Mission, History, and Values

How We Began

Two refugees, one shared concern

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Gina Bublil-Waldman, a former Jewish refugee from Tripoli, Libya, and Joseph Wahed z”l, a former Jewish refugee from Cairo, Egypt, came together around a shared concern. Public conversations about the Middle East were flattening a remarkably diverse region into simple narratives that erased Jews and other religious minorities from its history. At the same time, the American Jewish community was not adequately preserving or telling the stories of the nearly one million Jews who were forced out of or fled countries across the Middle East and North Africa in the twentieth century.

In 2002, after sharing their personal stories at a rally at San Francisco State University, Gina and Joseph recognized an urgent need for an organization that would let Jews from the Middle East and North Africa speak for themselves: to preserve their histories, pass on their cultures, and educate broader audiences, rather than have their identities and experiences interpreted by others. That year, with the support of many Bay Area Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, they founded JIMENA.

Milestones

From a volunteer speakers bureau to a national voice

More than two decades later, our founding principle remains unchanged. Our work ensures that Jews from the Middle East and North Africa are encountered in their full historical and human complexity, not reduced to political symbols, absorbed into someone else’s narrative, or asked to erase parts of themselves to fit today’s categories.

Where Our Voices Have Been Heard

Testimony at the highest levels

JIMENA speakers have testified before:

UN Human Rights CouncilU.S. CongressU.S. Department of StateCanadian ParliamentBritish House of LordsIsraeli Knesset

They have also brought personal testimony to more than 80 universities and hundreds of schools, synagogues, museums, and community institutions.

Why It Matters

A more complex Middle East, a more complete Jewish people

Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews complicate many of the categories through which the Middle East and Jewish identity are commonly understood. Their histories hold deep rootedness in the region alongside displacement from it; centuries of cultural exchange alongside periods of discrimination and persecution; Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, Babylonian, Kurdish, Amazigh, and other cultural influences alongside distinctly Jewish religious and communal traditions.

Their experiences challenge the binaries we often reach for:

These histories resist reduction because the people themselves resist reduction. That complexity is not incidental to our mission. It is one of the reasons our work matters.

At a moment when Jewish identity and Middle Eastern history are compressed into competing political narratives, JIMENA insists on something more demanding: historical honesty, human complexity, and the right of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews to define and pass on their own experiences.

JIMENA ultimately asks people to see more: not only a fuller history of the Middle East, but a fuller understanding of who the Jewish people are.