The Participants

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Sima K. Canoush was born in Baghdad, Iraq and grew up in Israel, where her family arrived as Jewish refugees in the 1950s. She has been a Jewish educator for decades, teaching Hebrew and Judaic studies to K-8 grades at Brandeis-Hillel and Beth Shalom in San Francisco, Beth Jacob in Redwood City, and Rodef Shalom in Marin. Canoush is passionate about Middle Eastern Jewish heritage and is an active member of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa). In 1998, Canoush was filmed in The Way Home, a documentary exploring the intersections of racism and sexism. Canoush also is a certified and practicing massage and reiki therapist, and she is trained in social work and Hakomi body-centered psychotherapy. In addition, she is a visual artist, and her paintings have been featured at an art exhibit in the Mission district of San Francisco.

Rabbi Tsipi Gabai, a Moroccan-Israeli Jew of Sephardi heritage, is the first female rabbi from the Moroccan community and one of four female Mizrahi/Sephardi rabbis worldwide. As one of the few women internationally who teaches Mizrahi and Sephardi songs, prayers, and Torah trope, Gabai plans to open the first-ever egalitarian Mizrahi/Sephardi synagogue in the world. Gabai is the Assistant Director of Tehiyah Day School in El Cerrito, the Director of Judaic Studies at the school, and one of the middle school teachers there. She has worked as a Jewish educator for decades. Over the past few years at Tehiyah, she developed a cutting-edge middle school curriculum on North African and Middle Eastern Jews, which has since been incorporated into the JMCP curriculum. As part of this work, Gabai's students exhibited their hand-crafted Moroccan Jewish art work at the Oakland Museum.

Joseph Wahed grew up in Heliopolis, Egypt and arrived in the U.S. as a Jewish refugee in 1962. For the last 30 years, he has served on numerous committees of San Francisco's Jewish Federation, including the Business and Professionals Organizing Committee and the Investment Advisors Committee of the Endowment Fund. He is currently a founding members of JIMENA , through which he lectures about the 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Wahed has a PhD in Political Economy and is the retired Chief Economist for Wells Fargo Bank's central office in San Francisco.

Gina Bublil Waldman grew up in Tripoli, Libya and has since spent her life as a human rights activist. For 14 years, she worked as Director of the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews, where she worked with dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Anatoli Scharansky and where she organized the first-ever Jewish art exhibit from Russia. She now does volunteer work with refugees, through Jewish Family and Children's Services, and she is one of the founding members of JIMENA , through which she speaks on panels about the current Middle East crisis.