JIMENA is built on a foundation of personal storytelling, with members of JIMENA’s Speakers Bureau serving as the North American voice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran. This Bureau comprises specially selected and highly trained former refugees, educators, rabbis, scholars, thought leaders, and cultural ambassadors. Each speaker brings a compelling personal story and deep knowledge to authentically share the history and heritage of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. While the backgrounds and experiences of JIMENA speakers vary, they share a common passion for empowering and educating audiences through their personal stories and expertise on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish culture.
JIMENA carefully matches its speakers with suitable audiences, and we are proud to have presented at over 80 universities and hundreds of organizations internationally. As the core strength of JIMENA, many of our speakers are accomplished leaders in their respective fields, whose voices have influenced policies and public opinion about the Middle East and North Africa.
Speakers
Aaron Matityahu
Aaron Matityahu was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1931. He lived there with his parents, four brothers and four sisters. When Aaron was a young child, life was made difficult for Jews living in Iraq.
Albert Bivas
Advocate
Albert Bivas and was born in Cairo, Egypt to an upper-class, Jewish family. Do to increasing pressure and threats from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime, Albert’s father–who was a successful stockbroker and textile factory owner–sold his factory at a deflated value in 1956 in order to keep it from being confiscated by the Egyptian government.
Ben-Dror Yemini
Ben-Dror Yemini was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel to a Yemenite Jewish family. He studied Humanities and History in Tel Aviv University, and later on he studied Law.
Carmella Pardo
Carmella Pardo was born to an Iraqi family in Bombay, India and returned to Basra, Iraq as a small child with her parents and brother.
Carole Basri
Carole Basri, born to Iraqi Jews parents, is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University and NYU School of Law, where she was a member of its National Moot Court Team.
Dalia Sirkin
Dalia Sirkin was born Dalia Bokhobza in Tripoli, Libya. She grew up speaking Italian as her first language, though she also knew some Arabic and Hebrew.
Doris Nachum
Doris Nachum was born Libya. Her family’s native language was Arabic although they also spoke Italian. In the 1940s Doris and her family were among the 38,000 Jews residing in Libya.
Edwin Shuker
Edwin Shuker was born in 1959 in Baghdad, and lived in a community that numbered more than 200,000 people in the 1940’s, but had been reduced to just 10,000 after years of persecution and flight.
Elie Abadie
Rabbi
Rabbi Dr. Elie Abadie comes from a long and distinguished rabbinical lineage dating back to fifteenth century Spain and Provence.
Elliot Benjamin
Legal Advisor
Elliott Benjamin was born in Iran and moved to London, England at the age of four. Mr. Benjamin is currently a senior legal advisor at the Los Angeles law firm of Parker Shumaker Mills LLP where he focuses on transactional real estate and general business corporate matters.
Gina Waldman
Gina Waldman is a survivor. Born Gina Malaka Bublil in Tripoli to a family that had lived in Libya for centuries, she was persecuted, nearly murdered and brutally expelled from her homeland in 1967, all because she is Jewish.
Isaac Cohen
Retired Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology
Isaac Cohen was born in Cairo, Egypt in the 1930’s. In 1956, while attending university in Montpellier, France, he learned that a war had broken out in Egypt.
Israel Bonan
Lecturer & Committee Member
Israel Bonan was born in Cairo,Egypt in the mid 1940s. He grew up and lived in Egypt, the country where his parents were born and where the Jewish community dated back to ancient times.
Jacqueline Saper
Writer, Translator & Public Speaker
Jacqueline Saper, is an Iranian-American writer, translator, and a public speaker.
Jacqueline was born and raised in a Jewish family in Tehran, in an idyllic time during the 1960s and 1970s.
Jaleh Pirnazar
Professor
Jaleh Pirnazar is a professor of Persian studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include Iranian history, literature, ethnic and religious minorities in Iran.
Joe Pessah
Joe Pessah was born in Cairo, at a time when he and his family were among the 80,000 Jews living in Egypt and thriving in their Jewish community.
Joe Shamash
Joe Shamash was born in Baghdad,Iraq in 1948. He lived there with his parents, five brothers, and two sisters; his family was very well off and they lived in a large house.
