<div dir="ltr"><div class=""><img src="http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march14/images/salomon.jpg" alt="Salomon and Esther Naar" border="0" width="686"><div class=""><p>Salomon,
Devin Naar’s great uncle, and his wife Esther perished in Auschwitz
along with their two children, Benjamin and Rachel. They were captured
in Salonica by the Nazis. This is the only photo of Salomon and Esther
that survived.</p></div></div>
<div class="">The Lost Branch</div>
<div class="">Reviving a language on the brink of extinction</div>
<div class="">By Lily Katz</div>
<p>It was not until his great uncle handed him a stack of old letters,
12 years ago, that Devin Naar, now an assistant history professor at UW,
was able to begin filling in the gaps of his family’s history. Naar had
known since he was a boy that he had relatives living in Greece during
World War II. What he did not know was the fate that befell them.</p>
<p>His uncle’s letters proved to be the key to unlocking the mystery of
this lost branch of his family’s past, but they were written in Ladino,
the centuries-old Judeo-Spanish language of the Sephardic Jews. “It was
in deciphering those letters that I was able to really get a picture of
what happened to the Jewish community of Salonica [Greece] during the
war and the murder of my relatives during the Holocaust,” says Naar, who
holds the UW’s Marsha & Jay Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies housed
in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.</p>
<p>Inspired by his discovery, the professor is now leading a project
dedicated to keeping the Sephardic language and culture alive. Ladino
was originally spoken by the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. When they
migrated elsewhere, especially to what was then the Ottoman Empire, the
language became a rich mixture of antiquated Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic,
Turkish, Greek and other languages. As most Ladino-speaking Jews
assimilated into other cultures or perished during the Holocaust, Ladino
nearly died out.</p>
<div class="" style="width:200px"><img src="http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march14/images/ladino_meam.jpg" alt="Meam Loez" border="0" width="200"><div class=""><p>Cover or <em>Meam Loez</em>,
published in Salonica, 1826. A key work of Ladino literature, this was
one of the only books from Rabbi Naar’s library that survived, and was
on of the first Ladino books Devin Naar ever saw.</p></div></div>Growing
up, Naar didn’t know much about the language, or just how endangered it
is. Born and raised in New Jersey, he had picked up a few Ladino words
from his grandfather, but was nowhere near fluent. But when he got hold
of the family letters, he became fixed on decoding them. While his
friends at Washington University in St. Louis would spend their Saturday
nights going to parties, Naar would spend his teaching himself Ladino—a
challenging task. When written, Ladino looks like Hebrew; when spoken,
it sounds like Spanish. For example, the Spanish word for god is “dios,”
while the Ladino word (spelled with Hebrew characters) is pronounced
“dio,” an homage to monotheism.
<p>After college, Naar spent a year in Salonica—the picturesque seaport
city from which many of the mysterious letters had come—as a Fulbright
Scholar, studying the city’s history and immersing himself in the
languages, culture and hometown of his relatives. Following his travels,
he received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University in 2011.
Under the tutelage of Aron Rodrigue—one of the few scholars of the
Sephardic world—Naar won an award for his dissertation on the Jewish
community of Salonica.</p>
<p>In the beginning, Naar could only make out the dates on the letters.
But as he learned more Ladino, he was able to put them together piece by
piece. Written between 1938 and 1950, many of the letters were
correspondence between Naar’s relatives who had immigrated to the United
States in 1924 and those who had remained in Salonica.
The correspondence starts cheerfully, recounting the children’s piano
and violin lessons, and one cousin’s preparation for his bar mitzvah.
But as the clouds of World War II gathered, the letters took on a more
ominous tone. Ultimately, they weave together the tragic story of Naar’s
relatives who had remained in Greece and were unable to obtain visas
out of the country. Those written after the war by a family friend
divulge the fate of the cousin who had been preparing for his bar
mitzvah; he was sent to the gas chambers instead. The letters depict the
dramatic final meeting between Naar’s cousin and great uncle at
Auschwitz before they were both executed. They reveal that Naar’s
relatives had been in one of the last convoys sent from Salonica to the
Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. The only reason they survived that
long is because of his great-uncle’s job distributing food to the sick
and elderly as they boarded earlier trains that transported most of
Salonica’s Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers. Before the 1940s,
Salonica was home to about 60,000 Ladino-speaking Jews, comprising
nearly half of the city’s population. But with the onset of the war,
some escaped to other countries, and 50,000 perished in Auschwitz. Only
about 1,000 Jews remain in Salonica today.</p>
<p>“It was a real revelation. I couldn’t stop there,” says Naar. “I now
have some precious knowledge about my relatives but that’s just one
family of this entire world that, over the course of a few months,
disappeared. Seventy years later, that world continues to be almost
invisible.”</p>
<div class="" style="width:200px"><img src="http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march14/images/ladino_cigar.jpg" alt="cigar ad" border="0" width="200"><div class=""><p>An ad for cigarettes made by the Turco American tobacco company from Devin Naar’s collection of Ladino artifacts.</p>
</div></div>After
patching together his own family’s history, Naar was determined to help
other Sephardic Jews do the same. In 2012, he launched Seattle
Sephardic Treasures, part of the larger UW Sephardic Studies Program
coordinated by the professor to preserve Sephardic traditions and
culture.
