Collage: Dignity , beauty, strength
(Art work on this blog is copyrighted.)
While many of us are aware that Sephardic Jews, fleeing the Inquisition, found safety for hundreds of years under the Ottoman Empire and in North Africa, outside the reach of Christian Europe and the Catholic Inquistion, we tend to be less far less aware of what happened that left our culture without the bulk of its Ladino speakers (and writers and publishers).
It is a necessary story. Without it, we and especially our children will never fully understand who we are as Sephardics. What happened to our language is tied up in where those Ladino speakers went.
I invite all of you to watch this video. It is about us. As you watch, realize that the people in it – our family – spoke Ladino, read it in many forms, published richly in it, made jokes and laughed in it, loved each other using it, and spoke farewells with it.
ladino presiozo 