Point of no return

Yemen Jews cast their votes from their new homes

2008-11-23T17:35:00.008Z

It looks like the 52 Yemeni Jews who were resettled in the capital San'aa after fleeing their homes in Sa'ada province are resigned that they will not return.

This report in The Yemen Observer says that the Jews have decided to cast their votes in the constituency in which they now live.

The rabbi of the al-Salem Jews , Yahya Yousef Mosa, said that the Jews decided to transfer their votes from Sa'ada to Sana'a so as to be able to practise their democratic right as voters and candidates . "None of us intends to nominate himself for the upcoming parliamentary elections because we are a minority, though we will practise our right as voters," said Mosa.

The Al-Salem Jews fled Sa'ada province after they had received threats from the supporters of the al-Hothi rebels in 2007.

The government granted them accommodation in the tourist city of Sana'a. Yahya Yousef Mosa said that he and the other al-Salem Jews will not go back to their home village al-Hayd in Sa'ada because it is not safe, and because living in the capital is much better. "Here in Sana'a is safer and better for educating our kids," said Mosa. However, he appealed to the president of the Republic Ali Abdullah Saleh 'to instruct the authorities concerned to write ownership contracts for the apartments that were given to al-Salem families to live in.' (By this he most probably means he would like to be given legal ownership of the apartments where the Jews now live.)

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Crisis scuttles Beirut synagogue restoration

2008-11-21T15:01:00.007Z

The global financial crisis has put paid to plans to restore the Maghen Avraham synagogue, reports AP. But could Lebanon's continuing instability be the real reason why would-be donors have cold feet?

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — One of Lebanon's sole remaining synagogues was set to get a restoration that has the rare blessing of all the factions in this divided country — even that of the anti-Israeli Hezbollah. But the global financial crisis has scuttled the effort for now, leaving the Magen Abraham chained, padlocked, badly damaged and rife with weeds.

The synagogue, like the country's once-thriving Jewish community, fell prey to the savage 1975-90 civil war (In fact 90 percent left after 1967 - ed). Once the fighting ended, the few dozen Jews who remained could not maintain the proud old structure.

A $1 million project set to begin in November had been organized by the Lebanese Jewish community to restore the two-story ramshackle building which is now surrounded by the gleaming new skyscrapers of Beirut's downtown building boom.

But potential overseas Jewish donors who were to provide the bulk of the funds said the reconstruction would have to wait because of the hard times brought on by the global financial crisis, said Isaac Arazi, leader of the country's tiny Jewish community ('self-proclaimed' leader, as nobody in the Lebanese Jewish diaspora appears to have heard of him -ed).

"I'll wait for two or three months. If no money is forthcoming, I'll launch a fundraising campaign in America and Europe for the rebuilding project," he told The Associated Press.

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Bahrain blazes a trail, but will the Jews return?

2008-11-20T07:56:00.007Z

As this excellent JTA News report shows, the King of Bahrain is making bold and remarkable efforts to lure his former Jewish subjects back to the tiny kingdom, promising to reinstate their citizenship and even give them land for housing. But the younger generation's links are now remote, and it is difficult to see his campaign as more than a public relations exercise designed to curry favour with the Americans.

NEW YORK (JTA)—Bahrain, the little Persian Gulf nation where pluralism has been the exception to the regional hegemonic rule, is learning that the best way for democracy to survive is to replicate.

Without explicitly saying so, Bahrain is softly encouraging the U.S.-led push for democratization in the Middle East as the means toward stabilization. Its rulers have made their treatment of the tiny Jewish community in Bahrain a showcase of how to achieve peaceful pluralism.

King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa met last week in New York with about 50 Bahraini Jews who had immigrated to the United States, and did something almost unheard of in the Arab world: He invited them home.

“It’s open, it’s your country,” he said.

The offer extended to younger generations and included specifics, including allocation of land for homes.

In a region where efforts to export ideology have often exploded into conflict, Bahraini officials are careful to say that they are pleased only to serve as an example, not as a beach head.

"What we do in Bahrain is for sure for Bahrain, it’s not to be exported," King Hamad said in an interview with JTA.

Yet it is clear that the nation, host to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and a major non-NATO ally of the United States, regards the Bush administration’s efforts in keeping with its own reforms. Bahrain officials subtly hint that the U.S. push for democracy in the region is playing catch-up to a country that launched a transition to constitutional monarchy in 1999.

"Our reforms were before Sept. 11," Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, the Bahraini foreign minister, said in an interview, referring to the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. "The American democratic program for the Middle East came after Sept. 11. They thought that extremism is linked to lack of freedom and democracy. Well fine, we agree with that."(...)

Taking the lead in reaching out to Israel and to Jews internationally is part of that equation. King Hamad stressed that such outreach was made in the context of the Saudi-led "Arab initiative," which posits comprehensive peace in exchange for a return to the borders prior to the 1967 Six-Day War.