Joseph Samuels
Joseph (Yusuf) Samuels was born in Taht El Takia, the Jewish quarter of the old city of Baghdad, Iraq in 1930 to a family who could trace their ancestry to the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E..
Karmel Melamed
Journalist & Attorney
Karmel Melamed is an award winning internationally published journalist and attorney based in Los Angeles. Working as a journalist since 2000, he has given a new voice to the emerging and quite successful Iranian community— in particular the vibrant Iranian Jewish community living in the United States.
Levana Zamir
Levana Zamir, was born to a wealthy Jewish family of hoteliers and publishers in Cairo, Egypt. Levana and her family were abruptly forced to flee her home to become a stateless refugee in France following Israel’s establishment in 1948.
Linda Menuhin
Journalist
Linda Menuhin serves as a commentator in Middle East Affairs both in Israeli and Arab media. Entrenched in the Arab culture, she reinvented herself in Israel, rising from an Iraqi refugee to a senior journalist.
Marcel Theboul
Marcel Theboul was born in Morocco. During the time Marcel and his family were living in Morocco many of the Jews there were moving to Israel because the push to move came from the Jewish community.
Marilyn Crystal-Uzan
Marilyn Crystal-Uzan was born in Tunisia where her family had lived for generations and she grew up in the capital, Tunis. Marilyn and her family lived in Tunis very happily and in peace until she was 17 years old.
Maurice Shohet
President of Congregation Bene Naharayim.
Maurice Shohet was born in Iraq. On September 2nd, 1970 Maurice left Baghdad seeking freedom from a country that had over the past few decades made life for the Jews living there difficult and frightening.
Pnina Meghnagi Soloman
Pnina Meghnagi Soloman was born in 1949 in Tripoli, Libya. In 1967, with the break out of Israel’s Six-Day War, Pnina was one day suddenly instructed to leave school and go home.
Rachel Wahba
Rachel Wahba was born on March 19th, 1946 in Bombay. Her father Maurice, had come from Mansura, Egypt and her mother from Baghdad.
Remy Pessah
Remy Pessah was born in Egypt in 1947, and lived through the wars of 1956 and 1967. In the mid 1960’s, Remy met her future husband, Joe Pessah, while learning Hebrew in an after school program.
Reuben Yeroushalmi
Reuben Yeroushalmi, was born in Tehran. Eventually settling in Los Angeles, Reuben went on to become a forceful litigator dedicated to improving the community around him.
Saba Soomekh
Professor
Professor Saba Soomekh was born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles. She teaches Religious Studies, Women’s Studies and Middle Eastern history courses.
Semha Alwaya
Semha Alwaya was born in Iraq and grew up in Turkey, Iran and Israel. Her parents were among 125,000 Iraqi refugees whose citizenship was revoked and their property confiscated by the Iraqi government in the middle of the 20th century.
Stanley A. Urman
Executive Vice-President
Dr. Stanley A. Urman is the Executive Vice-President \[Executive Director 2002-2008\] of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, an international coalition seeking rights and redress for Jews displaced from Arab countries. Since 2002, Dr. Urman has made formal representations on rights and redress for Jews forced to flee Arab countries to Members of Congress, and \[...\]
Sylvain Abitbol
Sylvain Abitbol was born in Casablanca, Morocco. His family immigrated to Canada following Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967 when Sylvain was a teenager.
Tabby Davoodi
Executive Director
Tabby Davoodi was born in Tehran after the Iranian Revolution and fled with her family in 1988. She completed her B.A. in communication from UC San Diego and received her Master’s Degree in public diplomacy at USC in 2010.
Vanessa Hidary
Native New Yorker Vanessa Hidary, AKA The Hebrew Mamita, grew up on Manhattan’s culturally diverse Upper West Side, graduating from LaGuardia High School of the Arts and Hunter College.
Yigal Ben Shalom
Dr. Yigal Ben-Shalom is the son of Ovadiak Ben-Shalom, the founder and president of The Association for Yemenite Society, Culture, Research and Documentationan Israeli organization which promotes and preserves the culture and history of Yemenite Jewry.
