About Miriam

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Religion from York University, a Masters in Islamic Studies from The Hebrew University and the University of Toronto, and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Toronto. I am a corporate/securities lawyer in Toronto. I have always been interested in my family history (particularly my Sephardic ancestry) and have a passion for learning about the Arab world and the Middle East.

Note: I have not studied genealogy nor the proper processes for recording data. My main goal was to preserve the data and make it accessible to others.

Grandpa & I

Acknowledgments

Without the assistance of the following individuals, this project would not have been possible:

• Eli Ifrah, my husband and biggest supporter, without whom this project would not have become a reality. Although not his family history (He has French Moroccan and Tunisian ancestry), he was excited to help me learn about mine and willing to spend his vacation in a dusty hot room in Morocco painstakingly taking photographs of every page of every book we could find. He searched Jewish cemeteries filled with garbage with me for hours and hours trying to locate the graves of my great-grandparents. He negotiated in French past every hurdle we encountered and was persistent to get us access to the synagogues and people we needed to see. He shared our project updates with the same excitement as I did. I am grateful for his support.
• My mother, Denise Benzaquen Levin, supported this project from the beginning. She sponsored the second trip back to Morocco and gently reminded me at least monthly over the last ten years to complete the project. She encouraged my siblings and I have to have a very close relationship with our grandparents and I am grateful for the many memories I have of my grandparents. She is involved in many philanthropic endeavors, including several supporting the Moroccan Jewish community in Toronto.
• Philip Abensur was an invaluable help in reviewing the translations and assisting with the project throughout. I emailed him on a daily basis as I worked through the documents and he gave me input and edits throughout. He has written several articles on Jewish genealogical sources for the north of Morocco and recently published two books with photographs and old postcards : "Tanger entre Orient et Occident" and "Tétouan cité marocaine aux racines andalouses", Editions Alan Sutton. He was generous with his time and instrumental in making this project a reality.
• Sidney and Gladys Piamenta were critical in helping identify errors in my transcription. They have also recorded certain other registers which I was able to compare to mine. They published a book “Actas de la Junta Selecta de La Comunidad Hebrea de Tanger”; a transcription manuscript that gathers the official reports of the meetings held between 1860 and 1883 by the first electe and organized meeting of the Jewish community in Tangiers.