Funded Projects Query Form
One match

A digitization day and simultaneous presentation on Ladino history and culture in the Pacific Northwest. These events would be followed by a second public event that would study and interpret the heritage items digitized during the initial digitization day. Seattle is one of the major global centers of Ladino culture and language, and the community would be invited to contribute heritage materials documenting the local community, including postcards, letters, photographs, memoirs, travel documents, marriage certificates, recipes, musical notation, and other items. With permission, digitized items would be made available as part of the Center’s digital collections in collaboration with the University of Washington Libraries. Events would be co-sponsored by the university as well as the James Garfield High School.

The University of Washington proposes to host a one-day digitization event titled “Seattle’s Sephardic Legacies” at Garfield High School in Seattle’s historic Central District in May, 2018. This event will feature presentations by humanities scholars on the little-known history of the Sephardic community in Seattle, Washington, during the Great Depression, and trace the lasting contributions of this demographic to the city’s industrial and cultural landscape today. At this event, which will be open to the public, a team of University archival workers will digitize a range of materials written in Ladino, the vanishing language of the peripatetic Sephardic people of Europe and North Africa. With permission from the owners, these items will be included in the Sephardic Studies Digital Archive at the University of Washington, the world’s first and only robust library and archive of original materials pertaining to the history and experience of the Sephardic people.