OFAKIM, Israel — Thirty women with roots from across the Middle East stood outside a Turkish fortress last Friday, Feb. 9, hawking platters of Moroccan beef kebabs and salmon, Tunisian couscous, Persian kubeh, Kurdish stuffed cabbage, Karaite noodles, Yemenite soup, and Iraqi pastries.

The food festival outside the development town of Ofakim was a delicious, unique, and kosher culinary experience for hundreds of people who came from all over Israel.

It was also something more: an opportunity for Sephardi women in Israel’s relatively isolated South to learn how knowledge of their past could help give them a brighter future.

The Ofakim and Merhavim regions in the Negev desert are sister communities of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ under the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Partnership 2000 program.

The women who had made and sold the food participate in Partnership 2000’s Women’s Ethnic Empowerment Group, an initiative sponsored by UJC MetroWest to develop their cultural heritage and use it as a tool to improve their lives.

Through the group, the women, in their 40s to 70s, research their roots and teach each other about their former communities, holidays, and traditions, including culinary traditions. Some have developed family trees tracing 40 generations.

Through five weeks of Friday afternoon food festivals, as well as other catered events, the women aim to raise enough money to allow them to come to New Jersey, where they are set to cater UJC MetroWest’s Israel Independence Day events in April.

The original plan was to bring 15 women to New Jersey through the Levin Cultural Endowment. But the group’s 30 women decided that rather than split the group, they would raise enough money to allow all of them to go.

The festivals have received significant coverage in local media, and the first two weeks sold out.

“The phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” said Smadar Kaplinsky, initiator of the event. “The people of Israel want to help women from the periphery, and they want to tour the land and meet the people. There’s a lot of love here.”

Kaplinsky said she has witnessed a transformation in the women since they began.

“Barely anyone knew each other before, but they have quickly become friends,” Kaplinsky said. “The women have realized that they have a valuable asset and they never knew it before. Now they recognize they are something.”

UJC-MetroWest Israel operations director Amir Shacham said that throughout the first decade of the partnership, he explored different ways to highlight what is special about Ofakim and Merhavim and what the areas could contribute to MetroWest and to the rest of Israel.

Shacham said he realized over time that the most impressive natural resource of Ofakim and Merhavim is its people. They come from a variety of ethnicities and have preserved their cultures more than their counterparts elsewhere in the country, due in part to their relative isolation. He said Kaplinsky came to him with the idea, and it has been a big success.

“We wanted to emphasize the energy of the community and the teamwork,” Shacham said. “This is an opportunity to allow these women to participate in the partnership for the first time, to go abroad and to show their strengths. But most of all, it has renewed their self-confidence.”

Many of the women are elderly and have never left Israel since they arrived in the wave of immigration from Arab and Muslim countries in the 1950s. Unlike participants in many MetroWest programs in Ofakim, most of the participants in the women’s group do not speak English.

To raise additional funds, in upcoming weeks they will cater events for delegations from Intel, the North American Coalition for Israel Education, and the UJC MetroWest religious pluralism in Israel committee.

Following their trip to the United States, many of the women want to continue holding food festivals and bringing delegations from Israel’s top companies to Ofakim. Some are even considering opening restaurants.

Some 1,500 people came to the first Friday of the festival on Feb. 2, including such celebrities as Dror Kashtan, the Israeli soccer team coach. A story on the festival was broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2, leading to another 2,000 people coming the second week on Feb. 9.

Many organizations, after hearing about the initiative, made contributions of cooking ingredients, tables, and chairs.

The food is prepared in a centralized location and not in the women’s homes in order to ensure that kosher standards are maintained. A rabbi from Merhavim provides kosher certification to the food at the festivals.

Yaffa Arush, Ofakim mayor Avi Asraf’s volunteer adviser on culture and events, said the women are looking forward to going to New Jersey and paying back the people of MetroWest with their tasty delicacies. Asked whether Ofakim’s Ashkenazi women were jealous of the initiative, Arush, who is Moroccan, said, “No, they are happy; they buy from us. They are our clients.”

Tamar Ben-Aharon of Merhavim’s Moshav Bitha distributed lemonade at the Feb. 9 event. She wore traditional Yemenite garb, which she received from her grandmother Ruma. She told stories about how her father played tricks as a child on a riverfront in Yemen, and then she sang and danced to a Yemenite tune.

Kadima Knesset Member Shai Hermesh, a former Jewish Agency treasurer and mayor of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council, came to the event with his wife. They sampled the fare and left with packages of food for their family to enjoy on Shabbat.

Hermesh said the festival would leave its mark not only on the women of the region, but on the Negev as a whole.

“The festival is an opportunity for people from the center of the country who would have never come here to find out that there is life outside Tel Aviv,” Hermesh said. “It gives people an opportunity to learn about Israel, love the country, and deepen their roots here. It’s important that people who are used to hearing negative reports about rocket attacks and unemployment in the Negev instead hear positive stories about the quality of life here.”