"It has been declared that we have this Arab initiative which would really normalize the relationship with Israel as soon as this conflict is over," he told JTA. "And you know very well Bahrain would love to have this conflict gone away from the scene a long time ago, we would love to see that day."

Still, Bahrain is more out front than its neighbors. The nation ended its participation in the Arab League boycott of Israel last year, something al-Khalifa is still called to defend before the Bahraini parliament.

"I said, we are democratizing, why should we tell people what to do or not to do?" the foreign minister recalled. "If they don’t want to buy something, it’s up to them. This boycott office is really contrary to our philosophy."

"Al-Khalifa cast such thinking as critical to bringing peace to the region, especially ahead of Israeli elections in February that could return hawks to power.

"We need to comfort and put the Israeli mind, citizens, at peace when he goes to the ballot box, that there are partners, not only Mahmoud Abbas," the Palestinian Authority president, "but others in the region."

Al-Khalifa recently proposed a regional grouping that would include Iran and Israel even before agreements are in place as a means to reaching accommodation. Such a grouping would start by dealing with the removal of weapons of mass destruction, sharing diminishing water supplies and cooperating on environmental controls.

"We need to lay these foundations for the future," the foreign minister said. "Israel is there to stay, Iran is there to stay. (...)

Practical considerations underpin Bahrain’s outreach: The kingdom’s oil wealth is expected to dry up within the next two decades, and the nation needs new strategies to thrive in the region. Quitting the Arab boycott was a condition of a free-trade pact with the United States. A peaceful neighborhood would help move development along, al-Khalifa said.

"In Bahrain we are caught between many places and hard places," he said, riffing on the old line about a rock and a hard place. A causeway separates Bahrain from one major theocracy, Saudi Arabia; a gulf separates it from another, Iran.

Bahrain, ruled for centuries by Sunni Muslims, has a Shi’a Muslim majority, and that has led to tensions, at times stoked by Shi’a Iran. Indigenous Shi’a have criticized the king’s outreach to Bahraini expatriates, Jewish and otherwise, as a way of containing Shi’a growth. They also note that the island’s democracy, although exemplary in the region, is limited: The king still appoints his own cabinet, and the parliament’s powers are limited.

Still, the Western-oriented pluralism that King Hamad is nurturing arises out of indigenous traditions. Starting in the late 18th century, the al-Khalifa family sough British protections from Persian hegemony, and the country has since welcomed traders, infusing the island with its multicultural sensibility.

The tiny Jewish community—just under 100 (in fact there are no more than 30 - ed) in a population of about 800,000—is descended from Iraqi Jews who sought opportunities in the 19th century British Empire. Before the creation of Israel in 1948, some 600 Jews lived in Bahrain. After the war, some emigrated, mostly to the United States and Britain.

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Jewish property confiscated in Iraq 'worth $18 m'

2008-11-18T23:00:00.006Z

Some $18 million worth of Jewish property has been confiscated in Iraq, a former adviser to the Iraqi president has told The Jerusalem Post. Quoting a German study by the university of Hanover, Mirzan Hassan Dinayi, a Kurdish Yazidi, said that the Iraqi government has ignored minority rights to compensation, while it has failed to protect minorities generally from Islamic radicalism.

Religious extremism is the biggest threat facing minorities in Iraq today and could ultimately see the war-torn country emptied of these populations, a former adviser to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

More than 40 percent of Christians are believed to have emigrated from Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein and Iraq was now seeing a mass migration of the Yazidi religious minority to Europe, said Mirzan Hassan Dinnayi, a Kurdish Yazidi who was Talabani's adviser on minorities in the first half of 2005, and now lives in Germany.

Just last month, large numbers of Christians were driven out of Mosul in northern Iraq and other cities, he said.

"The biggest danger for them is Islamic religious extremism in Iraq and the 'Islamization' of the street - this is what scares religious minority communities," Dinnayi said in an interview, before giving a lecture at the Hebrew University's Harry S. Truman Center for the Advancement of Peace.

The danger "is the killing based on [religious] identity," he said.

The worst-case scenario, he said, was "that the displacement that is happening will empty Iraq of its minority communities."

Other religious minorities in the country include the Mandaeans, the Shabaks and a small number of Jews. Roughly 60% of Iraqis are Shi'ites, and 34% are Sunnis.

The Yazidis, for example, who make up an estimated 2.5% of Iraq's population and practice one of the most ancient religions in the Middle East, were targeted in three large-scale attacks in 2007.

On February 15, 2007, in the Yazidi city of Shaikhan, "hundreds of radical Muslims" destroyed and burned the Yazidi temple, cultural centers, cars and shops, shot aimlessly at houses and citizens and demanded that the Yazidi people leave the area and emigrate, Dinnayi said in his lecture.

The next day, they beheaded a Yazidi mother of four children.

On April 22, 2007, 24 Yazidi workers were killed in Mosul by a group of gunmen. The attackers were aided by the police, whose headquarters ordered all checkpoints to move away from the area.

The next day, an intensifying anti-Yazidi movement caused 820 students to leave their faculties at the University of Mosul, where all Yazidi families have now left.

And in August 2007, extremists attacked in the Sinjar district, killing 311 people, wounding 800 and leaving 70 missing.

Not only was there a lack of laws to protect these minorities, Dinnayi said, there are few mechanisms to implement the laws that did exist.

While the Iraqi constitution protects the rights of all its citizens, "nothing from the constitution until now has been implemented regarding minorities," he said.

One solution was "international solidarity" for all minorities, he said. Another would be the stabilization of the security situation in Iraq and an eventual transition to a democratic state and "a state of laws."

In addition, one Kurdish official in northern Iraq has proposed establishing a "safe zone" in the Nineveh Plain for the Christian minority. The autonomous region, where Assyrian would be the official language, would have legislative and executive authorities.

However, Dinnayi said, there were many questions about the feasibility and even the wisdom of such a move.

"If this 'Islamization' of the street and radicalization in Iraq becomes stronger," something he expects, "which written law can protect this small island in an ocean of Islamic radicalism?"

Meanwhile, most of the minority members who suffered from "Arabization" measures imposed by Saddam Hussein's regime in northern Iraq, including displacement, forced relocation and confiscation of property, had still not been compensated, said attorney Said Pirmurat, a specialist in Iraqi criminal law who also lectured at the Truman Center on Tuesday.

While a solution to these policies was sought with the adoption of Article 140 of the Constitution of 2005, the measures have not been implemented.

In addition, Article 58 of the Iraqi Transitional Administrative Law of 2004 says that all confiscated lands must be returned to their owners or be compensated for, "but the Iraqi government has ignored this article," said Pirmurat, a Yazidi who also lives in Germany.

Both Yazidis and Jews had suffered from measures instituted by Saddam's regime, such as sequestration of property and displacement and destruction of villages. Yazidis in particular had suffered because they were both Kurds and members of a religious minority, he said.

One study from the University of Hanover in Germany estimated that some $18 billion worth of property was confiscated from the Jews, Pirmurat said.

"Article 58 leaves an opportunity also for Jews to claim what was confiscated from them during these years," he said.

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How good for the Jews was Mohammed V?

2008-11-17T07:28:00.001Z

How much of a friend to the Jews was the wartime king of Morocco, Mohammed V? Some go as far as to say he saved Jews from deportation by the Nazis; others that he simply did not have the authority.

Morocco was not under Nazi occupation, unlike Tunisia in 1942. The Vichy government imposed its own anti-Jewish regime in Morocco, the 'statut des juifs'. According to the historian Nathan Weinstock,the Moroccan king did not object to a single Vichy law, but placed his seal on each decree. He could have used his right of veto but chose not to. The rights of his Jewish subjects were just not worth a confrontation with Vichy.

Jews were thus banned from public office, quotas applied and they were forced back into the Mellahs. The king not only ratified (Weinstock,'Une si longue presence' p142) but EXTENDED a 1941 decree banning Jews from having Muslim maids.

The discriminatory Dhimma legislation was integrated into Moroccan law, and the king was complicit in this.

On the other hand, a 1941 telegram from the French foreign ministry, uncovered in the mid-1980s, discussed the worsening tensions between the French authorities and the king because of Mohammed V’s unwillingness to distinguish among his subjects."There are no Jews, only Moroccans," the king was reputed to have said. Some Moroccan Jews even claim that he asked the French authorities to bring him yellow stars for his family to wear; others say the story is apocryphal.

Michel Abitbol, the eminent historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has a different take. He makes a distinction between Mohammed V, the man, and the statesman.

"People forget that real power lay with the Resident-general of the French protectorate, he told Information juive (July/ Aug 2008 - Les juifs d'Afrique du Nord sous Vichy). The king kept the trappings of sovereignty, but had no way of opposing the French, unless he put his throne at risk, as he did in the early 1950s. In the 1940s, however, the king had no choice but to countersign French edicts, such as the notorious 1930 Berber Dahir, a real blow against Islam, and the anti-Jewish Vichy laws. On the personal level, however, he was sympathetic to the many Jews in his entourage. But as the 'statesman', he was forced to sign. "

Spotlight on the Jews of Babylon

2008-11-15T11:35:00.005Z

As the Babylon exhibition, London's latest hot ticket, opens at the British Museum, Eli Timan - writing in a special issue of the Iraqi magazine Muntada (no 96) - makes sure that the place Babylon occupies in Jewish history is not forgotten:

Babylonia, the cradle of civilisation, was also the birthplace of the Patriarch Abraham, who left Mesopotamia for the land of Canaan. Conquest of that land was followed several centuries later by 12 Hebrew tribes descended from Abraham.

After a short period of a united kingdom under King David and his son Solomon, a northern kingdom was established by 10 tribes, called Israel and a separate southern kingdom called Judah (Yehuda). Israel was conquered by the Assyrians in around 721 B.C.E* and a vast number of its population exiled to Mesopotamia.

