Mission, History and Values

About JIMENA

JIMENA was born from a conviction that remains at the heart of our work today: Jews from the Middle East and North Africa must have the opportunity to tell their own stories, in their own voices, and on their own terms.

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 increasingly flattening a remarkably diverse region into simplistic 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 had been ethnically cleansed or fled from countries across the Middle East and North Africa in the 20th century.

In 2002, that realization crystallized at a rally at San Francisco State University. After sharing their personal stories at an on-campus rally, Gina and Joseph recognized an urgent need for an organization that would enable Jews from MENA lands to speak for themselves - to preserve their histories, transmit their cultures, and educate broader audiences rather than have their identities and experiences interpreted by others. That year, they co-founded JIMENA with the support and contributions of many San Francisco Bay Area Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews.

From 2002 to 2007, JIMENA operated as a volunteer speakers bureau, fiscally sponsored by JCRC San Francisco, building its work around the sharing the personal testimonies of former Jewish refugees on college campuses. In 2008, JIMENA moved towards independence and received 501(c)(3) status, laying the institutional foundation for the organization it has grown in to today. Shortly after, Gina Bublil-Waldman became the first former Jewish refugee from an Arab country to testify at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland

More than two decades later, the founding principle remains unchanged. JIMENA is first and foremost accountable to the people whose stories we carry. Our work ensures that Jews from MENA lands are encountered in their full historical and human complexity, not reduced to political symbols, assimilated into someone else’s narrative, or asked to erase parts of themselves to fit contemporary categories.

Since its founding, JIMENA speakers have testified before the UN Human Rights Council, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of State, the Canadian Parliament, the British House of Lords, and the Israeli Knesset, among others. They have brought personal testimony to more than 80 universities across North America and hundreds of community institutions. JIMENA also maintains research and archival partnerships with universities including NYU, Brandeis University, and Ben-Gurion University.

Today, JIMENA is the only organization in the United States dedicated to pursuing acknowledgment, redress, and full inclusion for Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa and their Mizrahi and Sephardic descendants through the interconnected work of empowerment, education, and advocacy.

This history matters far beyond the communities whose experiences JIMENA preserves. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews complicate many of the categories through which the Middle East and Jewish identity are commonly understood. Their experiences challenge binaries of East and West, indigenous and foreign, Arab and European, diaspora and homeland. They remind us that Jewish civilization is rooted and survived continuously in the Middle East for over 3,000 years and that the region itself was never religiously, ethnically, or culturally monolithic.

To understand Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews is therefore to encounter a more complex Middle East and a more complete Jewish people. Their histories encompass deep rootedness in the region alongside displacement from it; centuries of cultural exchange alongside periods of discrimination and extreme persecution; Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, Babylonian, Kurdish, Amazigh, and other cultural influences alongside distinctly Jewish religious and communal traditions. These histories resist reduction because the people themselves resist reduction.

That complexity is not incidental to JIMENA’s mission. It is one of the reasons our work matters. 

At a moment when Jewish identity and Middle Eastern history are increasingly 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 transmit 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.