Community Magazine October 2012

Humble Beginnings – The Sephardic Voter’s League Maurice Hedaya is practically an army of one. With almost no budget, no regular staff (aside from a few dedicated volunteers) and no political experience or connections, Mr. Hedaya has, almost single handedly, brought the subject of voter registration to the forefront of the community. A tireless crusader who visits just about every community synagogue to carry out his mission, Mr. Hedaya started the Sephardic Voters League (SVL) in 1988. “We started [in order] to help get the Jews out of Syria,” he explains. At first he organized public meetings in the Sephardic Community Center in order “to acquaint the community about the issue” and to meet with candidates for public office. During one of those meetings, through the introduction of Rabbi Yizhak Fingerer, Mr. Hedaya met Joel Schnur, who was then working for AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), and Willy Rapfogel, head of Met Council on Jewish Poverty. They told him, “You want this thing to happen, get your people to register to vote and have an impact in elections.” And thus began the work of SVL to register the Sephardic community as voters. Registering voters from the community in those days, was hard work, Mr. Hedaya recalls. “Each one was a half- hour conversation, discussing jury duty, taxation… We had 130,000 forms from the Agudath Israel.” The community had to be convinced it was in their best interest to register to vote. “I would go to meetings and say, ‘You gotta vote’ and ‘We are paying a billion in taxes a year and we have no representation.’” Slowly, slowly, vote by vote, the community began getting involved. The SVL also started the Green Card and Immigration program. Once the Jews from Syria were freed and immigrated to the U.S., Mr. Hedaya says, “we realized how many immigrants were not officially U.S. citizens, and got to work encouraging and Politics – The Last Sephardic Frontier KELLY JEMAL MASSRY AND GOLDY ROSENBERG Leaders and supporters of the SCF presenting an award to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand last year. Pictured (l-r) SCF President Sam Sutton, SCF VP Ronnie Tawil, Philanthropist Joe Cayre, SCF VP Haim Dabbah, Senator Gillibrand and New York City Councilman David Greenfield Photo: Gindi Photography Having long established a world-renowned reputation for business, and after rising to the highest levels in many professional fields, including medicine, law, and finance, there remains a formidable frontier that vanguards and trailblazers of the prosperous Syrian-Sephardic (SY) communities of the New York area have yet to conquer: politics. And with hundreds of billions in potential government spending at stake, there is much more than just prestige on the line; case in point, the New York State education budget. In 2009, New York State’s median expenditure for a public school student was $19,607, while the median contribution per private school student was a paltry $203. Considering that over 98 percent of Sephardic K-12 students attend private, rather than public, schools, a typical community family with three school-aged kids might, perhaps justifiably, feel shortchanged to the tune of about $58,212 – every year! Taken together on a communal level, the potential aggregate sum of this one state allocation dwarfs the revenues of even the largest community businesses. But in spite of the enormity of the resources involved, it is only over the last 10 years that the Sephardic community has taken an organized and serious approach to working towards parity on this issue. 44 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE