The Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America Celebrates Its Centennial.

This Sunday, 350 guests will gather at the Sephardic Temple in Cedarhurst, Long Island, to enjoy live music and feast on traditional Jewish cuisine from Greece and Turkeytarama (fish roe salad), fasolia (green beans in tomato), bamyas (stewed okra), and raki and lokum (Turkish delights) for dessertand celebrate the centennial of a pillar of New York's Sephardic community: the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America. While the celebration will be a opportunity to honor the organization's past and present, there is also a sense of uncertainly about its future: engaging the next generation of the Brotherhood is integral to its success.

In 1915, a group of 40 young Jewish men and women from Salonicaa city in today's northern Greece (now called Thessaloniki) that was once home to the largest and most dynamic Ladino-speaking population in the worldconvened at a cafe on the Lower East Side of New York City. There, they established the Salonican Brotherhood of America, or La Ermandad as it's known in Ladino, which they incorporated in 1916. My family joined after arriving to America from Salonica in 1924; my great-grandfather served as a rabbi for the Brotherhood's synagogues in Harlem and later New Brunswick, New Jersey, where, in the Brotherhood cemetery, five generations of my family are buried.

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