<p>The project is an archive of old Ladino books and documents that have
been unearthed from basements and bookshelves from families in Seattle
as well as others across the country. While it is still a work in
progress, Naar has already collected more than 600 books with the help
of local community members, students and faculty. The online database
will contain everything from religious texts and diaries to newspapers
and wedding invitations.</p>
<p>Joel Benoliel, ’67, ’71, a member of the UW’s Sephardic Studies
Committee and Costco’s senior vice president and chief legal officer,
calls Naar a valuable asset and a liaison between the University and
local Sephardic community. “I’ve been a resident of the Seattle area all
my life, and Devin’s work is the most exciting thing in my 50 years of
being connected with the University,” he says.</p>
<p>The project took off when Naar moved to Seattle to teach at the UW in
2011. Uniquely, Seattle is home to a substantial population of
Sephardic Jews, and the city has two Sephardic synagogues. Just a
fraction (about 5 percent) of Jews who immigrated to the U.S. between
the 1880s and the 1920s were Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews, many of
whom chose Seattle as their final destination to take advantage of the
city’s coastal industries.</p>
<p>From the first fish vendors at Pike Place Market to the patrons of
Benaroya Hall, Sephardic Jews have made a significant imprint on
Seattle, which Naar calls a microcosm of the Sephardic-American world.</p>
<p>“When I arrived, people started bringing me Ladino books and letters
that they couldn’t read themselves,” he says. “Then they started
bringing me more things—a stack of documents here, a pile of books
there.”</p>
<p>Inspired by the community’s interest, Naar made an explicit call for
Ladino documents. The response was overwhelming. Seattle Sephardic
Treasures has now collected more Ladino books than are housed in the
Library of Congress or Harvard University. Eventually, Naar hopes to
upload audio recordings—some of which are more than 70 years old—to
provide students, scholars and community members with an online resource
for learning Ladino.</p>
<p>The project has three target audiences: university students, scholars
and the community. “One of the really exciting things about the
Sephardic Studies Program is that, at the university level, it can bring
together many different programs and disciplines,” says Naar.</p>
<p>Al Maimon, a member of the UW’s Sephardic Studies Committee and a
former professor at the Foster School of Business, says it was thrilling
to meet someone so young who is concerned about preserving the culture.
He calls Naar his kindred spirit.</p>
<p>“Before Devin came to town, the Sephardic studies dimension of the
program was ad hoc,” says Maimon, who has contributed several heirlooms
to the project. “When he arrived, that fundamentally changed. In
Seattle, we have a living, breathing expression of Sephardic tradition.
We’re custodians of a treasure. This isn’t just for us; it’s for the
whole fabric of the Jewish community.”</p>
<p>Maimon believes that today’s Seattle Sephardic community is
unprecedented. “There are few Sephardic communities that are as active,
from a social, cultural and religious point of view,” he says. The
challenge, he adds, is to reassimilate the traditions so families can
pass them on to future generations.</p>
<p>“Saving a language is saving a culture,” says Wendy Marcus, ’76,
music director at Seattle’s Temple Beth Am, a large reform temple in
North Seattle. “At the rate we’re losing languages today, it’s nothing
short of a mission on Devin’s part, and I applaud that mission.”</p>
<p>With the support and funding of the community, Naar has been able to
do much more than collect dusty books. He has brought Sephardic
musicians, photographers and guest speakers to the UW’s new Stroum
Center for Jewish Studies, which, under the leadership of Professor Noam
Pianko, is home to the Sephardic Studies Program. Naar has also
organized a symposium with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, D.C. More than 1,600 students, faculty and community
members have attended these events since last year.</p>
<p>Joel Benoliel, and his wife, Maureen, ’74, are part of the Sephardic
Studies Program Founders Circle—a group of families that has committed
to supporting the Stroum Center—and helped provide the seed money for
the program along with Lela and Harley Franco, ’74. “With funds being
cut from everywhere in the University, we need to make sure we can
continue funding our programs that are so fabulous,” says Lela Franco,
chair of the Sephardic Studies Committee. In addition to the Benoliels
and Francos, the other members of the Founders Circle are The Isaac
Alhadeff Foundation, Eli and Rebecca Almo, and Richard and Barrie
Galanti.</p>
<p>“The people who have contributed to this project have made it
possible; that’s the bottom line,” says Naar. “Without the support,
enthusiasm and interest of our local community, Sephardic Studies would
not be an initiative.”</p>
<p>The ultimate goal, he adds, is for the UW to become the nation’s
center for Sephardic studies—a model for communities around the country.
“I think it’s an important time to think about the future of Sephardic
life, both in Seattle and in the United States,” Naar says. “The last
generation of native Ladino speakers is on the way out, and a very rich
and treasured past is slipping further and further into the distance.”</p>
<p><em>—Lily Katz is a junior studying journalism and in the Law, Societies and Justice program at the UW.</em></p><a href="http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns-magazine/march-2014/features/ladino/">http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns-magazine/march-2014/features/ladino/</a><br clear="all">
<br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br>
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