Judy Frankel keeps Sephardic music alive

By Amy Kaufman

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Together, Judy Frankel and Jewish audiences will not let Sephardic music die.
About 250 attended Frankel's Aug. 9 con-?-
cert of Seph-ardic music, filling PSU's Lincoln Hall to overflowing on a sultry Monday night.
The singer's translations and anecdotes unlocked the meaning of Ladino songs that many heard for the first time that night. Among the rapt listeners was Alegre Tevet, who sang along with "Morenika," a favorite song in her youth in Salonika, Greece.
Tevet, who survived Auschwitz and came with her husband to America, said Frankel's commentary and rendition of the old songs were excellent.
Frankel said more than 55,000 of the 65,000 Jews of Salonika were killed during the Holocaust.
Frankel not only has saved the vestiges of Sephardic music on her several CDs; she has composed her own songs, which the audience found equally compelling.
One melody was "created to support" the poetry of Matilda Serrano of Jerusalem.
Frankel also sang a song on which she collaborated with Isaac Papo of Sarajevo: "Golden Sarajevo is being destroyed -- by yesterday's neighbors."
The special beauty of Sephardic music emerged in a "Spanish table hymn sung after dinner -- in the 17th-century converso community" and "a song about a dark beauty," which the composer Chaim Tsur heard his mother sing. Frankel said he urged her to add it to her repertoire.
Frankel has searched the world for Sephardic songs that might otherwise have been lost.
The free concert was sponsored by the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University, in cooperation with the 14th Annual Conference of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.