The Afghan Liturgical Quire Speaker Series

Jason, a social entrepreneur who specializes in building broad coalitions and melding intellectual and technical innovation, is the American Sephardi Federation’s Executive Director, founding Executive Director of Digital Heritage Mapping, and coordinator of DHM’s flagship initiative, the Diarna Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life, which was a 2017 cover story in Newsweek and profiled in the June 2020 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

A summa cum laude graduate of Sacred Heart University, where he served as the first Jewish class president, was a fellow of a Muslim civil rights organization, and organized a Freedom Concert against the Iranian regime, Jason was named to Connecticut Magazine’s “40 under 40” and to the New York Jewish Week’s “36 under 36.” He has presented Diarna at Stanford University’s Digital Humanities Center and the USC Shoah Foundation, conferences of the Association of Jewish Studies, Association of Jewish Libraries, Limmud UK, US Department of State/Moroccan Rabita Mohammadia of Ulema, and the World Wide Human Geography Data Working Group (WWHGD), guest lectured classes at Harvard’s Middle East Studies Center and at Wellesley College, represented the American Sephardi Federation at the Mecca-based Muslim World League’s “National Conference on Peace, Harmony and Coexistence” in Sri Lanka, the Baku World Forum, the Moroccan Royal Inauguration of Bayt Dakira in Essaouira, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ Missions to Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, written for AJS Perspectives, Sh’ma Journal, Wexner Foundation Newsletter, The Algemeiner, Newsweek, and the Brown Journal of World Affairs, as well as appeared on NPR’s “Here & Now” and in SmartHistory.

Jason is an alumnus of the Tikvah Fund’s Fellowship and Core18 Leaders Laboratory.

Ruth Langer is professor of Jewish studies in the Theology Department at Boston College, its director of Graduate Studies, and associate director of its Center for Christian-Jewish Learning. She received her PhD in Jewish liturgy in 1994 and her rabbinic ordination in 1986 from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Her scholarship addresses two primary areas: the development of Jewish liturgy and ritual from antiquity to today; and Christian-Jewish relations. Her book Cursing the Christians?: A History of the Birkat HaMinim (Oxford University Press, 2012) combines these two interests, tracing the transformations of a Jewish prayer that was, until modernity, a curse of Christians. Several articles similarly trace the history of other prayers that were objects of Christian censorship, including the aleynu.

She is also author of To Worship God Properly: Tensions between Liturgical Custom and Halakhah in Judaism, published in 1998 (Hebrew Union College Press). This book examines the interplay between liturgical law and custom in the medieval world, investigating the tensions between rabbinic dictates and the actual practices and understandings of the community. She also published Jewish Liturgy: A Guide to Research (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), an annotated bibliography of over 1,000 entries of English-language studies of Jewish liturgy accessible to those from outside the Jewish studies world. She also co-edited Enabling Dialogue about the Land: A Resource Book for Jews and Christians (Paulist Press, 2020) and Liturgy in the Life of the Synagogue (Eisenbrauns, 2005). She has also published over 100 articles.

Sara Koplik, PhD, attended Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in history, and later the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. There, she received a master's degree in Central Asian studies and a doctorate in Middle Eastern history. She is the author of A Political and Economic History of the Jews of Afghanistan (Brill, 2013) as well as journal articles and chapters on the Mizrahi Jewish experience. From 2016 to 2021, Dr. Koplik founded and directed the Sephardic Heritage Program at the Jewish Federation of New Mexico. Under her leadership, the program helped thousands of individuals across the globe. She also edited the New Mexico Jewish Link for over a decade.

Currently, she is the executive director of the Aaron David Bram Hillel House at the University of New Mexico.

Osnat Gad was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, to parents from Afghanistan. In 1947, her parents and their extended family moved to Bombay, India, to avoid mobs declaring their intention to kill the Jews after the partition of India and Pakistan. Once Israel was a new country, 30 members of her family moved there in the early 1950s. In 1961, she moved to the United States. There, her parents were deeply involved in their Afghan Jewish community.

In the early 1980s, Gad established her firm specializing in importing precious gems from countries that mined them. The culture of those countries prevented a free exchange of business between men and women, but through persistence and perseverance, she gained fame and success. Her jewelry line is now carried in more than 200 jewelry stores throughout the USA.

In 2013, Mr. Sarajuddin Saraj, an engineer from Herat who supervised the restoration of the Jewish synagogues by the Agha Khan Foundation, reached out to Gad. He was asking the Afghan Jewish community for financial assistance to repair the mikveh in one of the old Jewish synagogues that had been converted into a girls’ school. Through this, Gad realized the 500-year-old Jewish cemetery in Herat was also in dire need of restoration. Throughout, Mr. Sarajuddin stressed the importance of the project and the preservation of Jewish history in Afghanistan.

He obtained permits from the US State Department, the Afghan DC consulate, and Kabul and Herat Antiquities authorities. With the support of the Afghan Jewish communities in New York, London, and Israel, the project took six years and Mr. Sarajuddin secured the existence of the cemetery by building four 10-foot walls around it.

The Herat cemetery project availed opportunities for Gad’s growth and commitment to Jewish history and the existence of the Jewish people. Today, Gad lives in Sag Harbor, New York, and runs four ecommerce businesses, commuting between Manhattan and eastern Long Island.

Sara Aharon is the author of From Kabul to Queens: The Jews of Afghanistan and Their Move to the United States. She has spoken about her research at universities, libraries, and community centers across the US. Formerly at the Anti-Defamation League, Sara is a psychotherapist and licensed social worker in group private practice. Her work and research revolve around how resilience and perseverance develop among individuals and communities across the lifespan, and how an individual and community frame their story. She studied modern Jewish history and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University and NYU, leadership coaching at Columbia Business School Executive Education, and received her clinical training at Yeshiva University's Wurzweiler School of Social Work.