On March 25, 2016, Sarah Aroeste, a Sephardi singer-songwriter, released the first Ladino music album for children, called Ora de Despertar (Time to Wake Up). Soon after, she adapted it into a project including a children’s book and animated video series.

Aroeste grew up in the United States and trained in classical opera at Westminster Choir College and Yale University. While spending the summer of 1997 at the Israel Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv, she studied with Nico Castel, a leading Ladino singer, and quickly began to incorporate Ladino into her opera.

The Judeo-Spanish dialect of Ladino originated with Spanish Jews after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition and came to absorb fragments of languages in the countries to which they fled, including Turkish, Arabic, and Greek. Aroeste’s ancestors fled the Inquisition to Macedonia and Greece, and she works to pass on their Ladino tradition through music.

While living in New York City in the early 2000s, Aroeste realized nobody around her had heard of Ladino. She chose to study the language full time and released two albums featuring traditional Ladino music: A La Una: In the Beginning (2003) and Puertas (2007). In 2008 she was a finalist in Israel’s original Ladino song competition, Festiladino, where she performed her song with the Jerusalem Symphony.

In 2012, Aroeste began writing her own songs in Ladino. She released her first original album, Gracia, the same year, paying homage to the sixteenth-century Sephardic community leader Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi. Aroeste describes Gracia as “a mix of feminist, experimental, raw, rock-beat, energetic, empowering, electronic, retro-chic, Mediterranean-infused and fine-crafted, detailed sounds.”

When she became pregnant, Aroeste was unable to find any Ladino children's songs,  inspiring her to write and release her own Ladino children’s music in the album Ora de Despertar (2016). Her project won the 2016 Parent’s Choice Award and was quickly followed by the first original English/Ladino holiday song album, Together/Endjuntos (2017).

In 2017, Aroeste was invited by a group of non-Jewish residents to perform in her ancestral hometown of Monastir in the Balkans. She was inspired to record her next album, Monastir (2021), featuring more than 30 musicians from five countries singing in Macedonian, Ladino, and Hebrew. Monastir won Alma’s Best Jewish Album Award of 2021. She also released Hanuká, a Ladino Hanukkah album, in 2021.

Sources:

Aroeste, Sarah. “A Ladino Rock Revolution: A look back on my Sephardic Journey (part one).” Global Jews, November 9, 2021, https://globaljews.org/jewishand/a-ladino-rock-revolution-a-look-back-on-my-sephardic-journey-part-one/.

Aroeste, Sarah. “A Ladino Rock Revolution: A look back on my Sephardic Journey (part two).” Global Jews, November 11, 2021, https://globaljews.org/jewishand/a-ladino-rock-revolution-a-look-back-on-my-sephardic-journey-part-two/.

Aroeste, Sarah. “A Ladino Rock Revolution: A look back on my Sephardic Journey (part three).” Global Jews, November 15, 2021, https://globaljews.org/jewishand/a-ladino-rock-revolution-a-look-back-on-my-sephardic-journey-part-three/.

Sarah Aroeste. Accessed June 9, 2022. https://saraharoeste.com/home.