Mission, Vision and Values

In the early 20th century one million Jews from nine Arab countries and Iran were forced to flee lands their ancestors lived in for over 2,500 years. UN House Resolution 242 stated that Jews fleeing Arab countries were ‘bona fide’ refugees, yet the international political community, the media, and North American academic, human rights, and mainstream Jewish institutions have continuously ignored the Mizrahi refugee experience. The culture and spiritual contributions of Mizrahi Jews has also been left out of mainstream Jewish communal life and consciousness in North America.

The marginalization of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews from mainstream American Jewish life has left American Jews with a narrow view of what Jewishness looks like, what countries it comes from, what traditions it follows, what languages it speaks, how it engages with other Middle Eastern communities, and how it experiences Israel.

More over, revisionist history of the Middle East excludes the fact that over half of Israel’s Jewish population live there not because European atrocities during World War II, but because of Anti-Semitic Arab governments who, under the color of law, dispossessed and displaced their native Jewish populations following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Adopted narratives of the Arab-Israeli conflict fail to address the fact that Israel was the largest refugee camp in the Middle East, providing safe haven to some 650,000 Middle Eastern and North African Jewish refugees whose ancestors had a continuous presence in the region for over 3,000 years.