In 2010, Sarah Levin contacted synagogues seeking congregants to participate in an oral history project for JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, where she had recently become executive director. The Sephardic Congregation in Evanston, Ill., which her great-grandparents helped found, pointed her towards a Syrian and Turkish couple who had immigrated to the United States in the 1960s.

“I was told they have really interesting stories,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy. “Just go sit with them and go talk to them. So I went to their house, and they were clearly in desperate need of health interventions, of social service interventions. They didn’t know how they were going to get food into their doors. They were completely disconnected from the mainstream Jewish community.”

The couple needed support, but didn’t know where to find it or how to ask for help, she said.  

That experience inspired the latest cohort of JIMENA’s “Sephardic Leaders Fellowship,” which equips social service professionals, namely social workers and health-care workers, with the tools to provide culturally responsive care to Mizrahi and Sephardic clients. The three-month national cohort began in July, meeting virtually biweekly.

“We want people to feel seen and supported,” Tamar Zaken, director of community outreach at Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, told eJP. “One way for that to happen is as if our clinicians have cultural competence about the populations that they’re serving and they honor the cultures of the people that they’re serving.”

Zaken is facilitating one of the fellowship’s seven sessions, delving into Jewish texts to recognize the importance of names. “Names have so much meaning,” she said. “[The biblical patriarch] Yaakov went through a process, and his name changed to Yisrael.”

Learning a person’s name is a form of caring, she said. “It makes you feel like, ‘Wow, I have something to contribute. My name means something.’”  

A core area that the cohort will discuss is how to break through stigmas around therapy, which often stem from intergenerational trauma, Mastaneh Moghadam, executive director of the Cross Cultural Expressions Community Counseling Center in Los Angeles, who is leading the final session, told eJP.

According to a national demographic study JIMENA released last week, 34% of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Americans are immigrants. Many fled antisemitism in their countries of origin.

In the case of Persian Jews, this occurred as recently as 1979, when the Islamic Republic took power and forced Iranians to live under a brutal Islamic theocracy. For many Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, Oct. 7 “was an opening into some of the darkest, most violent, saddest, unsettling, disruptive, destructive moments of Jewish memory from the Middle East and North Africa,” Levin said.

“One of the big effects of trauma and intergenerational trauma is that it sets up this overprotective culture that then relies a lot on secrecy as a means to protect themselves,” Moghadam said. “And when you start to keep things hidden… they start to fester, and they start to get worse.”

Because of the oppressive and antisemitic countries they come from, some Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews don’t trust the world around them, and they struggle with seeking help, Moghadam said. “There develops a deep stigma around the idea of going outside of the family system or even outside yourself to gain any new perspectives to get any help,” she said. “So everybody starts to either downplay mental health and mental health issues, or they start to label people as weak.”

If a service provider doesn’t understand where this defense mechanism comes from, they might judge their client as being difficult or close-minded, Moghadam said. They may also see their communities and families as issues that must be dealt with.

Social work and psychotherapy programs teach theories “birthed in North America and Western Europe,” Moghadam said, so many therapists treat clients with a Western, individualistic worldview that “goes directly against” how many Middle Eastern clients see the world, which traditionally places community before individual.

Therapists rattle off therapy-speak such as boundaries, enmeshment and codependency, which often goes directly against the family structures of Middle Eastern families — as well as the family structures of many Ashkenazi Jewish families.

“If there’s safety in numbers and the group comes first, then there can’t be any boundaries because you can’t feel like there’s a me and a you,” Moghadam said. “It always has to be looked at as an us. This is a perspective that [therapy] books don’t look at because the books and the theories generally aren’t written from that cultural perspective.”

The important thing is “to not blindly follow any of these theories, but to really look at the person and what’s working for them, what isn’t working, given their culture, given their upbringing, their beliefs,” Moghadam said.

Other topics the fellowship explores are economic vulnerability — as 27% of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews are economically vulnerable, according to the recent study — and working with LGBTQ youth, led by JQY, an Orthodox LGBTQ organization that has “already done the work” of learning best practices of working with Mizrahi and Sephardic communities, Levin said.

In 2022, JIMENA’s “Sephardic Leaders Fellowship” launched as a six-month fellowship for Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish leaders and allies, but the focus shifted last year because many fellows already had a deep knowledge of their communities. The fellowship now educates subsets of the Jewish world, such as lay leaders and educators, on how to best serve Mizrahi and Sephardic communities.

The latest cohort included 30 fellows representing California, Washington State, New York, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado, Hawaii and Canada, and is made up predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews, though there are a few Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews participating. They benefit from fellowship, too, Zaken said, “because not all Sephardic and Mizrahi people are the same.” She avoids the terms because they “lump together a lot of people from different countries that actually are very different than each other.”

Along with teaching providers to best help their clients, the fellowship is also providing an opportunity for providers to bond over their common goal of supporting the community. At the first session, which was held on July 3, “people shared about having to not share all of their opinions in the workplace because they know that they might be judged or not accepted,” Zaken said. Antisemitism is spiking in America, including in social services, and it was healing for fellows “just being with other people who are going through the same challenges.”

Levin hopes that the fellowship leads to agencies doing outreach to Mizrahi and Sephardic synagogues — the place where many in the community congregate, especially aging Jews who don’t have connections to the broader Jewish world — so everyone can know that there is help and that it’s OK to take it.