#teimanim

[koenji]

A Jewish Yemeni boy pictured outside his home in Raydah, some 70 kilometers north of Sana'a on January 28, 2001.

The last remaining three Jewish families in Yemen were deported by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in 2021, leaving only one Jewish man in the country that once held a diverse and ancient Jewish community. Levi Marhabi, held captive by the Houthis since 2016.

[dizajn]

A-WA - "Hana Mash Hu Al Yaman" (Official Video)

[koenji]

btw the way the girls wear headscarves here is not traditional. for many generations jewish girls and women in Yemen generally wore a cap called gargush / קָ��רְקוּׄש which was decorated with embroidery, bead work and often metal coins. design and material used would vary depending on marital status, locality, and occasion. It's very possible, as in many Islamic countries (see Iran), the women were pressured to veil this way by Muslim rulers.

Photographs of the last remaining Jews of Yemen.

There were 55,000 Jews in Yemen in 1948. Today there are fewer than a hundred. The community existed for nearly three thousand years.

[hyenaswine]

i don't really like "judaism isn't just a religion, it's an ethnicity" because that implies that it's all ONE ethnicity. we're not all ashkies. i mean i am but many jews are not. there are MANY jewish ethnicities (sephardi, mizrahi, romaniote, beta israel, kaifeng, teimanim, etc). we are all jews but i feel it's important to acknowledge the vast diversity of jewish experience & cultural practice so as not to center eastern european jews as the default.

[jewish-privilege]

What is a home?

In Jewish history, with its centuries of wandering and ritualized longing for a land most never actually saw, circumstances created not so straightforward answers to this question. For the creators of modern-day Israel, the answer was to be found in a state.

But for some Jewish refugees that arrived in this new place, it did not feel like a home, either.

“Our great-grandmother came to Israel only to be put in a tiny, crowded shack in the desert,” says Tair Haim of A-Wa.

The Tel Aviv-based band A-Wa, comprised of three sisters that fuse Yemenite folk with hip-hop and electronic music, frames its answer around what the sisters’ great-grandmother Rachel, a refugee from Yemen, said about the question of home: “bayti fi rasi” – my home is in my head.

A-Wa’s new concept album, Baiti Fi Rasi, released on May 31st, shares many of the stories they heard as little girls of Rachel, a single mother facing hardship in Yemen as a Jew, a woman — and after she arrived in Israel during Operation Magic Carpet, as an Arabic-speaking Yemenite refugee. As children in the Arava Valley, Tair, Tagel, and Liron Haim would “milk from” their elders the spicy food, the henna and those limb-turning folk tunes of Yemen they had been encouraged to leave in the past. Though they never met her, Rachel became a guiding force in the sisters becoming proud, Jewish Yemenite women.

A single mother and feminist long before the term came in vogue, Rachel never found in her wandering a place she could call home, even after she came to Israel a refugee. But she cried out for “ya watani,” my homeland: Yemen. In spite of her suffering there, it was the sights, the sounds, the smells of Yemen that signaled home for her.

After their 2016 debut album, Habib Galbi, the A-Wa sisters travelled the world, encountering Syrian refugees on the streets of Europe. War ravaged Yemen. Thousands of African asylum-seekers in Tel Aviv continued to be denied refugee status and deemed “infiltrators” by the Jewish state.

“We saw all the refugee issues in all the world, in Israel, in Paris, and it made us think of the journey [Rachel] made,” said Tair “Being musicians seeing so many places, we thought — what is a home to us? Is it a certain person? A village you grew up in? The country? So we decided to put this idea into a concept album.”

The sisters used the childhood stories they heard of Rachel as the basis for the album’s content.

“Her family would hide [this history] – don’t talk about the past, etc. – but for us, we felt our great-grandma in the studio,” said Tair, the eldest sister, at a café in her suburban neighborhood of Ramat Aviv, just north of Tel Aviv.

Though the album includes stories from their great-grandmother’s past, it wasn’t nostalgia A-Wa sought. As they were always told growing up, the past is the past. But as A-Wa conveys through their music, the past can shed light on what’s happening today, interact with it, even become something entirely different — and downright groovy.

The album’s festive but fierce music takes listeners on a hip hop journey of funky keyboards accompanied by rustic tin drums and Yemenite Arabic melodies. “Everything that is a silver plate or whatever, you can drum on it,” said Tair. “The Yemenite woman would sing about lovers and drum on plates, anything they had while they worked, so we wanted to bring that vibe into the studio.”

The band also decided for the album to decidedly bring together fashion of then and now —adorning Yemenite gold necklaces over Adidas shirts and Nike sneakers — to create a new urbo-traditional fusion aesthetic.

“With our fashion, we don’t want to keep it in the past,” said Tair. “We want to bring the tradition and statement to nowadays and make it relevant. There is no use to just bringing something as it was.”

...Even for a Jewish Yemenite refugee, Rachel was resilient, and she was courageous. As her great-granddaughter Tair recalled, Rachel was married off at the age of 12. It was an unhappy arrangement. Soon after giving birth to her daughter, Shama’a, she decided to divorce her husband — norms be damned. She married a second time, but still, luck was not on her side, so she left the man “tight like an old shoe.” Rachel met another man, and they did fall in love, but the daughter of a local sheikh seduced him, and he left Rachel — a story retold in the reggae blues-like song “Bint Al Sheikh.”

Throughout Yemen, Rachel went from village to village, a single mother struggling to find a place they could call home. 

...Neither in Ibb nor Sana’a nor the ma’abarot refugee camps of Israel could Rachel find shelter she could call home. So “what is a home?” A-Wa asks again. “Bayti fi rasi,” is their response –

My home is in my head A refugee for my heart Wherever I go, it is with me.

Poor and fleeing persecution, Rachel brought from her homeland only what was intangible, possessions that she kept in the mind and soul. “She took her daughter, her loneliness, her Yemeni food, her father’s weaving and her mother’s tongue,” said Tair. “This is about identity… it’s what every refugee brings.”

The pressure to bury that identity upon arriving in a new place is widely felt among refugees, but in the album, A-Wa takes the story down the particular, dark path that Israel set Mizrahi refugees like Rachel on.

This marks new territory for the band. In their 2014 debut album, Habib Galbi, A-Wa’s music was revolutionary in Israel by its basic nature: three Jewish sisters, born and raised in southern Israel, singing modernized versions of Yemenite folk songs in Arabic. The band’s very existence is an act of rebellion against suppression of Mizrahi culture...

...The call-and-response section of refugee hopes and discriminatory reality — which Tair said was inspired by West Side Story’s similarly themed “I’d Like To Be In America” — describes in stark terms the Yemenite experience after arriving in Israel, including decrepit, overcrowded tent conditions in the ma’abarot, or refugee absorption camps, and the phenomenon in which thousands of Yemenite children disappeared and families say hundreds were abducted by the state and given to childless Holocaust survivors. From those earliest days, MIzrahim were confined to the lowest rungs of Jewish Israeli society, compelled to abandon Arabic and their native culture.

The A-Wa sisters dutifully avoid politics, but their decision to address this past feels timely following last year’s passage in the Knesset of the Nation-State Bill, which downgraded Arabic in Israel from an official language.

“A lot of Jewish people came from Arab countries, and to try to erase their language or identity, it’s really sad,” said Tair. “When Rachel and our grandma, Shama’a, came to Israel, [Israel] wanted to change their names. Shama’a [Arabic for “candle”] became Shoshana, which means rose, not a candle. So [with the Nation-State Bill] we observe it now even.”

By releasing this daringly personal album, the A-Wa sisters resist the forces they had sometimes felt even within their own family. “Maybe our grandparents were ashamed of their culture,” said Tair. “But not only are we not ashamed, we are proud of who we are. We celebrate the many identities that we wear. I’m a woman, I’m a Yemenite, I’m Jewish, I’m a sister… it goes on.”

Through the sisters’ music, however, a revival has taken place.

...For the narrative- and genre-bending A-Wa sisters, the past is no more — but memory isn’t static. It is alive, dynamic and changing with the times so a Yemenite headdress complements sneakers and tin drums turn up the dance-floor in a modern-day hip-hop production. This process that manifests in Baiti Fi Rasi’s music and aesthetic – fusing the cultures of there and here, then and now — is happening among refugees all over the world.

I wondered how the Haim sisters — second-generation Sabras with Hebrew as their native tongue and a wide but sorely incomplete Yemenite vocabulary — would relate to Rachel’s profound words. What can baiti fi rasi mean to them? “We feel we are luckier than the last generations. Israel is a home to us. The village we grew up in the Arava Valley is a home to us. My husband is a home to me,” said Tair. “But the idea of bayti fi rasi means I’m taking my home to everywhere I go. Home is a feeling. It’s a spirit.”

[haltraveler]

Antisemitism IS racism

A lot of people don't realize this. Jews aren't just a religion, we’re an ethnic group, and many antisemites hate us more due to our ethnicity than our religious beliefs. 

Just because the largest group of Jews in the U.S. pass for white doesn’t mean we aren't effected by racism. Certainly, on a day-to-day level, most of us have it a lot easier than most ethnic minorities, but on the bigger scale, antisemitic political movements are gaining a lot of power in governments across the world, even in the U.S. 

Most of these groups, especially Neo Nazis in the U.S., use racist language and “logic” to justify their hate, not religious bigotry. Even those of us, such as myself, who aren't religious can feel incredibly unsafe and at risk due to this rhetoric.

[newnitz]

It also erases non-Ashkenazi Jews.

My mother's family never spoke Yiddish, they spoke Ladino. And we Sephardim have it easier when it comes to Ashkenormativity than most other non-Ashkenazi Diasporas. They make a few footnotes to our existence while they talk over, appropriate and sometimes flat out ignore others, like the very existence of Judeo-Arabic, or Judeo-Yemenic, which is the closest dialect/language(dialanguage?) to classical Hebrew still in use today.

Has anyone else noticed the weird appropriation of Yiddish for specifically anti-zionist spaces? It makes me deeply uncomfortable.

[koenji]

Rachel Nadav (1912-2003), likely 1940s.

"Israeli ballet dancer, born in Aden (Yemen). In 1933 Nadav joined the ballet company of the dancer and choreographer Rina Nikova, a pioneer classic ballet dancer in Eretz Israel. Nadav became leading dancer of Nikova's "Yemenite Ballet Company" and performed around the country and abroad. In the early 1940s she founded a ballet company and integrated classic dances with Yemenite dances, influenced by Nikova's school, and inspired by biblical texts." x

[thestarshiphope]

So... Maki is Jewish now? That's neat. Do you know anything about Judaism? Otherwise I think Kiyo would have to provide classes.

I don’t really. Is there any sort of ritual I need to take?

Not necessarily. I can teach you about the culture and history of the world’s Jewish communities.

There’s more than one?

Surely you don’t think such a vast group would be monolithic. Over time, the Jewish diaspora has diversified into many groups, though all united under a common heritage. 

The largest are the Ashkenazim, who descend primarily from Central and Eastern Europe. They are often imagined as the traditional idea of a Jew in the western world. 

Interestingly, many have come to associate names ending in suffixes such as “-berg,” “-man,” or “-stein,” or containing “Gold” as inherently Jewish in origin. In fact, this is a byproduct of a 1787 Austro-Hungarian law, decreeing that all Jewish residents of their empire must adopt Germanic family names.

Beyond them, there is also the Sephardim, who descend from the Iberian Peninsula; the Mizrahi, who inhabited much of the Middle East from as far back as the biblical era; the Teimanim, who formed a unique culture in Yemen; the Cochin and Bene Israel communities of India; the Beta Israel of Ethiopia; the Kaifeng Jews of China’s Henan province.

And these merely the many cultural and ethnic identities that have emerged over the centuries. Many denominations exist within their religion, such as the Orthodox, Hasidic, Karaites, Haymanot, Reform, Renewal, and even secularists who may observe Jewish holidays and traditions, but are otherwise non-religious.

In short, you are part of an amazingly diverse community. I would be more than happy to share what I know with you. 

I never knew any of this until now.

I’d like that. Thank you.

[aftselakhis-shaladin]

Smaller Jewish groups include the Georgian Jews and Mountain Jews from the Caucasus; Indian Jews including the Bene Israel, Bnei Menashe, Cochin Jews and Bene Ephraim; the Romaniotes of Greece; the ancient Italian Jewish community; the Teimanim from the Yemen; various African Jews, including most numerously the Beta Israel of Ethiopia; the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia; and Chinese Jews, most notably the Kaifeng Jews, as well as various other distinct but now extinct communities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions

[decolonizejewish]

A Yemeinite Habbani family celebratin Passover in Tel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine, 1946

[westsemiteblues]

I grew up around people whose parents and grandparents and great-grands came to Israel from Yemen in '49. I don't know why I feel required to say that, except to emphasize that this is not an abstract thing for me. It's the food Ruti would make for Shabbat when my parents went to her house, it's the way the most secular Israeli I ever met would still brag for hours about his grandfather the rabbi who brought his whole congregation safely to Israel, it's a friend asking her mom to spell the town the family came from again, for her school project.

These are real people. They are not abstract 'brown Jews' who can be propped up like paper dolls to mean anything you want without their permission.

[jewish-archives-blog]

A Yemenite Jew in Jerusalem, 1921. Originally published under the name "A Vernomito Jew in Jerusalem" as a postcard; vernomito is a misspelling of Yemenite.

[koenji]

Handwoven Yemenite Jewish prayer shawl, Southern Yemen, Early 20th century. 275 x 102 cm. Gift of Yihya Ovadya Gibli, Jaffa.

"In Yemen, the biblical commandment (Num. 15:38–39; Deut. 22:12) to attach tassels (tzitzit) to the four corners of one’s garment is fulfilled by attaching tzitzit to the four-cornered outer garment worn daily; in other communities, where daily attire is not four-cornered, special ritual garments—the prayer shawl (tallit) and the vest-like tallit katan—have come to be used for this purpose.

The Jews of Yemen wore several types of four-cornered garments to fulfill the tzitzit precept. In Sana'a and on the Central Plateau, an everyday black woolen shawl worn over the shoulders served as a tallit. This type of shawl was an integral part of the Jewish male’s dress in the region, and the indicative offwhite ritual tassels hung from its four corners. A more precious version made of highly refined black wool was worn in this region on the Sabbath.

The garment’s Yemeni Arabic name shamleh recalls the Hebrew word simlah, used in the Bible. Both words carry the idea of a wrapped outer garment that envelops the wearer, as does the tallit when worn during prayers. As a four-cornered garment, the shamleh was subject to the commandment to bear tzitzit, and wearing it allowed one to fulfill the commandment with an article of clothing that served daily functions. In addition to being an article of clothing, it served as a blanket when resting, or a bag for bundling and carrying goods.

In rural Yemen, all men, Muslims and Jews, slung a striped, brightly colored cotton shoulder-cloth around their upper body called a lih feh or masnaf, edged with a woven band and fringes. On the four corners Jews added the ritual tassels, identifying themselves as Jews.

In southern Yemen, the tallitot were woven in color schemes of green, red, and yellow on an off-white background. These were the standard outer garment in this region, either rectangular in shape, or poncho-like with a hole or slit in the middle for the head, similar to the tallit katan (a small, four-cornered garment worn to enable one to fulfill the tzitzit commandment if one’s regular outer garment was not four-cornered). Silk squares were sewn on to reinforce the four corners where the tassels were fixed.

Skilled Jewish weavers made these garments. Among Yemeni Jews, weaving was a widely practiced and highly respected profession, one that was considered to require special skills. In the poncho-like tallit, the edges around the head and neck opening were embroidered with stitches typical of the area. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ashkenazi white rectangular tallit with its blue or black stripes along the shorter, fringed hems, called shal in Yemen, frequently replaced the traditional Yemenite prayer shawls." x

[koenji]

Handcrafted Yemenite silver filigree Mezuzot (png) by Chaim Gershon "Gershi" in Bnei Brak. x

Yemenite silversmithing is a historic craft practiced by the Jewish communities of Yemen. It is especially known for its filigree work, which produces intricate designs using fine silver wire. The results are ornate jewelry and other cultural and religious items. The traditional techniques are often passed down through generations.

Yemenite Jews have practiced silversmithing since at least the 1700s at a time when Muslims did not engage in this work, and their products were highly sought after in the southern Arabian Peninsula and beyond.

Following the mass exodus of Yemenite Jews in the mid-20th century, the majority fleeing to Israel, Yemenite silversmiths have continued practicing and passing down their craft. It remains a renowned aspect of Jewish artistic heritage.

[koenji]

A Yemenite Jewish man looks after his grandchild in a refugee camp in Israel, 1949. Boris Carmi (1914 - 2002).

Since the Houthi rebels forcibly deported the last three Jewish families from Yemen in 2021, only one Jew is known to remain in a country that once held an ancient and diverse Jewish population. Levi Marhabi, held captive by the Houthis since 2016.