The Sephardim of Seattle

Sept. 13 2023

On the eve of World War I, roughly one third of Seattle’s Jews were Sephardim, making the city a rarity in the U.S., where by this time the overwhelming majority of Jews were Ashkenazi. Most of these Jews had come from modern-day Turkey and the Greek island of Rhodes, both of which were then part of the Ottoman empire. Judy Lash Balint describes the community’s history:

They left their close-knit Jewish communities on the shores of Turkey’s Sea of Marmara and the island of Rhodes as political instability engulfed the crumbling Ottoman empire—to avoid conscription and to strive for a brighter economic future. Seattle’s fishing industry and the Puget Sound reminded the young Jews of the waterfront towns they had left behind, and Jacob Policar and Solomon Calvo had heard about Seattle from a traveler who returned to Marmara. They were the first Sephardi Jews who arrived in Seattle in 1902.

[T]he old Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation building on 19th Avenue and East Fir Street, last June, . . . was recognized by Seattle’s Landmarks Preservation Board as a protected historical landmark. The imposing brick building, constructed in 1929, still contains the original synagogue’s wooden entry doors decorated with Stars of David. The building application for landmark status notes that detailing on stone arches evokes the architecture of Hagia Sophia, the renowned Turkish Byzantine church, which is now a mosque. That flourish in the Seattle building is “suggestive of the Turkish heritage of the building’s original congregants,” per the application.

In the 1960s, most of the Jews left the area for the more suburban Seward Park neighborhood. The synagogue building is now occupied by a church.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: American Jewish History, Seattle, Sephardim, Synagogues

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023