In 701 B.C.E the Assyrian king, Sanherib (Sennacherib) attacked Lachish in southern Judah. This campaign was vividly depicted in his palace and you can see this massive depiction on two walls in a section at the British Museum. In the annals of his 3rd campaign, Sanherib states that “I drove out of them 200,150 people”. Allowing for exaggeration, a considerable number of captive Jews (inhabitants of Judah) must have been taken to Mesopotamia. In 597 B.C.E. Judah was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, followed in 586 B.C.E by his destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. It is said that some 50,000 Jews were exiled to Babylonia.

Thus began 2,600 years of history of the Jews of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). In captivity, the new exiles from Judah soon learned to adjust to the new environment. In a fertile and prosperous land, they enjoyed a freedom similar to the rest of the population. They were considered “resident foreigners” and paid taxes accordingly. They maintained their spirit with the support of the Prophet Yeheskel whose tomb is in the village of Kifl on the Euphrates River near the town of Hilla. He is venerated by Jews and Muslims alike since he was mentioned in the Qur’an as “Dhul Kifl”. Indeed, all the prophets in the Bible are venerated by Muslims and there are around 12 Jewish shrines in Iraq looked after today by non-Jews.

Shrines include those of the famous Ezra the Scribe (Al-‘Uzair) near the town of Amara on the Tigris River, Jonah (Yunis) in Nabi-Yunis, a suburb of Mosul, Nahum in El-Qosh, and Daniel in Kirkuk.

The Jewish exiles soon prospered, engaging in agriculture, the professions, commerce and trade, helped by their brethren from earlier exiles. There is evidence that a Jewish banking firm existed already and lasted for some hundred years.

We have to appreciate that the Assyrians had by 1800 B.C.E developed quite a sophisticated system of banking for their commerce with various trading colonies in Anatolia such as Kanesh. Caravans from Ashur to Kanesh were financed by Assyrian families and partners and a sophisticated system of Limited Companies with shareholders was devised. Bills of exchange between headquarters in Ashur and Assyrian agents in Kanesh were used for payments to minimise the transportation of cash which was mainly in silver currency. It is not surprising therefore that there were Jewish banking firms in the 6th century B.C.E.

In 537 B.C.E Babylon opened its gates to Cyrus the Persian without a fight. Cyrus gave the nations in his empire autonomy and the freedom to practise their religion; hence his proclamation to allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild its Temple. A few returned and built a simple temple, but in 458 B.C.E a large number returned with Ezra the Scribe and later with Nehemiah who was given the governorship of Jerusalem by Artaxerses I. Ezra and Nehemiah established official rites and prayers and it is said that Ezra completed the Torah scrolls and deposited them in the Temple.

Jewish law, both written and oral, would have been coloured extensively by life in Mesopotamia. The Persian Achaemanian era of Mesopotamia ended in 331 B.C.E by Alexander the Great in a battle near Arbil in today’s Kurdistan. There followed two centuries of Greek rule (331 - 126 B.C.E) with their capital Seleucia, south of Baghdad, on the opposite bank of the Tigris from Ctesiphon, the later Parthian and Sassanian capital in Mesopotamia (today only the ruins of the palace of Taq Kusra at Salman Pak village remains). The Parthians ruled to 227 C.E.** and the Sassanians to 636 C.E., the year they were defeated by the Arabs.

Thoughout this period (720 B.C.E to 636 C.E.), the Babylonian Jews spoke Aramaic. It was the main language spoken in Mesopotamia and was the official language of the Persian Empire. Babylon was a great centre of commerce, industry, trade and finance. Babylonian trade routes took the Jews to every corner of the known world, making them men of commerce and international trade. However the most common occupation was agriculture. A few of them had large tracts of agricultural land which they parcelled out among others by lease or by rent. A considerable proportion were farmhands who worked for a daily wage and endured great hardships as they toiled to convey the waters from the canals to the irrigation ditches or strove to keep them from overflowing.

Craftsmen had a happier lot and worked as bakers and brewers, weavers, dyers, and tailors; shipbuilders and woodcutters, blacksmiths, tanners, fishermen, sailors and porters. There were princes of commerce who exported wine, wool and flax, and imported silk, iron and precious stones; these rich merchants led a life of luxury amid a retinue of slaves and menials. In urban centres, a significant class of Jews engaged in manual labour, hiring themselves out by the day or week as masons, carpenters, potters, tailors, weavers and others. In around 218 C.E., a religious academy was founded in Sura by the Euphrates.

An earlier academy had already been established at Neherdea on the Euphrates at the junction of the Royal canal which connected the Euphrates to the Tigris at Seleucia and Ctesiphon. A third academy was founded some decades later at Pumbeditha, north of Neherdea, and it was followed by that at Mahoza on the Tigris, and others. In these academies, written and codified oral laws were studied and interpreted.

Centuries of interpretations, arguments, teachings, with topics including ethics, history and legend as well as law, resulted in the production of the Babylonian Talmud. Its codification began in Sura circa 367 C.E. and was completed circa 500 C.E. No other book has played so important a role in the history of the Jewish people as The Talmud. It served the Jewish Diasporas for generations, right down to our present day. It also serves as a reliable historical source on family and business life in that period.

It was in Babylonia rather than Jerusalem that the Jewish religion was preserved and codified. Judaism was present and influenced every aspect of the life of Babylonian Jews and that made them a distinct faith group. Education was greatly emphasised by the rabbis, and the communities developed a comprehensive and efficient school system.

Another feature of Jewish life which was to flourish and fully develop was the Synagogue. The Synagogue (Greek for “assembly”) was a gathering of the people to advance their communal and spiritual interests. It could be held in any convenient place in the midst of the local community. Portions of the Torah (Mosaic Law) were read there every week. The Synagogue was the centre of worship, of teaching and instruction for its local Jewish community. With no temple worship, the model of the Synagogue was instrumental in the spread of the concept of monotheism and later the rapid spread of the two universal religions of Christianity and Islam, with worship in church and mosque respectively. Follow-up article in the next issue of the Muntada.

The article combines extracts from various sources, mainly “The Jews of Baghdad” by Nissim Rejwan, London 1985 and “The story of an exile” by Nir Shohet, Tel-Aviv 1982. The author is currently engaged in a project to preserve the spoken dialect of Iraqi Jews.

*B.C.E: Before Christian Era
**C.E.: Christian Era

London Review of Books skews Iraqi Jews' story

2008-11-13T07:06:00.013Z

The London Review of Books' latest issue (6 November) has published a lengthy review by Adam Shatz of two books about Iraqi Jews, Memories of Eden by Violette Shamash and Baghdad yesterday: the last Arab Jew by Sasson Somekh (with thanks: TandM).

While the LRB's focus on the Jews of Iraq is to be welcomed, the author's post-Zionism obfuscates the primary cause of the destruction of the Jewish community - Arab hostility - by spreading blame around. The Jews themselves are to blame for identifying too strongly with the colonialist British; and Zionism is to blame for making coexistence between Muslims and Jews in Iraq impossible. "If Israel was a sanctuary for the Jews of Iraq, it was also the reason why they desperately needed one," Shatz claims.

Perhaps his subtle rewriting of history is not surprising: recall that The London Review of Books was the only journal to accept Walt and Mearsheimer's 'Israel lobby ' essay, the basis for their controversial book of the same name.

I have 'fisked' some of the more controversial passages (italics) in the piece.

Recent polemics – and pro-Israeli websites – have made much of the indignities of Jewish life under Ottoman rule, seeking to expose the ‘myth’ of Muslim tolerance. This tolerance, it’s argued, is a euphemism for dependence on the goodwill of capricious, if not cruel Muslim overlords. The memoirs of Iraqi Jews, however, tell a very different story...Memories of Eden provides as sumptuous an account of the world of the Baghdadi Jewish elite as we’re likely to get.

Not exactly. By demolishing one myth, Shatz is creating another: paradise only really existed for the better-off Iraqi Jews towards the end of the 19th century, following the establishment of the Alliance Israelite Universelle school and the emancipation of Jews and Christians foisted on the Ottomans by the Western powers.

Shamash writes that Baghdad’s Jews and the British felt an ‘instant connection’: ‘the British saw that there was much to gain from befriending us, with whom they had already had contact during a century of trade under colonial rule in India.’ True: but the wealthier members of the community expected more from this friendship than the British could offer if they hoped to maintain peaceful relations with the Muslim majority of what, in 1921, would become the Arab kingdom of Iraq.

(Stop beating about the bush, Shatz!) The Jews feared Arab rule would be 'politically irresponsible, fanatic and intolerant', in the words of Professor Elie Kedourie.

Jewish fear of majority rule led, early on, to fateful miscalculations. When the British conquered Baghdad in 1918, the president of the Jewish lay council and the acting chief rabbi appealed for direct British rule, on the grounds that their Muslim neighbours weren’t ready ‘to undertake with success the management of their own affairs’. After this was rejected, a group of Jewish notables petitioned for British citizenship, giving the distinct impression that they regarded themselves as separate from and superior to the emerging national community. The British, seeking to harness – and neutralise – the energies of Arab nationalism, were in no position to grant this request.

In other words, Shatz promotes the (to my mind, outrageous) notion that the Jews petitioning for British citizenship sowed the seeds of their own downfall by appearing superior to the Arab Muslims.

Whatever pride some took in the creation of a Jewish ‘national home’ was more than offset by the worry that it would endanger them in Iraq. But the Zionists in Palestine claimed to speak in the name of the Jewish people, and thus in their name as well.

This crude side-swipe at Zionism is also a red herring. The issue here is the absence of minority rights in Iraq for Assyrians and Kurds, as well as Jews. How much more anti-Zionist could the behaviour of Iraqi Jews have been?

