Jack Zaraya and wife Wendy Sabin have created an endowed fund to support Sephardic Studies, honoring Jack’s Sephardic heritage

As the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this spring, 2025 marked a milestone for the Sephardic Studies Program with the generous creation of the Jack Zaraya and Wendy Sabin Endowed Fund in Sephardic Studies, which will support a wide range of efforts in Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington.

Lily and Daniel Zaraya, circa 1937 in New York City

Born and raised in the Bronx to Sephardic parents from Salonica (today known as Thessaloniki, Greece), Jack Zaraya grew up on the Grand Concourse, where the iconic New York thoroughfare was punctuated with the sounds of his mother, Lily, speaking spanyol, also known as Judeo-Spanish or Ladino. “We never called it Ladino,” Jack says. “At home, it was always muestro spanyol [‘our Spanish’]… I remember when I was 16, my friend, Joe Schachter [who was Ashkenazi], introduced me to his father as his ‘Sephardic friend.’ His father asked me if I spoke Ladino and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what they call it!’”

It’s no surprise language also became a key element of Jack’s professional life. A longtime member of the New York newspaper guild, Jack was a career journalist, rising from copy editor to copy chief with The Morning Telegraph as well as holding positions with the Associated Press and as a ceremonial resolution writer with the New Jersey legislature.

The photograph of Lily Molho, circa 1936 in Paris

Over time, the focus of Jack’s writing turned inward, leading to the pages of his memoir, “Danny and Lily: Recollections of a Son.” “In my retirement, I took a writing class at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Rutgers University,” Jack says. “I started writing about my family and the memoir literally wrote itself!”

“Danny and Lily” is the story of Jack’s parents: a whirlwind courtship that started with a single photograph and ultimately crossed continents. Lily was living in Paris when Danny’s mother, Rikula, learned of the eligible Sefardita (Sephardic woman) as a possible match for her then-bachelor son.

Danny Zaraya presses clothing in a garment factory, circa 1955 in New York City

Danny had arrived in New York from Salonica when he was 13 years old and, by the time he saw Lily’s picture in his late 20s, had been fully “Americanized,” including working in the boiler room of a US Marine Merchant ship and becoming the first in his family to own and drive a car (a 1934 Packard).

In the fall of 1936, Danny set sail for Paris to meet the woman in the photograph, and two weeks later they were married.

The pages of “Danny and Lily” are filled with Jack’s vivid memories of summers spent in New York’s Rockaway Beach in a boarding house with immigrants from Salonica, such as the aromas of Sephardic cuisine cooking on Friday nights. Most of all, the memoir serves as a personal record of Sephardic history, the preservation of which has motivated Jack and Wendy’s generous endowment.

“I became fully aware of [Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies] Devin Naar’s scholarship during the pandemic lockdown, and have closely followed his career ever since,” Jack says. “With all that his program has done to preserve the language and culture, specifically of Sephardic Jews from Salonica, it is very important to me that it continues.”

Read Jack’s memoir, “Danny and Lily: Recollections of a Son,” in its entirety, and learn more about supporting the Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington.