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Jewish immigrants and their children are divided by a common religion
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with teens across the world to report on issues that impact their lives.
MIAMI (JTA) — When Ricardo Tanur arrived in Miami in the 1990s he had a hard time finding a religious school for his children and finding a synagogue where he felt comfortable. The biggest challenge, however, was leaving his Orthodox community in Mexico and raising his six children in an unfamiliar Jewish community whose religious values often did not align with his own.
“When I first arrived in Miami, I felt that I was leaving a part of me in Mexico, and did not feel that I truly belonged to the Jewish-American communities,” said Tanur. “I was unsure how I would raise my children in the faith when I didn’t have a temple or community which I felt a part of.”
Eventually Tanur joined the Bal Harbor Shul and the Skylake Synagogue in Miami Beach because he felt that community could make “a positive impact on his children’s personal and religious values.” This was important to him when raising children in an area whose approach to tradition was more “modern” than what he was used to in Mexico City.
The challenge of raising children in an unknown Jewish community is common for immigrants, especially for those in Miami. More than a third of the Jewish population in Miami are foreign-born adults, higher than in any other American Jewish community. With the continued population growth of foreign-born adults, the immigrant experience affects how young people approach religion by combining traditional and modern practices.
“My approach to religion differs from that of my parents mainly in the external aspect,” said Deborah Tanur, Ricardo’s eldest daughter. The 20-year-old, raised in Miami, said her father expected his daughters to wear the modest clothing typical of his Orthodox community back in Mexico. And yet her peers weren’t wearing skirts that fall below the knee, high-cut necklines or long sleeves.
Her 18-year-old sister, Raquel, recognizes the strain caused by these different ways of thinking. “The Mexican community is more closed-off and small, whereas in Miami the community is very modern and open,” she said. “This was not always easy for my mother and father to understand, as traditional appearance and practices were something which they believed to be a large part of conserving our faith.”
When Deborah was younger she was drawn to her Jewish friends’ liberal, Ashkenazi services, which were different from those in her parent’s Ashkenazi, Orthodox synagogue. “When I was little, I would sometimes ask to attend a Reform service with my friends’ families,” she said. “My parents did not allow me to do so at first, but eventually my parents and I navigated through our different perspectives in order to find common ground.”
Differences between children and immigrant parents’ are not only restricted to the level of observance, but also to their approaches to traditions and prayer. This is true for Luiz Gandleman — the son of two immigrants from Brazil and the president of the Jewish Student Union at Gulliver Preparatory in Coral Gables.
“My parents grew up in a very strict Ashkenazi community, so a lot of the prayers and service is heavily Ashkenazi which isn’t necessarily the case with me,” Gandelman said. “There are Jews from all over here [in Miami], so I observe a lot more broadly. I have attended both Ashkenazi services as well as Sephardic services, so I have adapted aspects from both.” Gandelman added that some holidays are observed differently in America than they are in Brazil.
“Hanukkah is observed on a smaller scale in Brazil, at least in my community. My parents didn’t really do anything for Hanukkah besides the traditional practices” of candle-lighting and a few special prayers, he said. “I convinced them to start celebrating on a greater scale with Hanukkah dinners and gift giving. My parents thought it to be an American thing at first, but after much convincing we were able to take the best of both worlds and mix our two beliefs.”
This different approach to faith is common for many children of immigrant parents, which Senior Rabbi Jeremy Barras of Temple Beth Am, a Reform synagogue in Pinecrest, recognizes in his congregation.
“More so in Miami Beach and Aventura, than Coral Gables and Pinecrest, the parents tend to be more traditional and the kids less so,” Barras said, referring to Miami-area suburbs. “The older generations are more interested in customs and rituals. The younger generations are more interested in culture and spirituality. It means that more creative means are required to engage younger families and the next generation. No longer can we rely on traditional models of observance to drive participation.”
The distinct way of thinking between immigrant parents and their children is not limited to their approaches to religion, but also to their feelings of belonging.
“Most of the people that are here [in Miami] came from Latin America which wasn’t always as safe and as great of a situation for Jews. In any minute if things got bad you would want to move. because of fear of anti-semitism. Americans don’t really worry about that, Americans never think that they are going to have to leave,” Barras said.
This lack of belonging also affects identity. Such is true for the Guimaraes family, Reform Jews who immigrated from Brazil.
“I would define myself first as Brazilian, and then as Jewish. Personally, I see myself as being merely a Brazilian Jew on American soil,” said Cassio Guimaraes.
Her youngest child, Ana Catherine, has the opposite view. “My identity is best described as an American Jew,” the 16-year-old said. “I always felt that I had a place here despite my Latina makeup. My traditions and values are well rooted in the community within Miami.
Despite differences between immigrant parents’ and their children, their religion provides common ground.
