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 Zevulon Boukhobza 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? 

We are building a grassroots spiritual project that offers diasporic SWANA Jews ways to connect with our ancestral traditions in a feminist, queer, liberatory space. We offer cultural gatherings, shabbatot with home-cooked meals, prayer services, and nusach training and education in our specific ancestral traditions. Based in Brooklyn, we are connected and part of a global network that is 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. The Zionist project, in cahoots with European colonialism, has tried to convince the world that we can’t exist. By existing anyway, joyously, we invite all Jews with Sephardic and SWANA ancestry to join us in throwing a wrench into the ideological machinations of colonialism and nationalistic warmongering. The machine sputters and coughs, unable to co-opt or metabolize the contradiction of our existence. The more we heal from our trauma of rupture and displacement, 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? 

Zevulon Boukhobza: 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, given that much of the Jewish left is rooted in a secularAshkenazi tradition. This has forced people to choose between going to a gender-segregated Sephardi synagogue that affirms our ancestral traditions, or a mixed-gender progressive synagogue where White supremacy and Ashkenormativity are predominant. Our kehilla creates one of the only spaces in the world where SWANA Jewish gender-marginalized folks can pray without having to compromise these parts of themselves. 

Every time we gather and share food after a protest, dance to Chaabi music, mark Shabbat in keffiyehs and then do jail support, and then discuss the finer points of what liberation and care really mean over some Arak, 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? 

Zevulon Boukhobza: Many of our community members describe feeling alienated from their synagogues and families due first of all to these spaces’ support for genocide, but also in no small part because of gender and queerness for many of us. Members have shared that at our events, they finally feel they can  bring their whole selves and identities - expanding their imagination of what is possible for an ancestrally rooted and liberatory Jewish community. 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.  

Zevulon Boukhobza: 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. However, even in our own messaging, the labels that we give our ethnicities are not consistent or all-inclusive of the 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! Given the last 75 years of coerced migration–”dislocation” to use a term coined by Ella Shohat–and our relocation to the USA specifically, many of our community members have been robbed of holistic experience of our  cultures, also due to the unfeasibility of travel back to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, and our various homelands. Many of us have only been able to access Ashkenazi traditions throughout our lives. Those of us who have been able to access their cultural heritages often find those spaces  dominated by patriarchy, where women are not considered to have the ability to be spiritual leaders or even participants in the traditional sense. These patriarchal trends have also been reinforced by the assimilation of our communities into Ashkenormative Jewish nationalism and the Orthodox/Reform binary, which is European in origin. Of course, like in most patriarchal communities, women are the ones doing the bulk of the relationship maintenance work that keeps a community going. 

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 that sustains our spirits and minds in a world dominated by white supremacy and capitalism and other death cults. 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. 

Zevulon Boukhobza: 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. 

What freedom means is something that has different shades through the many diverse lenses that come under the umbrella of “Sephardi and Mizrahi”. There are many decolonial scholars, writers and artists hailing from our communities that readers can check out for some of these perspectives, including the trailblazing scholar Ella Shohat, the Moroccan communist Abraham Serfaty, the Iraqi anti-Zionist activist Yusuf Harun Zilkha, the Tunisian feminist Sophie Bassis, the Fatah member William Najb Nassar, the Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour…truly the list goes on and includes many of our members, contributors and comrades both in NYC and globally. 

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

Zevulon Boukhobza: We are building a future where SWANA Jews can return to belonging in the SWANA world and reclaim our heritages, languages, cultures, customs and traditions that are in danger of being lost.Women and queer people always have been essential in the building of this liberatory future. In the near future, we hope to create spaces in NYC that bring together this community that has been fragmented, that is made of folks who often feel like the only one like them. We want to keep building our relationships with each other, ourselves, and our ancestors by praying and making music and learning and eating together. As we continue to do this work, our Kehilla will flourish and grow so that more folks can access education in their ancestral traditions, gaining the education and support our members need. Inshallah we will continue to deepen our solidarity with SWANA society both here in diaspora and in the SWANA world over there so we can all work together towards a liberated world where Palestine is free.

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

Zevulon Boukhobza: 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.