About Linda Capeloto Sendowski

Video (2 1/4 minutes) about the ancestry of Linda Capeloto Sendowski

I am Linda Capeloto Sendowski and I am an American Sephardic Jew. Although both of my parents were born in the U.S., their parents came from the Greek island of Rhodes and the Turquoise Coast of Turkey.

Being a Sephardic Jew means that my ancestors came from Spain and were forced to leave or become converts to catholicism when Queen Isabella signed the infamous and draconian declaration of the Inquisition in 1492. Sephardim (plural) scattered all over the globe, some as members of the crew of Christopher Columbus (it is rumored), some to Amsterdam or Portugal, but many of them settled in the Ottoman Empire. At that time, because the sultan of the Ottoman Empire appreciated the learning and the skills that the Jews possessed he invited them with open arms to live and prosper in his empire.

I am married for more than 30 years to an Ashkenazic Jew, born in the U.S., whose parents came to the United States from Poland and Czechoslovakia after the Holocaust. In my kosher kitchen I cook both Sephardic and Ashkenazic dishes plus I revise recipes from all over the world to fit into the requirements of kosher cooking. I am on a mission to create and codify oral recipes from the Sephardic community and archive them for history. I would say that the second part of my mission is to create an interest in actually cooking by showing how to step by step and demystifying the process.

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