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Friday, December 14, 1984 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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FOCUS
Sephardim changing
the society of Israel
BY CARL ALPERT
Special to The Jewish News
Haifa — The conflict is essen-
tially over. There will no doubt
still be occasional demonstrations
and even a few excitable confron-
tations, but what had once been
regarded as one of Israel's major
internal problems is in the process
of rapid solution. This is the social
and cultural gap which once sepa-
rated the Ashkenazi and Sephardi
communities in the population.
Israel is no utopia, and there
will perhaps always be an eco-
nomically depressed, culturally
underprivileged community, but
whereas in the first 30 years of
statehood these were hallmarks of
the North African immigrants,
the coming years will find the de-
pressed groups losing their
Sephardi coloration, and marked
only by common social, economic
and cultural characteristics with-
out reference to their countries of
origin or their backgrounds. They
will be the Israeli poor.
The changes now rapidly tak-
ing place in Israel society are sig-
nificant and on many levels. A
studied program of integration in
the country's public schools has
opened up new educational oppor-
tunities for those who previously
had seemed destined to be con-
fined to their castes. In the last
ten years, the percentage of stu-
dents of Asian or African origin in
Israel's universities has doubled,
and the annual trend is still rising
sharply.
Sephardim are to be found not
only in the student body, but also
in the ranks of the professors, the
deans and heads of departments.
The president of Tel Aviv Univer-
sity, Prof. Moshe Many, is a fifth
generation Sephardi in Israel of
mixed Iraqi and Georgian ances-
try.
Rafi Suissa, mayor of Mazkeret
Batya, told his colleagues, "We
hav nothing to be ashamed of any
longer. We are on the map." He
was addressing a meeting of 31
mayors of local towns, all of North
African origin. In his own town,
85 percent of the population are of
Russian birth, but Sephardi
Suissa was elected, even though
he does not speak Yiddish.
As we have pointed out on other
occasions, 32 members of the pre-
sent Knesset are Sephardim,
against 27 in the previous and 22
in the one before. They're on the
march.
More and more of the country's
leading personalities come from
Sephardi ranks. Chief of Staff
General Moshe Levy is the son of a
poor immigrant from Iraq. One of
the country's leading nuclear sci-
entists, Prof. Shimon Yiftach, is of
Yemenite origin. Speaker of the
_Knesset Shlomo Hillel was born
in Bagdad. Moroccan-born David
Levy is a prominent contender for
leadership of the Likud party. Av-
raham Turgeman, police commis-
sioner of Tel Aviv, is from
Morocco. Half-a-dozen directors-
general of government ministries
are Sephardim. Veteran among
them is Eliezer Shmueli, born in
Greece.
Yisrael Kessar, secretary-
general of the Histadrut, holding
a position more influential than
that of most government minis-
ters, was born in Yemen.
The Recanatis, pure Sephardim
from Greece, are prominent ban-
kers. Bino Zadik, director of the
First International, Israel's fas-
test growing bank, came from
Iraq, as did Shlomo Eliyahu, a
leading figure in insurance.
Elscint, one of the country's mira-
cle high technology industries, is
headed by Avraham Suhami, a
native of Turkey. Israel's leading
heart surgeon, Dr. Morris Levi,
comes from Bulgaria. The list can
be extended considerably.
The trend will continue, and
will be even more evident in fu-
ture elections and until the next
generation, when the differences
between Ashkenazim and
Sephardim will be increasingly
blurred as a result of mixed mar-
riage.
Israel has come a long way since
the days of the Moroccan mass
immigration of the early 1950s,
when the seeds were sown for
communal antagonisms. One
writer, Shlomo Abbayou, granted
that not all authorities were born
evil and that some did indeed dis-
play brotherly love to the be-
wildered new immigrants from
North Africa. He wrote, however,
that those can not offset "the se-
vere, pofound, stinging and
humiliating insult meted out by a
larger number of functionaries
whose hearts had room neither for
love nor any concern for us. These
tipped the scales."
The criticism may be exagger-
ated, and certainly does not take
into consideration the enormous
problems of absorbing the new
immigrants, but the important
thing is the way the immigrants
felt.
Only now is Israel beginning to
recover from the errors of those
days, errors which have had their
effect on the entire complex of the
country's social and political life.
The Sephardim are asserting
themselves by ability and by
sheer weight of numbers. Their
descendants will be Israelis all.
NEWS
Biased remark
draws criticism
New York — The Florida chap-
ter of the American Jewish Con-
gress has adopted a resolution
condemning the election-night
remarks of a state Republican
leader concerning the black com-
munity in Washington, D.C.
During an interview on a local
television station, Orange County
Republican Party Chair-man
Charles Curtis said the nation's
capital should be renamed Her-
shey, because it is "80 percent
chocolate and 20 percent nuts."
Curtis offered the disparaging
comment in response to a question
about Walter Mondale's sizeable
vote majority in Washington.