At a moment when many Jews feel forced to choose between tradition and liberation, the Egalitarian Sephardi Mizrahi Kehilla (ESMK) is building a community that refuses that divide. Based in New York City and connected to a broader global network, the grassroots collective hosts cultural gatherings, religious services, and nusach training rooted in the Jewish traditions of Southwest Asia and North Africa while embracing feminist, queer, and anti-colonial values.

In a Jewish landscape often dominated by Ashkenazi institutions and assumptions, ESMK is creating a rare space where SWANA Jewish heritage, political commitment, and traditional religious practice can coexist without compromise. Noa Barash spoke with organizers from ESMK about the community they’re building, the gaps it seeks to fill, and how reclaiming Sephardi and Mizrahi traditions can help shape a more liberated Jewish future.

Noa Barash: Tell us about the Egalitarian Sephardi Mizrahi Kehilla - what are you building and why does it matter? 

ESMK: We are building a spiritual and cultural project that offers Southwest Asia and North Africa (“SWANA”) Jewish and Sephardi Jewish cultural gatherings, religious services, and nusach training. We are an independent grassroots community in NYC and are part of a global network of communities engaged in justice and reclamation work in the SWANA Jewish world.

Staring down a century and a half of anti-Arab racism, we dare to be the impossible: Jewish, SWANA, Arab, feminist, queer & trans, religious, traditional, radical, artist, decolonial, all of the above. Much effort has been made by the Zionist project, in cahoots with European colonialism, to convince the world and even to convince us that we can’t exist. By existing anyway, joyously, loudly proclaiming that we are all these things and that you can join us, we throw a giant wrench into the ideological machinations of global colonialism. The machine sputters and coughs, unable to co-opt or metabolize the contradiction of our existence. The more we heal from our scars of rupture and displacement, the more we refuse to compromise any part of ourselves, the closer we collectively move to a liberated world. 

Noa Barash: You describe your community as filling a void that's existed for too long. What's the gap you're filling, and who's finding a home with you that they couldn't find elsewhere? 

We offer a spiritual home for Jews on the margins who have experienced gender, racial, and/or political discrimination in traditional and mainstream Jewish spaces. The spiritual aspect of our work is geared towards Jews who wish to observe in a traditional Sephardi custom while enacting liberatory values, such as feminism and anti-zionism. We are unique in offering this in a Jewish leftist scene full of groups which are largely more secular and squarely in the Ashkenazi tradition. This has forced people to choose between going to a gender segregated Sephardi synagogue or a mixed-gender progressive synagogue where White supremacy and Ashkenormativity are predominant. In this context, we are one of the only spaces in the world where SWANA Jewish gender-marginalized folks can pray without having to compromise parts of themselves. 

Every time we gather to share food after a protest, to dance to Chaabi music, mark Shabbat in keffiyehs and then do jail support, to debate each other on the finer points of what liberation and care really mean, we reach back through time to take our fleeing and forsaken ancestors in our arms and say look, there is a place for you. We are still here. We remember you. 

Noa Barash: A lot of your members say this is the first place they've been able to bring their whole selves - their politics, their identities, their traditions - all at once. What are you hearing from people about what that means to them? 

Many of our community members describe feeling exiled from their synagogues and family religious spaces due first of all to these spaces’ support for genocide, but also in no small part because of gender and queerness for many people. People describe looking for anti-zionist Jewish spaces and finding only white-dominated Ashkenazi spaces. At our events, people have shared that they finally feel they can bring their whole selves and identities - expanding what they feel is possible in a Jewish space and their ability to lead a Jewish life. For some, the nusach feels like home and brings back memories of synagogue in childhood. For others, it is a gateway to learning more about themselves and the heritages that preceded them. 

Noa Barash: You're training prayer leaders around the world in Middle Eastern and North African Jewish traditions. Tell us about that work and why it’s important for Jewish communities to carry.  

The phrase North African and Middle Eastern is a bit misleading and doesn’t fully represent our community and goals as our community also includes Jews from Central Asian, Ethiopian, Greek, and Caribbean backgrounds. Even in our own messaging, the labels that we give our ethnicities are not consistent or all-inclusive, since there isn’t a neat label that works, and on top of that the traditions that we have been able to center in our teaching work have mostly been Moroccan, Syrian, and Yemeni. Point being that there are whole universes of Jewish practice and history that exist outside of the Ashkenazi paradigm, and these are the universes that we want to nurture and engage with. Because these are the worlds that have been attacked by Zionism and colonialism over the past 200+ years! And especially with the last 75 years of coerced migration–”dislocation” to use a term coined by Ella Shohat–and our relocation to the USA specifically, most of our community members have been robbed of any holistic experience of their various cultures. Many of us have only been able to access Ashkenazi traditions throughout our lives. On top of that, even those of us who have been able to access their cultural heritages have found spaces that are by and large completely dominated by patriarchy, where women are not considered to have the ability to be spiritual leaders or even participants in the traditional sense. Though of course like in most communities, women are the ones doing the bulk of the relationship maintenance work that keeps a community going. 

So when we come to this work we are faced with the triple task of combating colonialism, Zionism, and patriarchy. And we have to do battle with these forces in order to simply access the basic act of prayer which for many of us is what sustains our spirits and minds in a world dominated by white supremacy and capitalism and other death cults. Even putting aside the history, our workshops are some of the only spaces in the world where women and queer people get to learn how to lead these prayers in these traditions.

Noa Barash: With Passover approaching, tell us about how your community celebrates — and what you'd want readers to take away about what freedom means through a Sephardi and Mizrahi lens. 

Sephardi and SWANA Jewish communities each have our own unique passover traditions, special foods, melodies and customs. We have diverse haroset recipes, and might argue over which one is best, but many of our recipes include dates. Syrian Jews recite the “mishaarotam” in Arabic, a call and response passage where we personally tell the story of leaving Egypt and answer questions about where we are going and what we are bringing with us. Moroccans pass the matzah plate over the heads of all the guests, and Persians hit each other with scallions as a reminder of the dangers of longing for the times of slavery. 

For centuries, to mark the end of Passover, Jewish families in North Africa would open their homes to everyone on the block in a multifaith, cross-communal celebration called Mimouna. Our Mimouna party is an interfaith event which also serves as a Palestine fundraiser and opportunity to build community with our non-Jewish SWANA siblings. 

Noa Barash: What future are you building towards with your work? 

Our long-term goal is to create a thriving diasporic Sephardi Mizrahi Jewish community that centers our vision for a better world, and is part of a collaborative ecosystem of the Jewish community at large, in relationship with SWANA communities, and the broader NYC and global left. Our work facilitates healing for marginalized women and queer individuals, and builds bridges to heal the centuries old relationships between Jews from the SWANA region and Muslims, Christians, Kurds, and other ethnic and religious groups from our countries of origin. 

Noa Barash: How can people connect with you - whether they're local to New York or want to join from elsewhere? 

We’d love to connect! Send us an email at egalsmkehilla@gmail.com to get onto our mailing list - where we share about upcoming events and opportunities to get involved. And follow us on instagram @egalsmkehilla. For folks outside of NYC, we sometimes host virtual offerings as well.