Sephardic Heritage Museum - Promotional Video

about 18 years ago the community was losing the the touch to the old generation the elders had slowly passed on and joseph said felt the need that we must somehow capture that that history that we have to teach the next generation my dream is for us to stay together for hundreds of years until the mashiach comes and the key for us staying together is understanding our past and so the sephardic heritage museum was formed with the sole purpose of helping our community stay together into the generations to come we have a collection of over a thousand artifacts old sephirah torah that go back from spain we bring these artifacts to the schools into the synagogues people start becoming connected to them whether they go back to aleppo or goes back to damascus or items that go back to lebanon beirut israel turkey these artifacts tell a story and it reconnects our community to their past to their customs to them in our game we have 50 000 documents and 700 manuscripts they've put out 22 volumes of books from manuscript for the first time they go back 400 500 years never been printed from our community separately there's a team that studies them for genealogy all the names that are found in the documents and the manuscripts and we put them into a database separately the museum has a department called the documentary series department and from there we were able to produce seven documentaries of our community starting back from the history of aleppo the 3000 years of aleppo in damascus egypt lebanon beirut and spanning all the way to our community came to the united states it's an unbelievable story of immigrants building one of the most beautiful communities in the world so now that we have seven episodes i said you know we have all this information how can we really make it relevant to our children we developed shm learn all these parts of our community's history through the episodes have been expanded in a curriculum form the museum is very active in restoration we have a team on the ground in aleppo syria on a daily basis for almost six years we're restoring the great synagogue of aleppo we restored almost 2 000 graves in aleppo we don't just focus on whatever our community needs and to do whatever we can for our friends our brothers our neighbors but we have we have feelings for other jews around the world so the sephardic heritage museum went out of its way to save the jews of yemen the jews were in trouble the houthi rebels came in but the syrian community was there to save their lives and to bring them out and the same is true with ukraine it was the last sunday in february in 2022 when we got a call from ralph gindy giraffe gindy calls joe sit and he says we must do something for the jews in ukraine i immediately reached out to harry adjby and so launched the mission harry immediately called for an emergency community meeting to be held the next day in his office the whole purpose that we got involved was to help to move people from point a to point b point b being either moldova it could have been poland it was to get them out of the country they needed to get drivers they needed to get security guards and then they need to move these buses across different checkpoints and ultimately to the border one of the things that sits on me is the question that gets asked so many times why didn't the jews of the world mobilize during the holocaust i'm not a judge of that but i do want our generation our children our community members to say that when we saw the horrors of war and death happening in ukraine that we mobilized that we reached out that we did our part and baruch hashem so far we've saved over 23 000 jewish lives from that first monday on this conference table we got together we believed in each other we believed in the the the collections and the fundraising effort that we did the monies came pouring in a total of seven point six million dollars came in i have to really give credit where it's due to the leadership of harry agemi as well as mark ashby and ikey mastery the three of them really spearheaded so much my cousin harry god bless him is a great leader um and i'm very proud to be a part of it and there's more we can do and uh with the help of the museum we got a lot done i want to thank our core committee and the many volunteers who gave of their time le chem champ and all stepped up in a very big way you need strong leadership to do such a thing and i think that um harry was a very very big an integral role to ensuring that our community can pull something like this off i just want to give thanks to ralph gindy for the invitation for harry for joey sit um for initiating this on the front lines margalit so you should know if we don't make the right decision nobody is gonna do it rabbi david haber rabbi [Music] and most importantly of all rabbi sultan there's no man that i could describe that has ever done the things that rabbi sultan has done to save the lives of jews at least during my generation of god blessing and it's a privilege and an honor to be part of such a group that really worked le chem chemi and we should continue to do great things together as the community is known for thank you everybody from the bottom of my heart for trusting in us for being a part of this for throwing your hat in the ring to create what this ukraine rescue mission did under the auspices of the sephardic heritage museum our community's history is an amazing history goes back 3 000 years please be a partner with us in the community be a partner with us in the museum to be able to bring out this information that we should ensure that our children understand where they really come from you