Sefardi Jewish culture boasts beautiful music, delicious food, and a fascinating language, Judeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino). Unfortunately, in the US, mainstream Jewish communities often erase Sefardi culture. Many Ashkenazi American Jews are unaware of and uninformed about Sefardi culture–and because of a lack of resources, some American Sefardi Jews struggle to learn about and practice their own traditions.
In spring 2024, Sefardi Jews Naomi Spector and Yinnon Sanders took matters into their own hands. Without any institutional support or funding, they started a ragtag club dedicated to Sefardi culture and language in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Muestro Lashon (“our language,” a name for Judeo-Spanish). The club welcomes other Sefardi Jews and those (such as myself) who are not Sefardi but interested in learning more about the culture.
Muestro Lashon has hosted monthly meetings for over a year now and hosted a Sefardi Shabbat dinner and Chanukah party. We’ve studied Sefardi folk rituals and sang songs in Judeo-Spanish.
Now, having just received a microgrant from the American Ladino League, the club exemplifies both an increased interest in Sefardi culture and the power of grassroots, lay-led Jewish communities.
The club co-leader, Naomi Spector, is an ethnoherbalist, plant historian, and Spanish teacher whose practice draws on Sefardi, Ashkenazi, and Mediterranean plant traditions. For Lilith, I spoke to her about her Jewish journey and her experience leading our unique new club.
SB: Can you tell us about your family’s Jewish story?
NS: I am half Sefardi, on my mom’s side, and half Ashkenazi, on my dad’s. My dad’s family came to the U.S. from Poland and Ukraine. My mother’s side of the family were likely Sefardi Jews who converted to Christianity in order to be able to stay in their homes after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. While we do not have much evidence, there are some signs that point to this history, a history we share with many descendants of Jews from Spain: for example, my mother’s surname is Fraile, which means “friar” in Spanish. This was a common name taken on by Sefardim who converted to Christianity. Jews who converted in order to remain in Spain were under tremendous pressure to show society that they had become true and pious Christians, as were their descendants. Many converts and even the generations that came after them were believed to be practicing Judaism in secret and were investigated, tortured, and killed at the hands of the Inquisition. Some Sefardim took on ultra-Catholic names such as Fraile to try to blend in and fly under the radar. My family eventually assimilated and now they are Catholic, and my mother was the first generation of our family to return to Judaism, converting in her youth so that she could raise me as a Jew.
SB: What did your Jewish upbringing look like?
NS: I grew up pretty secular. Like many American Jews of his generation, my dad was pretty disinterested in religion and disengaged from communal Jewish life during my childhood. He and I did have a tradition, though, of reading a little bit of Torah together (in English) on Saturday mornings, which was very special. Hanukkah was the holiday we always celebrated at home each year, and my mom incorporated Sefardi culture into our Hanukkah celebrations: she learned how to make Sefardi-style cauliflower fritters, for example, and we sang Sefardi songs like “Ocho Kandelikas.”
SB: How did Muestro Lashon, the Sefardi language and culture club of Cambridge, Massachusetts come to be?
NS: I was starting to study Judezmo, or Judeo-Spanish, the language of the Jews of Spain, a little bit on my own simply because I was trying to decode traditional Sefardi folk remedies and translate them into English. I was also starting to realize that there are many Sefardi folk songs about plants, and that studying folk music is a powerful way to learn about Jewish relationships to plants and to traditional foods. I started thinking about how much more I could learn if I was doing this in community instead of by myself, and I knew that my friend Yinnon had hosted a Sefardi song circle recently in the Boston area…I reached out to him and soon discovered that we shared an interest in being part of a community focused on Sefardi culture, language and history. We decided to create that community together.
SB: What are some of your favorite memories you’ve made in the club so far?
NS: It’s hard to choose, because the club has brought me so much joy, so much learning, and so many memories that I treasure. I have really loved singing Sefardi songs together. I have found it really healing to learn the music of my ancestors and to sing these special songs in community and share them with my people.
A highlight for me was our first Sefardi Hanukkah party. We ate delicious homemade bimuelos and sang Sefardi Hanukkah songs, which brought back memories of Hanukkah celebrations in my childhood, which, as I’ve written above, were my first experiences with Sefardi culture.
SB: How did you first learn about Jewish plant and herb traditions?
NS: I’ve always loved plants, and my great-aunt Gloria introduced me to herbalism as a young child. Whenever I had a cold, for example, she would prepare a eucalyptus steam for me: I would feel instant relief. Some years ago, I was going through a difficult period and a stress-related health crisis in my personal life, partly because I am a classroom teacher. I started brewing herbal teas and learning about simple plant remedies and making my own, and I realized that I was feeling a lot better. As I started learning more about herbalism, however, I was becoming increasingly critical of the entire approach to plant healing that Western herbalism represents. The herbalism books I was studying were written from a perspective that took plant traditions and healing practices completely out of their cultural context.
I became very interested in learning about how my Jewish ancestors healed themselves with plants, especially when they could not access formal healthcare. I began to ask questions like: what remedies did people make in their homes? What stories did they tell about plants, what songs did they sing about them? What, if anything, does the Torah say about these plants? Or the Talmud?
Learning about how our ancestors interacted with plants can help us connect to our earth-based traditions and begin to heal our fractured, colonized relationship to the earth itself. I believe that all people, no matter their background, can benefit from learning about the plant traditions of their ancestors, especially in this time of devastating climate change. So many of us have become convinced that the earth is here for us to exploit, that it is essentially a tool box for us to use. According to Jewish tradition, the opposite is true: people are meant to be guardians of the Earth, or Shomrei Adamah.
The more I learned, the more urgent it felt to recover and pass down the folk medicine, healing traditions, and plant teachings of ordinary Jews in their homes.
SB: Tell me about the work you’ve done as a Jewish educator.
NS: I wrote my first Jewish herbalism book, The Jewish Book of Flowers, an interdisciplinary guide to ancestral Jewish relationships to flowers and the healing properties of herbs in 2023. In the past few years, I have also started teaching Jewish herbalism classes both online and in person—at synagogues and various Jewish community spaces, at conferences and retreats. It brings me joy to share my research with my people, as there are so many barriers to accessing this knowledge. I want to shout out the amazing leaders of the Jewish Farmer Network, who invited me time and time again to teach in their community and encouraged me so much in this work when I was first starting to do it; I feel that they have cultivated me as a Jewish herbalist.
I have also been teaching Sefardi folk songs. Last summer, I had the privilege to teach my first class on Sefardi folk music at Let My People Sing (LMPS), which is a summer retreat centered on Jewish communal singing for healing and liberation. The LMPS team has inspired me and have helped me develop my skills as a song leader.
SB: What advice do you have for Sefardi Jews in the US looking to connect to their culture?
NS: Don’t wait for someone else to create the community you want! You don’t need to be an expert to lead a group or start creating a community. If you get some Sefardim together, knowledge, wisdom and questions will naturally emerge from that gathering; many of us have grown up isolated from other Sefardi Jews and have never been in the same room as other Sefardim outside of our immediate family. I cannot overstate how powerful it is just to get us together in the same space so we can meet each other, communicate, and start to build together. Judeo-Spanish speaking groups and language learning groups are popping up on Zoom, and different clubs are being formed in person across many regions of this continent. Let’s grow this movement!
Sarah Biskowitz manages the Rising Voices Fellowship at the Jewish Women’s Archive and teaches Yiddish at the Boston Workers Circle and Lehrhaus.
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