At the Sephardi Table

Among the Western Sephardim — the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, London, New York, and the wider Atlantic world — the singing does not end when the service does. It moves to the table. The same rite that fills the Esnoga and Bevis Marks on Shabbat morning continues, in a softer register, over the family meal: a hymn to open, table-songs, reshuyot, and graces through the courses, and a quiet psalm at Havdalah to see the Sabbath out.

This collection gathers sixteen of those songs, sung by two families of the rite — most by Rabbi Jonathan Cohen and family, and a handful (among them a Mozart-melody Adon Olam) by Hazzan Daniel Halfon and family. Rabbi Cohen, a former Visiting Rabbi of Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, has spent years documenting the melodies of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews — “distinctly Sephardi, yet also distinctly Western.” Each song carries its full Hebrew text, a transliteration, a translation, and a short note on where it comes from; the material is distilled from his London Sephardi Music and Jewish Table Singing, and the recordings are the family’s own, shared for non-commercial, educational use.

They are sung today, in the Hudson Valley, at Kehillah Kedoshah Zikhron Zvi — the living community at the heart of the Program’s Western Sephardi Liturgy project.

Companion collection. Where this page gathers the songs of the home, Western Sephardic Liturgical Classics gathers the music of the synagogue — psalms, piyyutim, Kaddishim, and the great prayers — in the public-domain recordings of Hazzan Daniel Halfon.