We are Jews who are Indigenous to Judea and Samaria, Southwest Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. We are MENA Jews that include Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi diaspora ancestries – along with Levantine Jewish families (those families that never left our Land of Israel, despite every attempted ethnic-cleansing by Arabs and Europeans over the last 2,000 years). Our website here, http://www.takemeon.org/dir, is offered to this world to give our extreme Indigenous Judean minority a voice on the social media platforms. Rather than listening to non-Jews and successfully colonized Jews telling our Jewish people’s historical and cultural story, listen to us instead – we MENA Jews by ancestry – who know intimately our Jewish people’s history and culture in the Levant and greater Middle Eastern regions!
Admin for this Jewish Indigenous Rights Advocacy Org Web Site
Chacham Yosef ibn Yehuda – שלום! Who am I? I am the son of a mother who is by direct descent, as is all her mothers before her, a Sardinia Indigenous. I am the son of a father who is, as is all his fathers before him, a Levant Indigenous. The genetic admixtures that my DNA retains – percentages of geographical here and there from Jewish relations with non-Jews who have been added into the Jewish tribe – from my mother’s side shows relations with people that are from Sardinia, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom. The consistent (never changing in percentage) admixtures that my DNA retains from my father’s side shows relations with Jews, Portuguese, Greeks, and Hungarians. Yes, I am a Sephardi Jew by direct descent! But, DNA doesn’t make you Jewish. Embracing Judaism – the culture, stories and laws, language, lived history, and fate of the Jewish people – is what makes you Jewish.
I am Yosef ben David ibn Yehuda, also known by my colonial name as Joseph Tsefanyahu Farkasdi. And I am your chachám for as long as you see me as such. I am an accidental chachám (a “thought-leader”, “sage”) from too much personal studying into our Indigenous Judean ways. I only want to see the end of European and Arab settler Colonialism and of its inherent systemic racism – antisemitic and skin-color based racism – and to see the creation of a messianic age of genuine peace among humans – in all our inherited differences – from the sharing of these words in this web site here. The only path to peace and security amongst human beings is to allow all surviving Indigenous nations, starting with Israel, to fully decolonize as independent sovereign nations amongst the Colonial established nations upon planet Earth.
More about me personally – I grew up as an island Jew, a chiloni trapped in a quasi-Christian and quasi-Indigenous world. Ever rebelling against the world around me. I come from an ancestry of Sefardi Jews on my father’s side that found their way up to Hungary after 1492. They were, due to pre-WW2 antisemitism experiences, poor Jews that immigrated from Europe. WW2 turned our family elders deeply silent about their past, and about their transfers of money to the Old World.
And, worse,… So, much has been lost in history for our quote “American” family, due to the Shoah. But, as the Ashkenazi Jews of the island taught me, I am a “pintele yid”, for the blood itself, the ancestors, has driven me to returning. Not too many people in this world understand that ancestral memory is real and it seeks expression in the present.
Hence, the older I got, the more of a cheider I became. Studying anything and everything Jewish, all because my family name proved to me that my lineage is deep and needs to be explored, as the blood in me kept urging day in and day out.
I traced my family line back to, apparently, Satmar land. Which explained to me “why” I feel affinity with Jews who have a Heredi upbringing. Hence, my inexplicable need as a youth to buy Chafetz Chaim’s ספר המצוות הקצר, even without a yeshiva nor Israeli understanding of עברית at the time. I guess it was the name Chafetz Chaim , “Pursuer of Life”, that caught my blood’s attention in this purchase.
Then, I came upon a cassette, before military service, of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi ע”ה chanting tefillah. A couple of chants, I still chant in his derech to this very day. My daughter was born quite the vocalist as I was born and proved to be, so tefillah it is! It doesn’t really matter where a Jew is from, only that our emunah is being expressed. Authentically, from the heart, regardless the raised method of expressing this.
So, between feeling (and experiencing, however brief) relationship with and warring with Arabs, between experiencing Western and Eastern expressions of Jewishness, between growing up between Colonists and Indigenous, I have an Indigenous sense of understanding about this world. Without a destined and predetermined bubble of social influence to abide by.
I guess, this means that I will always offend everyone, Indigenous and Colonizer, in my expressions. And also those who are partially successfully colonized – either way – in between. I’ve never settled into a communal social camp fully, because of this. I understand the importance of every human’s perspective, but I also understand that still surviving Indigenous Peoples NEED to be heard and respected. It will always be my derech to address this latter.
I don’t know “why”. I am just living life through my particular lens, like all others who are around me. I can never be mad or hateful, but I can be bluntly real and honestly expressing from my experience of life. Even though I know it is likely to offend others. It is always such a blessing to me, when those who protest SO MUCH keep engaging with me!
שמע ישראל נקיים את חובתנו לאחד את העולם! לא יהיה לי אלהים על פני. זכור את יום השבת לקדשו.
Who We Are at TakeMeOn. We are Jews who are Indigenous to Judea and Samaria, our Southwest Asian Canaan land of Israel.
Learn more about us here – http://www.takemeon.org/dir/