Image credit: Dayna Smith
Stay tuned in to our local news coverage: Listen to 90.7 WMFE on your FM or HD radio, the WMFE mobile app or your smart speaker say “Alexa, play NPR” and you’ll be connected.
Singer, songwriter, guitarist and accordionist Flory Jagoda worked hard to preserve the music and language she inherited from her Sephardic Jewish ancestors in her adopted American home. Named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002, she died on Jan. 29 at age 97 in Alexandria, Va. at a long-term memory care facility, according to an obituary placed by her family.
Remembering Flory Jagoda, Who Preserved Sephardic Jewish Music And Language – Nation & World News wuft.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wuft.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Flory Jagoda, flame keeper of traditional Sephardic music, dies at 97 Ryan Di Corpo Flory Jagoda, a Bosnian-born guitarist and accordionist who brought the traditional ballads of her Sephardic ancestors and the melodies of the Ladino language to American audiences through performances and recordings, died Jan. 29 at a memory-care center in Alexandria, Va. She was 97. The cause was complications of dementia, said her daughter Lori Lowell. In an early life marked by war, persecution and dislocation, Mrs. Jagoda said she found comfort in her heritage and the teachings passed down by her maternal grandmother her nona in the mountain village of Vlasenica.
Read this article in Yiddish
Flory Jagoda, the Sarajevo-born Holocaust survivor and Sephardic musician who brought Ladino music to the wider world died last month at the age of 97.
Jagoda was a lifelong lover of her native-langauge, Ladino. To many, she is the first name which comes to mind when thinking of Sephardic and Balkan Jewish music.
Flory Jagoda poses with her guitar and signature white accordion.
“With the recent passing of Flory, we not only lost a Ladino-speaking nonagenarian, but a Sephardic matriarch considered to be the
nona (grandmother) of the Ladino language,” said Bryan Kirschen, a professor of Ladino language at Binghamton University. “Through her music and language, she brought Judeo-Spanish to the world.”