Isaac Choua

Isaac Choua

Rabbi · Sephardic scholar and editor · nonprofit leader in national security and Jewish communal life

I work at the meeting point of Sephardic tradition, scholarship, and public life: building institutions, recovering texts, and making the Sephardic and Mizrahi inheritance legible to a wider world.

Ordained as a rabbi and rooted in the Aleppan and Lebanese Sephardic world of my family, I lead policy and communal organizations by day and edit and translate classical Sephardic works by night. My through-line is the same in both: institutions and texts are how a community remembers itself, and both deserve to be built carefully.

Work

Executive Director
Council for Secure America (CSA)
Current
New York (part-time)
JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa
2026 to present
Communal leadership
Kehila Janina · the Brotherhood · haSepharadi
Ongoing
World Jewish Congress
Prior role
through 2025

Scholarship and projects

Megillath Antiyokhus

A critical Sephardic edition of the Scroll of the Hasmoneans, with translation and commentary across its witnesses.

Trilingual Haggadah

A Passover Haggadah in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and English, with commentary in the Sephardic tradition.

The José Faur Library

A sourced, interlinked edition of the works of Rabbi José Faur, translated and organized for study.

The Syrian Dictionary

A lexicon of the Syrian Jewish community's living Judeo-Arabic, recorded as a work of fieldwork lexicography.

The Crown of a Good Name

A play and book on Keter Shem Ṭoḇ, with a companion audio drama in production.

Digital editions

Encyclopedia and Mishnah digitization projects making large reference corpora searchable and linked.

Writing

I write on Sephardic and Mizrahi history, identity, and the long arc of Jewish life in the Middle East. Essays appear on my Substack.

Read the Substack → [CONFIRM: link]

Contact

theisaacchoua@gmail.com