San Francisco, CA – With two upcoming evenings of cooking, singing and celebrating, JIMENA, San Francisco Moishe House and the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco are bringing young adults together to learn and experience North African Jewish history and culture.

JCFSF Director of Women’s Philanthropy, Corrine Levy, will guide the group through a cooking lesson, preparing cuisines of her Moroccan heritage. The food will be served the following evening at a lively Kabbalat Shabbat. Along with dinner, participants are invited to celebrate with henna painting, traditional North African costumes, and Sephardic music.

After a warmly-received series at East Bay Chabad, which included an Iraqi-Indian Jewish cooking lesson led by Pearl Sofaer and a talk at Shabbat dinner by former Iraqi refugee Joseph Shamash, JIMENA is excited tp bring the program to San Francisco. This summer’s events will serve as the kick-off to a year full of Sephardic Cultural programming from JIMENA, made possible by the Jewish Community Federation’s Young Funders Impact Grants Initiative (IGI), which supports innovative approaches to young adult Jewish engagement. Thanks to the support of a generous IGI grant, the Bay Area Young Adult Jewish community can look forward to many more Sephardic & Mizrahi themed Shabbat programs, exhibits, movie screenings, lectures, holiday celebrations and more.

Since 2001, JIMENA has sought universal recognition of the Mizrahi refugee experience and heritage in order to create balance in attitudes, negotiations, narratives and discourse about Middle Eastern refugees and the contemporary Jewish experience.  Through community offerings such as this event series, JIMENA aims to expose the wider Bay Area Jewish community to Mizrahi voices and heritage, while activating the involvement of Mizrahim in mainstream Jewish life.

 

For further information or to RSVP please contact:
Dyanna Loeb, JIMENA Community Relations Manager
Tel: (415) 626-5062
Cell: (510) 206-7420
dyanna@jimena.org

This program is generously supported by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco