Documentary to disco: Harif's 20th anniversary bathes JW3 in colour

An evening to mark the departures and expulsions of Jews from Arab lands and Iran ‘shows how daft the white colonial settler’ thing is

An event at London’s JW3 to mark the departure and expulsion of Jews from Arab lands and Iran opened with on-screen testimony. Speakers told of their forced flight from Egypt, Syria and Iraq: the sudden urgency some faced – “there’s no time to get your medicine, just forget it” – as well as the deep sense of belonging that was overturned in an instant.

But Thursday evening’s sold-out event was also a 20th birthday celebration for Harif, the UK charity that promotes the history and culture of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.

So, after the testimonies, the mood shifted as the stage filled with the Judeo-Arabic party sounds of the Eastern Beats collective. Only minutes after delivering a formal speech, the president of the Board of Deputies, Phil Rosenberg, was boogieing in his seat.

Phil Rosenberg and Harif co-founder Lyn Julius at the 20th anniversary event

Rabbi Joseph Dweck, in one of his last engagements before stepping down as leader of the Sephardi community, also addressed the event. Referring to the film, compiled by Ciara Shalome, he said: “Every story is a universe… Every time a [synagogue] member told me a piece of their own story, it was an honour to listen.”

And as he stood beside a board listing the hundreds of thousands of Jews displaced from places including Algeria, Lebanon, Libya and Tunisia, he said: “You see these countries? They live inside of us. And they’re alive. And as we come out through all of this struggle we come out with the beautiful colour, the multi-colour, the tremendous nuance that is the people of Israel.”

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Rabbi Dweck, who is about to make aliyah, said he thought the Ashkenazi-Sephardi prejudice that had been so formidable a few decades ago was disappearing, especially in Israel. “All of those colours are beginning to find their way into a harmonious tapestry.”

While the rabbi may have missed the evening’s finale – a belly-dancing floor show in the bar area followed by a Mizrahi-pop disco DJed by Emily Theodore – the Board president partied until the end.

Also on the dance floor was Lyn Julius, co-founder of Harif. She told Jewish News: “I am very proud of the fact that Harif has been able to put the story of the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews on the map, and the packed house at JW3 testifies to how important it is to remember their expulsion and celebrate their heritage. But our work will not be done until every Jew thinks of the Mizrahi story as his or her own.”

The evening clearly impressed Marc Cave, director of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Nottinghamshire. “If ‘Jews don’t count’, then brown Jews don’t even exist,” he said. “The world is ignorant of the Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, who went back home after 2,500 years of living in exile, like Boney M said, ‘By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, and yea we wept, when we remembered Zion.’

“That’s why I love what Harif does. Tonight we watched soulful performances in Judeo-Arabic, Yemenite Hebrew and Farsi. What a beautiful celebration of not just coexistence but co-creation. It shows how daft the whole ‘white colonial settler’ thing is.”