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Detroit's Sephardic community is struggling
to retain its heritage and customs.

111) avid Chicorel had
never tasted gefilte
fish. He'd never heard
of kreplach, and kugel
never sat on his Shab-
bat table.
Instead, the Chicorel
family dined on rice and beans on Friday
night. They ate fresh spinach pies, green
beans in tomato sauce, hot fried cheese and
green soup.
' And David never spent his evenings
sipping tea and telling jokes in Yiddish.
He didn't know a word of the language.
After dinner, David and his family liked
to sit on their porch and drink Turkish
coffee. Maybe friends from the neighbor-
hood would stop by and they would sing
songs of the old country — not Russia or
Poland but Turkey and Egypt and Spain.
As a Sephardic Jew, Mr. Chicorel has
always been in the minority in the Jewish
community of Detroit. But he and the
other several hundred Sephardic Jews,
whose parents came to the United States
from Islamic countries in the early part of
the century, always managed to keep up
their traditions and customs.
They also formed a central organiza-
tion, the Sephardic Community of
Greater Detroit, to which about 80
families belong. Started in 1917 by Mr.
Chicorel's parents, Jacob and Judith, the

28

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1990

group hosts High Holy Day services, a
Chanukah party and sponsors a Sunday
morning minyan.
Years ago, the Sephardic Community
also held social gatherings like Mediter-
ranean Night, featuring Greek dancers
and food and Sephardi Jews dressed in
traditional garb of their homeland. The
event attracted hundreds of Sephardi
and Ashkenazi Jews.
Things are different now. Younger
Sephardic Jews are only minimally inter-
ested in keeping up family traditions,
older Sephardim say. The younger Jews
have been educated at Ashkenazi day
schools, grown up at Ashkenazi syn-
agogues and temples, marry Ashkenazi
Jews and raise their own children in the
predominant Jewish culture —
Ashkenazi.
And the older generation — the men
and women who still hold the Pesach tray
above the heads of each seder guest, who
name their children after living relatives,
who give new sons blue marbles to ward
off the evil eye — is dying out. Now in their
50s and 60s, they tell bittersweet tales of
immigrant parents settling in the United
States, struggling both to find their place

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM

Assistant Editor

in a new country and a new Jewish
community.
This lack of interest among younger
Sephardim can mean only one thing, says
Mr. Chicorel, former president of the
Sephardic Community: the Sepharidic
Jewish community will slowly decrease,
until — perhaps in as soon as 50 years —
it will virtually disappear.
"Younger people aren't interested in
Sephardic customs," he says. "They don't
come to our services.
"Even my children could care less about
Sephardic culture. They're all
Ashkenazim now."

acob and Judith Chicorel were both
in their 20s when, in 1916, they emi-
grated from Turkey to the United
States. Jacob, a cantorial student at
the Talmud Ibrah in Ismir, Turkey, left the
country to escape army service. He and his
wife started out in Long Island, N.Y., then
settled in Detroit when Jacob discovered
his brother, Haim, lived here.

ii

"When he came to the United States, he
knew he had a brother here but he didn't
know where," says Jacob's daughter,
Shirley Behar, president of the Sephardic
Jewish Community. "So he put in ads for
Haim in papers across the country. Final-
ly, he found him."