became one of his founding circle. Uh we've developed that into the premier university-based sphartic studies program in America. And what we discovered was very interesting. Devon of course is a generation younger than I am. So when I talk about our grandfather coming from the Ottoman Empire to Seattle, his great-grandfather was Rabbi Nar who was hired out of Salonica to come to New Jersey. And what we further discovered is that they came the same year. It was 1924. 24. Yeah. What we further discovered is that they left on two different ships the same day. Look at that. Manifests are available. This man is a historian. He decided to research it. He came up with both ships manifests and he showed that Rivar and Ri both left their respective parts of the Ottoman Empire coming to serve as rabbis in communities in in the United States on the very same day in August of 1924. That is wild. That is wild. So, I became very devoted to uh uh to that program. I'm very proud of what we've accomplished there. One of the things that we did there was to collect um writings, books, anything uh in the Latino language, particularly written in the Latino script in soloto which I don't know how to read. It's been lost. But this young man, Professor Deon Nar, while in college, taught himself to read and write in solo so that he could understand the writings that he had in a family uh family scrapbook with with letters from uh from the old country. and he was interested and so we have collected one of the largest digital libraries in the world now of Latino writing and that that was all done in the last decade uh at the University of Washington. In addition to that, with uh a cousin of mine by the name of Albert Mman uh and two other individuals, uh we formed a new organization, a new nonprofit in the city of Seattle called Seattle Sphartic Network. Our vision was this is more than 10 years ago as well that um that there were many people were interested in sphartic learning in sphartic culture and sphartic cooking and sphartic stories uh in the Latino language um who were not necessarily connected anymore through the synagogues. It used to be that the Spartic Synagogue was the cultural center as well as the religious center, but there was a broader community that I thought we were missing. And uh we created this network to partner with uh other institutions and create uh events and learning opportunities and u uh ways of preserving and promoting Sphartic history and culture. It's been a tremendous success. uh I've now retired from that board but uh it's ongoing and it has lots of uh lots of success. And the third thing that I did uh in partnership with my cousin uh another cousin Azus who was the hassan ameritus at at uh at the congregation is rabbis. We formed uh the Sphartic Traditions Foundation which became starting in the year 2000. So now 25 years the publisher of uh prayer books uh Makarim which captured the Minagim that our families brought with them from the old country. Uh for a long time we had a problem that the sphartic books that were available for our synagogues did not exactly reflect our main and there were important differences. And so if you were um holding the dissol sphartic uh uh prayer book and uh which was chosen because it had a beautiful English translation, you would get lost because the hazan was was going according to what they brought from teira or from roads but it wasn't in that order or something was left out or something was added. So it was it was my cousin Ike's dream that someday uh we would publish our own books which thank God uh through his work and my help and support uh we've been able to do it. So those are three uh sphartic oriented activities uh some at the university some in the broader community and some in the synagogues that we've done. I'm proud to say that uh the the first book we published was the daily and sabbath. Uh that was named Zahud Ysef. It's a sid right? Yes. That that was named for our father Ysef and then the for the regalim uh amor zon Rafael her dear mother. Beautiful. So we have Zah and Zon and Ysef and Rafael. And then of course it goes on from there. We have five or six books there. Beautiful. Beautiful. They're in use uh all over the world. I uh I was invited to Johannesburg, South Africa to make a presentation uh to help uh the young people uh young professionals in in their Jewish community. And uh and I said that the Shabbat that I was there, I wanted to be in a sphartic synagogue. They arranged it for me. And when I walked in, there was a hookah. Our our book from Seattle must have made you feel great. Oh, it was unbelievable. And uh deep down and and all over the world.