Rachel Wahba

Born	Bombay (now Mumbai), India, 1946
Heritage	Father from Mansoura, Egypt; mother from Baghdad, Iraq
Today	Writer and psychotherapist in the San Francisco Bay Area
Expertise	Mizrahi identity, exile and statelessness, Jewish diversity
Website	Visit website

Rachel Wahba was born in Bombay on March 19, 1946. Her father, Maurice, came from a family that had lived in Mansoura, Egypt, for centuries; her mother was from Baghdad. Her parents met in Iraq and left for India, where Rachel was born. After Indian independence, the family moved to Japan, and because her mother was stateless, it took a year of work with consulates and the Red Cross before they arrived in 1950.

Rachel grew up in Japan's small, close knit Jewish community. She faced pressure and ridicule at a missionary school, then found a welcoming home at a Protestant high school with other Jewish classmates. In 1964 her parents sent her to California. For years she felt distant from her Mizrahi heritage, until she saw how little Americans knew about Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.

Today Rachel is a psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco and Marin County, a writer, and a cofounder of Olivia Travel. Her essays have appeared in The Times of Israel, HuffPost, and The Jerusalem Post, and she has written about her mother's experience of the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad. She serves on JIMENA's advisory board and speaks about Jews as a multicultural, global people.