Summary
Joe Pessah (b. 1945), an Egyptian Karaite engineer who emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1970 and became the acting rabbi and principal organizer of the Karaite Jews of America, presented in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as the leading figure of the Bay Area Karaite community’s reestablishment (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3204-3342).
Details
- Pessah grew up in an Arabic-speaking home in Cairo’s harat al-yahud al-qara’in and studied engineering at Cairo University; he was the only one of Jehoash Hirshberg’s thirty 1986 questionnaire respondents who had attended daily prayers at the Dar Simha synagogue there (Chapter 7, note 15) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3204-3342).
- As a boy he knew Moshe Marzuq and took pride in him personally rather than ideologically; after Marzuq’s arrest he thought he also wanted to be a spy, and at the executions he thought only of Marzuq, not of Azar. He held that the Egyptian Karaites had a religious attachment to Jerusalem and that living in Israel would hasten the messiah, “but this was not a commitment requiring secular political action” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3204-3342).
- He described the upheaval of arrival in America: “We were no longer privileged khawagat (foreigners). I had never worked for anyone else before. Now we were at the bottom of the social pyramid and rejected as Jews” (Chapter 7, note 14) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3204-3342).
- Detained in the prison camps during and after the 1967 war, he married Raymonde (Remy) Gazzar in an Egyptian jail on May 31, 1970, was released on June 21, 1970, and immigrated to the United States with Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society assistance; remarried two months after arrival by Rabbi Herbert Morris, the couple did not tell the rabbi they were Karaites, feeling he would not understand who they were, and the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin’s front-page account of the wedding did not mention their Karaite identity (Chapter 7, notes 21–22) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3204-3342).
- Even the Pessahs, who became the community’s most energetic organizers in the 1980s, felt unable to claim their Karaite identity when they first arrived; only after Joe Pessah established his own computer-consulting business did he devote substantial time to organizing. He has served continually as acting rabbi of the Karaite Jews of America since its formal establishment in July 1983, leading services and guarding the purity of the Karaite liturgy against Rabbanite or exogenous practices, while encouraging children to listen to Egyptian music and keeping contact with Egypt through magazines such as Ruz al-Yusuf and Uktubir (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3204-3342).
- With Remy he began publishing the KJA Bulletin in 1984, maintains the computerized mailing list of Karaites in the United States, and organizes the Lake Tahoe Karaite summer camp (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3204-3342).
- His liturgical pragmatism is the chapter’s example of “reform Karaism”: on driving to Sabbath services, “it was much better to encourage such people to drive and attend synagogue because it was obviously impossible for them to do so if they did not drive” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3204-3342).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Karaites, Karaite Jews of America, Jacob Masliah, Moshe Marzuq