Flory Jagoda, flame keeper of traditional Sephardic music

Flory Jagoda, a Bosnian-born guitarist and accordionist who brought the traditional ballads of her Sephardic ancestors and the melodies of the Ladino language to American audiences through performances and recordings, died Jan. 29 at a memory-care center in Alexandria, Va. She was 97.

The cause was complications of dementia, said her daughter Lori Lowell.

In an early life marked by war, persecution and dislocation, Jagoda said she found comfort in her heritage and the teachings passed down by her maternal grandmother — her nona — in the mountain village of Vlasenica.

In addition to Sephardic Jewish culture, her nona taught her the centuries-old Ladino language, now a rarely spoken Castilian Spanish dialect. She also passed on the legend of “La Yave,” the metaphorical key guarded by Sephardim that would one day allow them to return to their ancestral homes after being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 by order of Spain’s Catholic monarchs.

After surviving an internment camp during the Holocaust, Jagoda married an American soldier and settled in Northern Virginia in the 1940s. Calling upon her memories of her nona, as well as her considerable musical skill, she became a preeminent flame keeper of the Ladino language.

Starting in the 1960s, she and a circle of musical friends began hosting lamb roasts and other gatherings where they sang traditional Ladino music. Over the years, she became a regular at local folk festivals, eventually touring the United States and Europe. She recorded five albums, released her own songbook and composed a Hanukkah song, “Ocho Kandelikas” (“Eight Little Candles”), that was recorded by singers including Idina Menzel.

In recognition of her contributions to Sephardic music, the National Endowment for the Arts named her a National Heritage Fellow in 2002. She was the subject of the documentaries “The Key From Spain” (2002) and “Flory’s Flame” (2014).

Gerard Edery, a Moroccan-born guitarist and expert in Sephardic music, noted the “simplicity and honesty” of Jagoda’s music. “She was looking to pass on the tradition, as it were, almost more from an ethnomusicological place, even though she herself was just singing the songs of her childhood,” he said.

“I perform with a mostly very oriental Bosnian style because that’s how my nona sang,” Jagoda told the NEA in 2002. “A lot of trills, lots of embellishments.”

Flora Papo was born Dec. 21, 1923, in Sarajevo, where her father was a nightclub musician. After her parents divorced, Flora lived with her mother and mother’s family in Vlasenica, and she later took the surname of her stepfather (Kabilio).

She moved with her mother and stepfather to Croatia and had several years of musical and dance training in Zagreb. Her stepfather bought her a harmoniku, or accordion, that she played with such fervor that she considered the instrument a friend, she recalled to the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Her life became one of harrowing uncertainty after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. Using fabricated documents provided by her stepfather — and a non-Jewish name — she left Zagreb by train bound for the Adriatic seaport city of Split, which was then occupied by Italy.

Carrying a single suitcase and her harmoniku, she entertained fellow passengers by playing Serbo-Croatian melodies. “My father said, ‘Don’t talk. Just play the accordion,’” she later told The Washington Post. “I played it from Zagreb to Split. That little accordion, which I still have, saved my life.” (The conductor was so charmed, she recalled, that he neglected to ask for her papers.)

She was soon reunited with her parents in Split, and later that same year they were sent by the Italians with hundreds of other Jews to an internment camp on the Adriatic island of Korcula. They spent two years on the island, until being released in 1943, and from there she made her way to Bari, Italy.

Of more than 82,000 Yugoslav Jews, an estimated 15,000 survived the war, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. More than 40 members of her family perished.

After the war, she found work as a translator helping the Americans at a salvage depot in Bari. There she met an Army sergeant, Harry Jagoda, whom she married in 1945, fashioning a wedding dress from the silk of a parachute.

He left for the United States that December, and she followed a few months later on a Red Cross ship ferrying hundreds of Italian war brides. Her parents joined them two years later.