The sepharadic museum goals

OUR GOALS

The purpose of the foundation is to encourage Jewish diversity, and create a central place for the Sephardi and Eastern Mizrahi history and culture, which has been too long ignored on the general Jewish and public agenda.

The foundation will support the establishment and functioning of a Sephardi and Mizrahi Heritage Center and Museum in Jerusalem, Israel. This center will also sponsor an annual guest artist program to bring Israeli and diaspora Jews to the center for a year to produce original Sephardic and Eastern Jewish creations in the fields of art, music, film, dance, literature, drama, language, and poetry.

The center will provide permanent and temporary museum exhibits with artifacts and the latest technology, will host public programs and conferences, bring Israeli school children and youth for day experiences, organize language classes in Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, neo-Aramaic, Judeo-Italian, and other non-Ashkenazi Jewish languages, as well as serve as a home for the popular Israeli piyyut (religious poetry and liturgy) movement.

We will commit to provide Sephardi and Eastern Jewish traditional cuisine in all of its events, catering, public food provision; as well as educating to revive the breadth of particularistic Sephardic and Mizrahi culinary traditions.

In addition to this, the foundation will promote educational and cultural activities involving Jewish diversity in the United States in physically held activities and on line.

OUR PRINCIPLES

The foundation will not promote Jewish diversity as a sectoral project, but is devoted to showing the integral intertwining of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewry within Jewish peoplehood; as well as promoting cultural proliferation, creativity, production, and education.

FJD seeks to emphasize streams of religious tolerance, as well as diversity, within the Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions, and the ingathering of the Lost Tribes, crypto-Jews (marranos, anusim), and people of color seeking to reunite with or join the Jewish people.

The FJD will be committed to Zionist values and The State of Israel, enable full expression and voice for males and females, alike, and in mixed company, will honor all religious streams of the Jewish people, and will be committed to observing religious Sabbath and Jewish holiday observance in its public activities.

The FJD will honor Jewish rabbinic tradition, and Sephardi and Mizrahi rabbinic traditions in particular, while accommodating secular culture in its fullest sense, enabling religious pluralism and diversity, and maintaining all of its structures, bodies, and decisions in accordance to democratic principles and the law of respective countries.

The FJD is committed to heritage commemoration, education, and perpetuation, and will dedicate its activities to tolerance and acceptance, while striving to eradicate hate, discrimination, and intolerance. In the absence of proper inclusion throughout the world in the commemoration and education of the experience and annihilation of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry in the Holocaust/Shoa, the Sephardi and Mizrahi Heritage Center and Museum in Jerusalem, Israel, and the FJD in its activities will put an emphasis on the visual portrayal of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry in the Shoa, institute an educational program for it, and promote actively the interviewing of Sephardi and Mizrahi survivors in Israel and the diaspora who have never been interviewed and videotaped, nor giving a chance to tell their stories and life experiences.