Note how only the Zionists have agency, never the Arabs. It was the Arabs who conflated the non- or anti-Zionist Jews of Iraq with Zionism, not the other way around. Later on in his piece, Shatz contradicts himself somewhat by describing how the anti-Zionist communist party had huge Jewish support.

The farhud continued for two days, an orgy of murder, rape and arson that left two hundred Jews and a number of Muslims dead.

(Who were these Muslims? Shatz does not tell us, but hints at a revisionist theory put about by some Iraqi Jews, including Somekh, that some Muslims died saving Jews.)

Mossad’s objective was not to improve the position of the Jews in Iraq, but to hasten their departure. Pamphlets appeared discouraging Jews from mixing with Arabs, and arguing that any attempt to do so ‘leads to butchery’.

The Israeli government circulated stories about Iraqi ‘pogroms’ and ‘concentration camps’ and denounced the hanging of seven Jews charged with Zionist activism in March 1949 – executions that Mossad’s own agents in Baghdad insisted had never occurred. Unless Iraqi Jews were allowed to emigrate, Israel warned, it would back armed resistance to al-Said’s government, or find itself unable to prevent Iraqi Jews already in Israel from killing Palestinians in revenge."

I don't know where Shatz got this from, but his introduction into the picture of Zionist scaremongering and the infamous bombs beloved of Arab propaganda obviously mitigates the effect of Arab hostility by making Israel at least partly responsible for the plight of Iraqi Jews. Absent from Shatz's account is any suggestion, documented in Elie Kedourie's essay in The break between Jews and Arabs, that it was the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said who was the driving force behind the expulsion of the Jews and the idea of an exchange of populations. Also absent is the fact, sorrowfully stated by the Jewish senator Ezra Daniel, that by 1950 the Jews had been deprived of their rights.

But soon after the Baath Party seized power in 1963, in a CIA-backed coup, Jews were forced to carry yellow identity cards.

Note how responsiblity for putting the Ba'ath in power (and thus the treatment of the Jews) devolves away from the Arabs on to the Americans.

Shatz's article ends with a long paragraph about the shoddy treatment of the Iraqi Jews by the Ashkenazi establishment in Israel. This was no doubt true then, but is no longer true now. Its only purpose is to denigrate Israel's ruling elite as racists and snobs:

We don’t want Israelis to become Arabs,’ (Ben Gurion) said with his usual bluntness, and the Iraqi Jews were dangerously close to being Arabs in Israel. An elite in their own country, they were now cast as a ‘primitive’, inferior people, requiring tutelage from Ashkenazi Jews, descendants of the despised Ostjuden, who were now determined to erase any trace of the East. And though many Iraqi Jews, bitter at their treatment at the hands of Arabs, became supporters of the political right in Israel, the racism they encountered made it impossible for them to identify fully with the movement that brought them ‘home’.

If resentment of Ashkenazim was as significant as Shatz makes out, the Iraqi Jews in Israel would have been expected to vote for the Left or in alliance wiht the Arabs. But this is not the case, as Shatz admits. The Israelification of immigrants was not confined to Mizrahim. Yiddish-speaking Jews were encouraged to jettison their language and change their names to Hebrew ones. And prejudice was demonstrated to other Ashkenazim too - Holocaust survivors were taunted as 'sabon' (soap). Harping on about Ashkenazi contempt for Mizrahim tends to seem hopelessly out-of-date in today's Israel, where intermarriage is at an all time high, Mizrahim have reached the highest echelons of power, and Middle Eastern culture is all the fashion.

In the early 1990s, Somekh tried to establish a solidarity association with the Iraqi people with the aim of documenting ‘the co-operation and good neighbourliness between the Jews and other Iraqis, so that the coming generations would know about this wonderful connection that had characterised Jewish life in the Arab world for 1500 years.’ His application was rejected by the Registrar of Non-Profit Associations in Jerusalem, which thought it unwise to revive such memories, a potential ‘source of Saddamist subversion’.

Shatz ends on this indignant note. Earlier he describes Somekh's memoir as an 'experiment in coexistence, rather than a Zionist parable about its impossibility'. Here in a nutshell is Shatz's own philosophy: Zionism is confrontational. No word about Arab aggression preventing coexistence. No understanding that at the time Somekh was promoting 'la-la land' solidarity with the Iraqi people, Saddam's brutal regime was in a state of war with Israel, having just fired dozens of missiles at Tel Aviv.

There is a time for peace, and a time for war.

Crossposted on Z-word blog

On Islamic antisemitism

2008-11-12T19:54:00.004Z

If you go over to Harry's Place you might still be in time to join the discussion following Mikey's guest post.

Mikey argues essentially that before it was infiltrated by Christian antisemitism, Muslim antisemitism was not specifically anti-Jewish, but anti-dhimmi, and that Jews under Islam may have had it better than Christians, and in any event were treated better than in Christian Europe.

King says Bahrain will ease return of Jews

2008-11-12T08:03:00.008Z

The king of Bahrain is continuing his campaign to lure Bahraini Jews back to the land of their birth, JTA reports:

NEW YORK (JTA) - The king of Bahrain said he would facilitate the return of Jewish expatriates through restored citizenship and land offers.

