After Joseph Jemal’s mother Sally passed away in 2020, he longed for the taste of her sambusak, a type of Middle Eastern pastry she stuffed with spiced meat. Sally “loved cooking. She loved catering to her family and she loved making a lot of the Syrian Sephardic pastries. She really specialized in them,” he recalls. 

Joseph searched the Sephardi grocery stores in his community in Deal, New Jersey, but none of the sambusak he found matched the ones his mother made for Shabbat appetizers and her mazza, a spread of delicious appetizers like torpedo-shaped kibbeh, lahmajun, pickles, and olives she prepared for guests. 

Both Sally and the family’s mazza tradition came from Syria. She was born Sarah Chira in 1918 in Aleppo. Her father died of the Spanish flu and when she was little, she moved with her mother to Brooklyn, just before the stock market crash of 1929. “She came into this country illegally by way of Mexico and Cuba,” going by the name Maria Rodriguez, Joseph explains.

In Brooklyn, she adopted a new name once again. Her friends told her “Sarah” was old fashioned and she should pick one that was modern and American like Shirley or Sally. She chose Sally. And when they found out she didn’t know her birthday, they told her once again to pick one for herself. She celebrated her birthday on July 4th every year after that. 

When Sally was in her early 20s, there was a candy store in the neighborhood where young single members of the community would meet up and socialize. That’s where she met Joseph’s father Norman on a weekend when he was in town for business. Shortly after, he waited all day in a taxi outside of the linen shop where she worked on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to see her again. “This was on a Monday and they were married the next Sunday. It was a one week courtship,” Joseph shares.    

When Joseph was little, his family lived in Honolulu for his father’s work. He attended the same school as Barack Obama “and all my friends were non-Jews. I came home demanding a Christmas tree and wanting to see Santa Claus at a department store,” he says. That’s when his parents decided to move back to Brooklyn and enroll him in yeshiva. Their Syrian Jewish community in the 1940s and 1950s was still small and very close knit — everyone knew one another and stuck together. 

Shabbat dinner in their home was part of every week with dishes like a tangy soup called hamod, string beans, chicken with potatoes, and stuffed vegetables. To start the meal Sally made her meat sambusak or other treats like kibbeh, which the family of 10 would snack on before dinner around the coffee table. 

His mother lived to be 102 and continued to cook until nearly the end of her life. In her final few years, she lived with Joseph and he would watch her in the kitchen. But it wasn’t until Sally passed away and Joseph went on those unsuccessful grocery shopping trips, that he tried to make sambusak himself. 

“It took a few times — there were several misses, there’s no question about that,” Joseph shares. But he mastered the recipe relatively quickly. Today he makes the sambusak and stores them in the freezer to give it to his children. 

In his kitchen, there’s a picture of his mother on the wall “and she's smiling at me every day — it’s really something,” he adds.