Misha Gabriel Avramoff z”l

Misha Gabriel Avramoff was born to a Sephardic family in Sofia, Bulgaria, and, like many children of the Jewish middle class, attended a Catholic school. He spoke Bulgarian with his parents, Ladino with his grandparents, and French in school. In 1949 his family, together with 95 percent of the community (all members of which, with the tragic exception of the Macedonian Jews, survived the war intact), emigrated to Israel. His four years in Israel were critical in shaping his identity as a secular Israeli. When his family moved to the United States he became passionately involved in a Zionist youth movement as a way of maintaining his fierce attachment to Israel. But by the time he graduated from high school he began to recognize a need to redefine himself. He was no longer an Israeli, but an American Jew. While attending Columbia University in the 1960s he took courses in jewish history and religion and became involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements. At that time he became a United Synagogue Youth advisor and this began his life’s work of transmitting to teenagers his sense of discovery and awe-with all the struggles that such a modern encounter entails- of Judaism’s complex past and traditions.

Misha Avramoff served as the youth director of Temple Beth-El in Cedarhurst, Long Island, from 1965 to 1970 and as a teacher in the Hebrew High School of the Five Towns in Lawrence, Long Island, from 1965 to 1979. He taught in the high school havurah at the Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore from 1971 to 1990 and directed the havurah program at Temple Israel in New York City from 1982 to 1991. He has been teaching at the Judah Nadich Hebrew High School at the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan since 1979 and also serves as its coordinator. In addition, since its inception in 1973, he has been co-director of Project Ezra where he has helped to shape its ethos as a hands-on, grass-roots organization serving the Jewish elderly poor on the Lower East Side.

He and his wife have traveled extensively, always seeking out Jewish communities, in Western and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as the cities and villages of North Africa, Turkey, Iran, and the Far East. They have visited the Jews of Cochin and the B’nai Israel in Bombay, met the single remaining Jew in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), and found the last Jew in Penang, Malaysia, whose days were spent tending the old cemetery on Yahoodi Street.