Tag: Sephardic Spice Girls

In the late 1960’s, when my grandparents emigrated from Israel to Australia, they lived in Hurstville. Their house was steps away from the Georges River in the quiet, idyllic Southern suburbs of Sydney. The only drawback was the distance. Hurstville was 15 miles away from Bondi and the Eastern suburbs, the center of Jewish life […]

Last year, after 30 years away from the land of his birth, Alan decided it was time to return. He decided that we would spend Passover in South Africa with his mother’s two sisters. My son, daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter were planning to be with her parents in Paris, so it would be the five […]

For many, many years, on Friday nights, my mother-in-law Becky would walk into our Los Angeles home carrying her yellow Dutch oven. The heavy pot was tightly wrapped in a towel and inside sat her red rice. She would look at Neil and say, with quiet pride, “El arroz salió uno por uno,” meaning the […]

Long before I light my candles,   the smoky scent of my Moroccan fish signals that Shabbat is coming. Like my mother and my grandmothers before me, I serve my family and friends this flavorful, saucy fish dish every Friday night. For Sephardic Jews, serving fish as the first course on Friday night is symbolic […]

Can you believe there are people who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving? I love Thanksgiving and I’ve been a fan since my family arrived here from Morocco in October 1973. My family had never heard of this holiday but we were thankful to leave an Arab country to live in a country where Jews were welcomed and […]