NEW YORK (RNS) — For years, Daniel Cayre felt conflicted about his place in Jewish communal and spiritual life.
On holidays like Yom Kippur, he’d go the first evening to a Reconstructionist synagogue that felt welcoming of his gay identity. On Yom Kippur day, he returned to the traditional Sephardic synagogue of his upbringing, where the melodies, spirituality and liturgy reflected his Syrian Jewish heritage.
Neither space felt complete: Most liberal synagogues followed Ashkenazi liturgical traditions, and Sephardic synagogues often leaned more conservative in terms of gender and sexuality.
“I started thinking there had to be a space for Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews seeking LGBTQ inclusion while still wanting traditional liturgy and community,” he said. Sephardic Jews are a diaspora group whose ancestors were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula 500 years ago by the Christian monarchy. Many Sephardic Jews migrated in exile across the Ottoman Empire. A related group, Mizrahi Jews, are those who trace family roots to Arab and Muslim lands; some identify as Sephardic, while others do not. Today, estimates for global Sephardic populations sit around 6.2 million, while Mizrahi populations (which overlap demographically) are estimated at 3 million. An estimated 10% of the American Jewish population identifies as having either Sephardic or Mizrahi roots, with communities today primarily concentrated in Israel and France.
Cayre, a 43-year-old Brooklyn-born real estate developer whose family traces its roots to Syria, is gay, married and a recent first-time father.
Attendees get food from a Hanukkah table at a Kanisse event in New York City. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Cayre)
As he spoke with others about a lack of spaces inclusive of their whole identity, Cayre realized many shared the same sense of absence. That led him to launch a New York-based modern Sephardic and Mizrahi community called Kanisse in 2021, in time for Yom Kippur, when Cayre and other lay leaders put together an egalitarian language Sephardic maḥzor, a holiday prayer book.
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