Arthur Benveniste

Arthur Benveniste was born in Los Angeles in 1933. His parents, Israel “Harry” Benveniste and Rebecca Russo, were from the Island of Rhodes. He grew up in the Ladino-speaking community of Jews from Rhodes and was a Sephardic Hebrew Center synagogue member. He attended the University of Southern California from 1952 to 1956 and taught Social Studies in the Los Angeles Unified School District from 1959 to 1993. He is the editor of “Halapid” (Crypto-Jewish studies) and “The History of the Sephardim in Los Angeles”.

For years, he has been tracing the roots of Sephardic culture and collecting books and materials on the subject. He has visited many Jewish sites in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Morocco, Turkey, Greece, and South America. During the 1970s, he began videotaping the reminiscences of people from Rhodes.

In 2000, Arthur Benveniste became a volunteer to head the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel (STTI) Archive, which the late Bob Hattem helmed. The STTI Archive has now been gifted to the UCLA Library Special Collections.

For more info, visit Arthur’s YouTube page