“Although me and my parents pray differently, it widens perspective. For example, I pray using a wider range of prayers than do my parents. For example, I recite the amidah while my parents do not. Nevertheless, I love learning how my mom was raised praying and how my dad learned to pray, and they love learning what I know,” Gandelman said. “We end up teaching each other. It is a nice way for us to connect and build on each other’s religious beliefs together.”
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The post Jewish immigrants and their children are divided by a common religion appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world
In TikTok videos viewed tens of thousands of times, 31-year-old Dan Sheena dons a blond wig and acts out skits of a bickering Iraqi couple in a language that is nearly extinct: Judeo-Arabic.
Sheena began posting videos on TikTok in 2023, speaking the endangered language, which today is rarely spoken by anyone under the age of 60, following the mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries due to discrimination and religious persecution.
Raised by two parents from Baghdad, Sheena grew up in Israel and spoke the language at home. That’s a rarity among second- and third-generation Iraqi Jews, whose families often stopped passing it down in an effort to assimilate.
From a young age, Sheena, who still lives in Israel, knew he wanted to become an Arabic teacher. After years of teaching conversational Arabic in the public school system, he became determined to preserve the dialect he grew up with.
When Sheena told his family that he wanted to teach Judeo-Arabic, they urged him to focus on a more practical dialect. “They told me, ‘Oh, you are stupid. Why do you want to do that? No one wants to learn it. It’s going to die.’”
Despite their concerns, the initial response to his account and the Judeo-Arabic Zoom lessons he offered was overwhelming. “Many people registered. They told me, ‘Dan, this is my dream. I heard my parents speaking in Judeo Arabic, and I really want to learn it. And I finally have the opportunity.’”
He said that, for him, social media has been essential to his efforts to preserve the language. “Many people forward my videos between themselves” and “ask their parents about certain words,” he said. “This is the way to talk about Judeo-Arabic, to keep it alive. Social media lets me do that, not in the classic way of writing a book and trying to spread it and share it. This is the old way of keeping a language alive.”
In videos, he uses classic Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic phrases, including in equal measure cheeky insults like Wakka mazzalem (“may their luck run out”), and compliments like Asht eedak (“may your hands be blessed”), a phrase used to compliment someone’s cooking or hosting abilities.
Sheena has since built a TikTok following of more than 100,000 and teaches dozens of students around the world, who find him through social media, through Zoom-based courses each year.
A disappearing language
In the 1940s, nearly 1 million Jews lived across the Arab world. Today, an estimated 4,000 remain. In Iraq, where there was once a thriving Jewish community of around 120,000, just three Jews are believed to still live in the country.
Judeo-Arabic, a variety of different dialects of Arabic that were spoken by Jews in the Arab world, endured in active use for roughly 1,250 years. Since the mid-20th century, when Jews were forced to flee the region en masse, the language has been in rapid decline.
According to Assaf Bar Moshe, one of the world’s few Judeo-Arabic experts, Jews in the Middle East were usually bilingual. “They spoke one dialect with their community and families, and another dialect the moment they stepped out of their house,” to be able to communicate with their non-Jewish neighbors. A key feature of the language is words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic, especially for religious objects or distinctly Jewish words.
Bar Moshe said today, there are around 6,000 native speakers of the Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic dialect worldwide. That dialect, he said, offers a glimpse into what the Arab world sounded like centuries ago. “Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic is actually the original dialect of Baghdad from the Middle Ages. The Jewish community preserved it, while the Muslim dialect came later with migrations in the 17th century. That’s why they are so different.”
Over the centuries, Jews in each country developed their own dialect, often with additional regional variation. While the spoken language is extremely varied depending on where it was developed, the written language became much more standardized, with Arabic transliterated into Hebrew script, similar to Yiddish or Ladino.
When Jews left the Arab world, most fleeing to Israel, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, they commonly abandoned the language as they tried to integrate into new societies. In Israel, Bar Moshe said, “Arabic was seen as the language of the enemy, so children were embarrassed to speak it.”
There was a similar pressure to assimilate for Jews who fled to other countries. “We wanted to be British,” said Vicky Sweiry Tsur, a Bahraini Jew who grew up in the U.K. and now lives in California. “I used to feel very embarrassed when my friends heard my parents speak Arabic. And you know, slowly, slowly, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
According to Sheena, many students come to him with a sense of regret for turning away from the language when they were younger.
“If we just listened to my mom way back then, you know, I wouldn’t be chasing after every word and phrase that I can possibly remember now,” said Sweiry Tsur. “What I wouldn’t give to go back.”
‘You learn it from your heart’
Sheena admits his parents had reason to protest his decision to delve into Judeo-Arabic. Students come to him all the time debating whether they should learn conversational Arabic or Judeo-Arabic, which, by most measures, cannot be revived and has no practical use outside of the shrinking circle of elderly individuals who still speak it. “I always answer, to learn the spoken Arabic, you do it from your brain because you want to use it daily. But the Judeo-Arabic, you don’t learn from your brain. You learn it from your heart.”
