On a Saturday morning in Seward Park, the prayers do not sound like the Yiddish-inflected Hebrew of most American synagogues. At Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, the melodies carry the cadence of the island of Rhodes, and over kiddush the older congregants slip into Ladino, a Spanish their ancestors carried out of Iberia in 1492 and kept alive for five centuries. The Sephardic Jews in Seattle built something rare on the shore of Lake Washington: a Judeo-Spanish world transplanted, almost intact, from the Ottoman Mediterranean to the Pacific Northwest.
It started, as the story goes, with two young men, a fish stall, and a chance conversation about a city none of them had ever seen.
Seward Park: The Place
Seward Park sits in south Seattle, a leafy residential peninsula jutting into Lake Washington about six miles from downtown. The neighborhood wraps around a forested city park of the same name, with quiet streets of mid-century homes climbing the slopes above the water. Two Sephardic synagogues anchor it, and a kosher market and Jewish day schools sit within walking distance, the modern heart of a community that began three miles north in the old Central District.
How Seattle Became a Sephardic Capital
Before the Sephardim
Seattle’s first Jews were Ashkenazi, German and Eastern European merchants who arrived in the late nineteenth century and built their lives along Yesler Way and up the hill into the Central District. By the 1890s a recognizable Jewish quarter ran from roughly 12th Avenue east into the avenues numbered in the thirties, with the Orthodox congregation Bikur Cholim at its center. When the first Sephardic Jews stepped off the train, this Ashkenazi world was the only Jewish community waiting for them, and the two groups could barely understand one another. One prayed in Yiddish, the other in Ladino.
The Sephardim Arrive
In 1902, Solomon Calvo and Jacob Policar left the island of Marmara, in the Sea of Marmara near Constantinople, and made their way to Seattle. The reason was almost accidental. In the version told and retold in the community, Calvo fell into conversation with a Greek acquaintance whose brother had just come back from a place called Seattle, full of water and opportunity, and Calvo decided to see it for himself. The city’s maritime setting felt familiar to men raised on a fishing island.
At first there were too few of them even to pray together. Until 1906 the Sephardim worshipped at the Ashkenazi Bikur Cholim, and Calvo and Policar lived in a converted shed behind the building, doing janitorial work in exchange for rent. Policar took a job in a butcher shop. Calvo peddled fish, then opened his own stall, the start of a trade that would define the community for generations.
In 1904 a third pioneer arrived, Nissim Alhadeff, this time from the island of Rhodes. The story tells of these early men meeting in a Greek coffeehouse and discovering, with astonishment, that they all spoke the same old Spanish. Word traveled back across the ocean. Letters and remittances pulled brothers, cousins, and whole families out of Marmara, Tekirdag, Gallipoli, and above all Rhodes. This chain migration, one relative summoning the next, is the engine of the entire story. By the time the doors were closing in the 1920s, Seattle held the largest concentration of Sephardic Jews on the West Coast.
Seattle at Its Peak
By the 1920s the community had split, gently, along the lines of the old country. The Jews from the Turkish towns, Marmara, Tekirdag, and Gallipoli, gathered as Sephardic Bikur Holim, while the Rhodeslis built their own congregation, Ezra Bessaroth. Both took root in the Central District, within blocks of each other, and the neighborhood filled with Ladino. After Shabbat services, families strolled Yesler Way, stopping at Sephardic grocery stores and coffeehouses where men played backgammon and the talk ran in Judeo-Spanish.
The kitchens told the same story. Women baked bourekas and boyos, the flaky coiled pastries of spinach and cheese, alongside biscochos and bulemas, recipes measured by hand and memory rather than any book. This was the world the Ladino speakers would later mourn and celebrate in equal measure, a tight grid of streets where you could live an entire life in the language of Sepharad. Seattle had become, by proportion, the most Sephardic Jewish community in America.
The Change
Two forces pulled the community south. As the children of the immigrants grew prosperous and educated through the 1940s and 1950s, they wanted newer homes, and the Central District was shifting, becoming increasingly African American as Seattle’s neighborhoods sorted along the racial lines that shaped so many American cities. Most of the Jews moved out, to Mercer Island, the Eastside suburbs, and especially Seward Park.
The congregations followed their families. Ezra Bessaroth relocated to Seward Park in 1958, and Sephardic Bikur Holim made the same move not long after. The old grid on Yesler Way emptied of its Ladino, and a new center formed on the lake. It was the end of one era and, as it turned out, not the end of the community.
The Landmarks of Sephardic Seattle
Congregation Ezra Bessaroth (5217 S Brandon St, Seward Park). The spiritual home of Seattle’s Rhodeslis grew out of a Rhodes mutual-aid fund and was incorporated in the 1910s, with its first Orthodox synagogue opening in 1918. Inside, the liturgy still follows the distinctive melodies of Rhodes, a sound that very nearly vanished from the earth when the island’s Jewish community was destroyed in 1944.
Sephardic Bikur Holim (6500 52nd Ave S, Seward Park). Founded by the Sephardim from the Turkish towns and incorporated in 1914, SBH is the larger of the two congregations. Decades later, when scholars went looking for old Ladino documents, they found a trove stuffed into Safeway grocery bags in the synagogue’s basement, an archive of a vanished literary world that researchers nicknamed the Safeway Archives.
The Pike Place Market fish stalls (85 Pike St). When the public market opened in 1907, Sephardic newcomers found their trade waiting for them. By the 1920s nearly a dozen of the market’s fish stalls were run by immigrants from Turkey and Rhodes, and the roster of fishmongers read like a Sephardic census: Alhadeff, Levy, Amon, Calderon, Ovadia, Bensussen. In 1923 Nissim Alhadeff took over a waterfront operation, renamed it City Fish, and reopened it in the market with David Levy running the counter.
