As a public institution, we are committed to serving the community of greater Los Angeles, the state of California, and the global academy and public. Our faculty and doctoral students give public lectures in schools, synagogues, and mosques in Los Angeles and work with K-12 students and teachers, and produce timely, popularly-accessible scholarship. We contribute to popular media covrage on topical affairs, from music to minority politics, Holocaust rememberance to the reconstruction of the deep past. UCLA’s Moroccan Jewish Studies affiliates contribute to community events such as the marking of the 50th anniversary of Em Habanim, the 100th year anniversary of The Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel, and the first Morocco Day in Los Angeles. We continue to work to expand our partnership with the Moroccan Jewish community of Los Angeles by organizing scholarly events and public scholarship that benefit the community. We hope to continue to build oral history archives on the community in Los Angeles and other cities in the United States especially in New York and Florida.
100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles
This landmark project, a product of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Sephardic Archive Initiative at UCLA, with the cooperation of UCLA Libraries and Special Collections, aims to showcase the vibrancy of Sephardic culture in the City of Angels and to shed light on its astonishing diversity past and present.
Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel (STTI) Archive
In 2015, the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel (STTI), Los Angeles’ largest Sephardic congregation, generously gifted their archives to UCLA Library Special Collections. The Archive is comprised of institutional papers, photographs and ephemera from STTI, as well as materials related to the various organizations that merged to create the synagogue in its current form, including Temple Tifereth Israel and Haim Vehesed, as well as the Peace and Progress Society (founded in 1917), La Communidad (founded in 1920), and Sephardic Beth Shalom. As a result, the STTI Archive provides a rich and comprehensive portrait of Sephardic Jewish life in 20th century Los Angeles.
Danielle Avidan and Anna Mireille Abitbol Archive
The UCLA Sephardic Archive Initiative is delighted to announce the acquisition, by UCLA Special Collections, of the Danielle Avidan (neé Abitbol) and Anna Mireille Abitbol Archive.
The AMAA is divided into two archival boxes. Objects date from 1876 through the 1990s. Languages represented include French, English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The geographic range of the archive extends from Algeria to Morocco and from France to Los Angeles.