Sheena’s student Jason Mashal, 36, whose parents were born in Iraq, said he is learning the language out of a desire to preserve it. “I don’t even want to learn Modern Standard Arabic,” he said. “My motivation has always been that this is a dying language, and I guess I’m probably going to fail to save it, but I’m still going to try, you know, to be as functional as I can.”
Inspired by his progress, Mashal later traveled to Iraq, visiting the school his parents attended (where current students had no idea it used to be a school for Jews), the only synagogue left in Baghdad, and even a nightclub his father used to frequent. “It was a very magical and electric feeling to walk through those halls in the precise place where I know both my parents went to school many years ago. Speaking Jewish Arabic in Iraq was just as electric.”
For many of Sheena’s students, the language offers a way to reconnect with memories they can no longer access. “People say to me, ‘Dan, I want to smell again my grandmother. I can’t sit with her and listen to her stories again, but I can hear her by these words by this language.’”
“He comes out with a word or a phrase that literally I can say I have not heard for like, 40 or 50 years,” said Sweiry Tsur. “There’s no way I would have been able to bring it out from the depths of my brain, but then you hear it, and you know exactly what it means, and exactly in what context you would use it — and all the emotions that are tied to it, you know, Friday night dinners with all of the family.”
The post Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran’s President Says Immediate Cessation of US-Israeli Aggression Needed to End War
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit 2025, in Tianjin, China, September 1, 2025. Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that there needs to be an “immediate cessation” of what he described as US-Israeli aggression to end the war and wider regional conflict, Iran’s embassy in India said in an X post on Saturday.
Pezeshkian spoke with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi by phone earlier in the day.
Pezeshkian told Modi that there should be guarantees to prevent a recurrence of such “aggression” in the future. He also called on the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies to play an independent role in halting aggression against Iran.
The Iranian president proposed a regional security framework comprising West Asian countries to ensure peace without foreign interference, according to the country’s embassy in India.
In a separate post on X earlier on Saturday, Modi said he condemned attacks on critical infrastructure in the Middle East in the discussion with Pezeshkian.
The Indian Prime Minister further reiterated the importance of safeguarding freedom of navigation and ensuring shipping lanes remain open and secure.
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Trump’s Peace Board Hands Hamas Disarmament Proposal, Sources Say
US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff attend the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has presented Hamas with a written proposal on how it could lay down its weapons, two sources said, a step the Palestinian terrorists have thus far refused to take as the US president pushes on with his plan for Gaza’s future.
The proposal, first reported by NPR, was submitted to Hamas during meetings in Cairo over the past week, one of the sources said. The talks were attended by Nickolay Mladenov and Aryeh Lightstone, the two sources familiar with the matter said.
Mladenov is the Trump-appointed Board of Peace envoy to Gaza. Lightstone is a US aide to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Trump’s Gaza plan, to which Israel and Hamas agreed in October, sees Israeli troops withdrawing from Gaza and reconstruction starting as Hamas lays down its weapons.
Mladenov on Thursday said that serious efforts were underway to bring relief to war-torn Gaza, with a framework agreed by the mediators that could advance reconstruction in the enclave, much of which lies in ruins.
“It is now on the table. It requires one clear choice: full decommissioning by Hamas and every armed group, with no exceptions and no carve-outs. In this season of hope, may those responsible make the right choice for the Palestinian people,” Mladenov said on X in a post for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr.
Representatives of Hamas were not immediately available for comment on Saturday, the second day of the holiday. Talks on disarmament had been placed on hold at the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran which began on February 28.
AMNESTY OFFER MAY BE ON THE TABLE
US officials have said that Iran-backed Hamas could be offered amnesty in any deal under which they agree to lay down any heavy weaponry and light arms including rifles.
Sources close to Hamas say the group would likely refuse to give up their rifles for fear of attacks by rival militias in Gaza, some of which have backing from Israel. Hamas and its rivals have staged deadly attacks on one another since the October ceasefire.
One of the sources said much would depend on what is acceptable to Israel, which demands the group’s complete disarmament.
Some of Hamas’ prominent officials have outright rejected any disarmament over the past few months.
Israel has shown no sign of withdrawing its troops who are in control of around half of Gaza’s territory, with Hamas keeping a firm grip on the other half of the enclave and its two million population, most of which has been rendered homeless by two years of devastating war.
The source said that amnesty and targeted investments in Gaza were being offered as incentives for Hamas, but said that it was unclear whether the Board of Peace would have funds to pay for it.
Trump garnered some $7 billion in pledges in February from countries, including some in the Gulf, before those same countries came under attack by Iran in a widening Middle East war.
The source said that only a small amount of those pledged funds had actually been provided, without specifying sums.