King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa met in New York Tuesday with about 50 Bahraini Jews who had immigrated to the United States, following on a similar meeting in London this summer.

The king said that all expatriate Bahrainis, whatever their religion, were welcome to return.

“It’s open, it’s your country,” he said in New York. He had reversed a law that banned dual citizenship and was ready to restore the citizenship of Bahrainis who had lost it in the interim, and to offer it to their children as well.

“The younger ones can’t remember much, but we want them to know,” he said of Bahraini heritage.

Returning Bahrainis would be eligible for land allocations, he said.

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King will offer London Bahraini Jews dual citizenship

New Alexandria community head is Muslim convert

2008-11-11T07:54:00.027Z

A member of the Jewish community council in Alexandria has challenged the new head's suitability to lead the community because he is a Jewish convert to Islam. (Via HSJE)

Victor Balassanio claims that as a convert to Islam Yousef Yousef Gaon had no right to replace the last community leader, Max Salama, whose death we reported here. Balassanio has complained that Gaon had changed all the locks at the Nebi Daniel synagogue (pictured) and had cut him off from community decision-making.

When Balassanio asked for a letter of reference he was made to sign various papers abdicating his authority in community matters. Balassanio and his wife Denise have now decided to pack their bags and join their children in the US.

When the controversy was reported by Aimee Kligman on her blog Women's Lens, Yousef Gaon (proudly proclaiming his Jewish credentials as the nephew of Nissim Gaon, president of the World Sephardi Federation and owner of the Noga Hilton in Geneva) queried the facts as described and told Ms Kligman she could be in violation of Egyptian law.

Ms Kligman responded that Mr Gaon had the opportunity to correct the facts if he disagreed with them. In the US people could publish freely, unlike Egypt, where bloggers could be thrown into jail, she wrote.

Mr Gaon did not reply.

Max Salama z''l

Tripoli synagogue, monument to a dead community

2008-11-11T06:02:00.009Z

Intrepid travellers Laurence Ben-Nathan and his wife Marianne took these pictures of the Great Synagogue in the Old Town of Tripoli. Once a quarter of Tripoli's inhabitants were Jews, but no Jews live in Libya now. Laurence describes how he came to find the synagogue:

"After our guided tour of the Old Town of Tripoli, we (with our four friends) decided to do our own tour which followed a route set out in the Lonely Planet guide book. We noticed that this route made mention of a synagogue. We eventually found this magnificent building which is now somewhat derelict. To be fair, this may be a reason why tour groups are not shown the building. We should probably have wore hard hats to enter it, if European Health and Safety rules applied there. Clearly it was a centre of the thriving Jewish community there before 1967 but was abandoned with the rest of the area in 1967 and has been left to decay. You must remember that the present Libyan regime does not undertake restoration of sites that we would consider historic; most of the present restoration work of the Roman and Greek sites has been carried out by the Italians.

"My name is, I would have thought, obviously Jewish and I never disguise my roots in this respect. This also applies to our other recent group travels to places such Syria and Iran. I also make a point of asking the local guides about the history of Jews in the areas we visit and I have generally received positive answers to my questions. Invariably any mention of Jews by the guides is peripheral but that may be because we are principally visiting ancient Roman and Greek sites and the Jews are not renowned for building grand cities and monuments.

"Nevertheless Jews have played prominent roles at times dating back before the great Roman and Greek empires and they do seem to be somewhat airbrushed out of the history. The Jews put up great resistance to the Roman invasion of Libya during the time of Trajan and helped destroy the Roman city now known as Cyrene. This was rebuilt after the Jewish uprising in 116 AD by Hadrian who wanted to restore it to the magnificent city it was originally. I think he succeeded.

"In Tripoli we had a Berber guide who took us around the Old City. As little mention was made of the Jews there, I asked him to tell us about their presence, which he willing did. He stopped at the old Jewish quarter, which he may have done anyway, as it was on our route. He told us that over a quarter of the Old Town was Jewish and in his view the Jews would almost certainly have eventually taken over the entire Old Town. However they abandoned the city completely at the time of the Six-Day war (1967) never to return. This area of the Old Town is now derelict with many of the building partly or completely destroyed. He pointed out buildings with typical dark blue doors.

"I pressed the guide a bit further about Judaism in Libya and he told me that many of the Berbers had followed the Jewish religion. Indeed there is a synagogue in the Berber regions in the Western Mountains but it was not on our route. When we got to the Berber town of Ghadames I asked the guide there about the previous religions followed by the Berbers but he said that nothing is specifically known about that!

"I also must say that we were welcomed very openly wherever we went by the ordinary people and, surprisingly, by the policemen and felt extremely comfortable and safe there. We also found that to be the case in Syria and Iran. Perhaps it is the politicians that cause all the hatred and difficulties, not unlike most countries of the world."

For pictures of the interior of the synagogue taken by Sadok click here.

