Rhodes, an island off the coast of present-day Greece in the Aegean Sea, has been home to Jewish communities since the first century BCE. Prior to the sixteenth century, the Jewish population on the island was relatively small and experienced discrimination from other island residents. Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the Ottoman conquest of Rhodes in 1523, an influx of Jews to the island led to the establishment of a vibrant community that would thrive for hundreds of years to come. Poor economic conditions prompted widespread migration in the early 1900s and the population significantly declined during World War II due to Italian occupation of the island. Researchers estimate the Jewish population on Rhodes to have been around 4,000 from the late nineteenth century until 1938, when approximately half of the population fled due to the Italian government’s anti-Semitic laws. Nazi German forces joined Fascist authorities on the island as World War II raged; during this period, authorities sent the vast majority of the remaining Jewish population to prison camps. By 2000, there were only about 20 Jews left in the city, mostly of Greek origin. 
          During Ottoman rule, the Jewish population lived in relative peace with the ruling Ottoman Muslims and Greek Christians, with the latter having comprised the majority of the population on the island. The Jews of Rhodes were free to practice their faith and built several large synagogues, including the oldest synagogue in what is now Greece, the Kahal Shalom Synagogue. They created a strong educational system, with two schools, one for boys and one for girls, alongside several Talmud Torahs, or religious schools. 
         While the events of World War II led to the direct destruction of the Jewish community on the island, steady migration of young men to Africa, Europe, South America, and the United States prompted the start of the population decline a few decades earlier. The Rhodesli or Greek-speaking Jews, as historians describe them, were Western educated and discontented with the lack of opportunities for economic advancement in the early twenithth century.  This situation led them to look for opportunities abroad. While the Rhodes economy had prospered earlier for the island’s Jewish residents, poverty remained widespread by 1900. The strong education system within the community gave rise to a well-educated young population whose members were ambitious and eager to secure livelihoods, leading to mass migration in the early twentieth century. This outflow of population further weakened the economy, as the sudden dearth of taxpayers led to diminished tax revenue. When the Italian government took over in the 1920s, it introduced several initiatives to benefit the island and its Jewish residents. These initiatives helped in the short term, but they were discontinued once Italy aligned itself with Germany in the wake of World War II and Italy began to institute Anti-Semitic laws on the island.
         The Rhodesli Sephardic men who settled in the United States immigrated through Ellis Island after traveling by ship.  Many of these migrants settled near Ashkenazi Jewish populations in New York. Though united by Judaism, a language barrier separated these communities, since Sephardic Jews spoke Ladino, while Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish. Sephardic Jews, along with Mizrahi and Romaniotes Jews became “minorities within a minority” within the US Jewish community. 
          According to recent estimates, Ashkenazi Jews, most of whom are of central European descent, make up 96 percent of the U.S. Jewish population, while Sephardic Jews, originating from Spain, Portugal, and the Ottoman Empire; Mizrahi Jews, Arabic-speaking Jews from the Middle East and Western Asia; and Romaniotes Greek-speaking Jews, from the former Byzantine Empire, comprise the remaining four percent. This fragmentation of the broader Jewish population led Sephardic Jews to continue to build their own communities in the United States, spurring further migration.
          A portion of the East Coast Sephardic population established communities on the West Coast, with the most prominent community at the time originating in Seattle. From Seattle, Rhodeslis continued south to Los Angeles and over the next few decades, a large population migrated from Rhodes to Los Angeles, leading to the formation of the “Juderia,” which was a Sephardic Jewish neighborhood. Though the community initially lacked higher education and English literacy, citizens pursued labor intensive jobs. Over time, the economic conditions of the population improved, especially compared to their economic conditions on Rhodes. Multiple Sephardic synagogues in Los Angeles organized prior to 1993, with one specifically tied to the Rhodesli community. In 1993, the two largest synagogues, the Rhodelsi synagogue and the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel merged, leading to the present-day Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel.
          The recipes present in the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook published by the Or Chadash Sisterhood of the Sephardic Temple Tiferteth Israel match the migration patterns and economic framework discussed above. A story published in the cookbook by Kaye Hasson Israel illustrates her family’s migration. After her parents left Rhodes in the early 1900s, Kaye herself was born in Seattle, and her family later moved to Los Angeles, where she is now a member of the Sephardic Temple Tiferteth Israel.

Bibliography
Angel, Marc. The Jews of Rhodes: The History of a Sephardic Community. New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1998.
Ben-Ur, Aviva. The Jews Who Weren’t There: Scholarly and Communal Exclusion in: Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History, 1-22. NYU Pres, 2009.
Detsch, Gotthard and Galate, Abraham. “Rhodes”. Accessed February 1, 2023.https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12727-rhodes.  
Hasson, Aron. “The Los Angeles Rhodesli Sephardic Community.” Accessed February 1, 2023.https://www.rhodesjewishmuseum.org/los-angeles/history/.
Jewish Virtual Library, “Rhodes, Greece”. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rhodes-greece-jewish-history-tour. 
Sephardic Temple Or Chadash Sisterhood. Sephardic Heritage Cookbook: Ottoman, Persian, Moroccan, Egyptian Recipes and More. South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016.
Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. “Asymmetric Fates: Secular Yiddish and Ladino Culture in Comparison.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 96, no. 4 (Fall, 2006): 489-509.