City Fish at Pike Place (1535 Pike Pl). The Levy family sold fish from a single market stall for seventy-two years, fathers handing tongs to sons across generations. On one legendary day, five different men named Isaac Levy were all working in the market at once, a small comic monument to just how many Sephardic families the place absorbed.
The old Central District quarter (around Yesler Way and Cherry Street). For roughly half a century this was the living center of Sephardic Seattle, its synagogues, coffeehouses, and grocery stores clustered in the avenues east of downtown. The buildings have been repurposed and the Ladino has faded from the sidewalks, but the neighborhood was where the community learned how to be both Sephardic and American.
The University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program (Jackson School of International Studies). Led by historian Devin Naar, himself of Sephardic descent, the program has assembled what is described as the world’s first major digital library of Ladino sources, gathered from the closets and basements of Seattle families. Hundreds of Ladino books, documents, and audio recordings now live online, a vanished world rescued one Safeway bag at a time.
Where the Seattle Sephardim Came From
Almost every Sephardic family in Seattle traces its line to one of a handful of Ottoman places. From the Turkish side came the towns of Marmara, Tekirdag, and Gallipoli, clustered around the Sea of Marmara, whose Jews founded Sephardic Bikur Holim. From the eastern Aegean came the island of Rhodes, whose emigrants built Ezra Bessaroth and whose melodies and recipes still define so much of the community’s character.
Behind those towns lies a longer journey. These were the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, who found refuge in the Ottoman Empire and there preserved their Spanish for four hundred years. The pressures that pushed them toward America in the early 1900s, military conscription, political upheaval, and the slow collapse of the empire, sent them looking for a port that felt like home. A maritime city full of fishing work felt close enough.
That connection to Rhodes carries a wound the community does not forget. In July 1944, German forces deported nearly the entire Jewish population of Rhodes and nearby Kos, around 1,700 people, on what became the longest journey to Auschwitz of any Jewish community. Only about 150 survived. For Seattle’s Rhodeslis, this was not distant news; it was the death of grandparents, aunts, and cousins whose photographs sat on mantels in Seward Park. The living tradition carried on here became, in part, a way of keeping faith with the relatives who never made it out.
Sephardic Seattle Today
Seattle remains the third-largest Sephardic community in the United States, after New York and Los Angeles, numbering several thousand people. By proportion it stands alone: since the First World War no American city has had a higher share of Sephardim within its Jewish population. The two old congregations, Sephardic Bikur Holim and Ezra Bessaroth, still face each other across Seward Park with several hundred families between them, and the fourth generation now fills the pews.
The Ladino, inevitably, has thinned. Few young people speak it as a mother tongue anymore, and the last native speakers, the Ladineros, are treasured for exactly that reason. But the response has not been quiet mourning. Hazzan Isaac Azose, who led Ezra Bessaroth’s music for more than three decades, spent his later years recording the Rhodes melodies and producing the Seattle Sephardic prayer book so the liturgy could outlast its last memorizers. Each December the city marks Ladino Day at the university with song, food, and the old refranes.
A century after two young men from Marmara stepped off a train, the bourekas still come out of the synagogue kitchens by the dozen, and the prayers still rise in the accent of an island half a world away. The Sephardic Jews in Seattle did not simply remember where they came from. They kept it breathing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Sephardic Jews settle in Seattle?
The first Sephardic Jews in Seattle, Solomon Calvo and Jacob Policar, arrived in 1902 from the island of Marmara after hearing the city described as a place of water and opportunity. The maritime setting suited men raised in Ottoman fishing communities, and once they were established, chain migration drew relatives from Marmara, Tekirdag, and Rhodes. Many found work in the fish and produce trade at Pike Place Market.
Is Seattle still home to a Sephardic community today?
Yes. Seattle has the third-largest Sephardic community in the United States and, by proportion, the highest share of Sephardim of any American city’s Jewish population since World War I. The Sephardic Jews in Seattle are now centered in Seward Park, where two historic congregations and a fourth generation of families keep the traditions alive.
What are the main Sephardic landmarks in Seattle?
The two great congregations are Sephardic Bikur Holim, founded by Jews from Turkey, and Ezra Bessaroth, founded by Jews from Rhodes, both now in Seward Park. The historic fish stalls of Pike Place Market, long run by Sephardic families like the Alhadeffs and Levys, and the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program are also central to the community’s story.
Where did Seattle’s Sephardic Jews come from?
They came from the Ottoman Empire, chiefly the Turkish towns of Marmara, Tekirdag, and Gallipoli and the island of Rhodes. Their ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and preserved their Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino, for centuries. The Rhodes community was almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust in 1944, which deepened Seattle’s role as a keeper of that heritage.
When did Sephardic Jews first arrive in Seattle?
The first Sephardic Jews in Seattle arrived in 1902, when Solomon Calvo and Jacob Policar came from the island of Marmara. A Rhodes pioneer, Nissim Alhadeff, followed in 1904, and steady chain migration over the next two decades built one of the most significant Sephardic communities in America.
If your family’s story passed through the coffeehouses of Yesler Way, the fish stalls of Pike Place, or the islands of the Ottoman Mediterranean, the threads are still there to follow. Seattle’s Sephardic story is one of many that connect a Pacific Northwest neighborhood to a homeland an ocean away, much like the Jewish immigrants who filled the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, and the Japanese families of Seattle’s own Nihonmachi just north of the old Central District.