Romaniote American Oral History Project
A community-sourced archive for preservation, research, and inspiration
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What does it mean to be a Romaniote Jew in the US in the 21st Century?
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After more than 100 years in America, Kehila Kedosha Janina is excited to launch this new research project to document our community today, exploring questions of identity, culture, preservation, & adaptation.
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We want to hear from you! Submit testimonies, family stories, recipes, photographs, traditions, songs, memories, & more.
Contact Theo Canter at Theo@kkjsm.org to learn more and contribute your voice as we write the next chapter of our community’s story.
​Project Overview
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The Romaniote Greek Jewish community has had a presence in Greece dating back millenia, with a rich, varied, and distinct Jewish existence despite their small size — both historically and especially after the Holocaust. There has been some historical and anthropological research on the community’s traditions and culture, both religious and social, but mostly focused on the community in Greece. There has been even less research produced to study the Romaniote community in America, where it best survives today in terms of both numbers and communal integrity.
Kehila Kedosha Janina, the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, thus seeks to create the Romaniote American Oral History Project. KKJ will use the resources of our community network — numbering in the thousands, across continents and age — to catalog over a century of the Romaniote American experience.
While remaining a strong community with links to our homeland across the ocean, Romaniote Americans have achieved a great level of both societal integration and economic success in a variety of fields, akin to other members of both the Greek-American and Jewish-American diasporas.
Although many of our community members no longer have living family links to Greece, nor speak the Greek language of our ancestors, there remains a strong connection to our heritage, particularly the social and cultural traditions both inside and outside of the synagogue.
Methods
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We seek to gather a broad collection of material in as accessible a way as possible. This will include oral testimony via audio, video, and writing. It will also include historical documents, recipes, holiday traditions, melodies, family photos, memorabilia, etc. We will develop a template document with guiding questions for people who want to interview their own family members and friends, and develop a digital channel for them to upload these testimonials. As individual entries are gathered, we will tag them with categories such as “holidays,” “food,” “music,” “Lower East Side,” and more.
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Ultimately, we hope that the material gathered can help keep our community alive and united, help preserve the traditions recorded, and provide a repository for academics and artists seeking to work in this exciting but under-catalogued niche. It is also our hope that the material gathered will enable us to create a digital and portable museum exhibit that can be exhibited both at KKJ and travel to synagogues, community centers, and museums elsewhere.