European MEPS urged to rethink refugee issue

2008-11-10T09:23:00.006Z

Two members of the Israeli Knesset last week put forward, before hundreds of European Parliamentarians, their proposals for the absorption of Palestinian refugees in third countries, mirorring the absorption of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The Jerusalem Post reports:

A gathering of hundreds of European parliamentarians who support Israel concluded over the weekend in Paris with a politically loaded discussion on the rehabilitation of Palestinian refugees - one of the most sensitive issues facing Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.

The debate, part of a conference sponsored by the Brussels-based European Friends of Israel, came amid a groundswell of parliamentary activity around the world, including in the US and Canada, to reroute funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the mammoth UN body that deals with Palestinian refugees and their descendants, towards the resettlement of some of the refugees and their descendants in third countries.

The session, which was hosted by the Israel Allies Caucus Foundation, the international arm of the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus, included addresses by European parliamentarians as well as by MK Benny Elon of the National Union-National Religious Party and MK Amira Dotan of Kadima. The two co-chair a new Knesset caucus on the rehabilitation of Palestinian refugees.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians - estimates range from 400,000 to 750,000 - left their homes during the War of Independence in 1948 and 1949. They, along with their millions of descendants, constitute one of the prickliest issues that must be dealt with as part of any resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel flatly rejects the Palestinian demand that these refugees be allowed to return to their ancestral homes within Israel, saying that such a move would indelibly alter the character of the country.

Israel has also pointed to the 850,000 Jews who fled Arab countries after Israel's founding in 1948 and were integrated and absorbed in Israeli society as counterweight to the issue of Palestinian refugees.

Recently, some Israeli parliamentarians have begun to openly advocate dealing tackling the Palestinian refugee issue after decades of avoiding it as a non-starter.

Much of the focus at Friday's discussion centered on the difference between UNRWA and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR), the main UN body that handles all other refugees around the world.

While UNRWA's 25,000-strong almost exclusively Palestinian staff care for 4.5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, the UNHCR employs a staff of around 6,300 people to help nearly 33 million people in more than 110 countries.

The event also dwelt on UNRWA's definition of Palestinian refugees, which includes not only the refugees themselves, but also their descendants, which critics say only serves to perpetuate the refugee crisis.

"We are asking why the UNHCR has the mandate to solve the problem of refugees and UNRWA does not," Elon said. "There are cynical political reasons to maintain the status of the refugees."

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Iran's Jews have 'no major problems' - Jewish MP

2008-11-10T08:06:00.008Z

Iran's only Jewish MP has admitted that Jews do have problems, but not major ones, compared to the early years of the Iranian revolution. The government turns a blind eye to visits to Israel, he said. And president Ahmadinejad's 'Holocaust denial' was not shared by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Report by European Jewish Press. (With thanks: a reader)

BRUSSELS (EJP)---A Jewish Iranian parliamentarian, on a visit to the European Parliament this week , said Iran’s Jewish community doesn’t face major problems today and stressed that Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s statements on the Holocaust “are not shared by other leaders in the country.”

Ciamak Morsadegh is a member of a delegation of five MPs from Majlis, Iran’s parliament, who held two days of talks in the European Parliament in Brussels as part of an interparliamentary meeting.

In an interview with EJP, Morsadegh pointed out that with 25,000 people, the Jewish community of Iran is the largest in the Middle East, after Israel.

“We are living in a religious country as a religious minority. Of course we have some problems. I don’t want to say that everything is OK. But at this moment we don’t have major problems.Our day-to-day conditions are improving and our situation is now more stable and better than it was in the early years of the Iranian revolution when Jews and Muslims weren’t equal,” the 42-year-old physician who was elected in the Majlis as an independent candidate.

He is a member of the parliament's health committee.

He mentioned the fact that there are more than 40 synagogues in the country, half of them located in the capital, Tehran.

Some 60 percent of Iran’s Jews live in Tehran, the others being spread in various cities across the country, such as Shiraz or Ispahan. “Jewish children have the choice between going to governmental schools or Jewish schools, “ he mentioned.

In the past, several Jews aged between 40 and 60 have emigrated to Europe or the United States. “Today, we have a large population under 40 and older than 60.

He conceded that young Jews have problems with finding a job in governmental offices but also elsewhere due to the economic situation. “It is not impossible to find a job in public offices but it’s rather more difficult for Jews than for Muslims. “Even myself, I had the possibility to be employed as an associate professor in a governmental university but the conditions for me were harder than for a Muslim.”

Most of the Jews are working in small businesses but traditionally there are also an important number of doctors and dentists. “Since many centuries, Iranian people believe in Jewish physicians more than in other physicians,” the MP, who was born in Shiraz, in the southwest of Iran, said.

Jews living in Iran are free to travel abroad “anytime we want," he said. “We can go to the passport office, take our documents and leave the country.”

“Of course, according to the law, it is prohibited for Iranian Jews to visit Israel but the government closes the eyes,” he added.” “Iranian Jews go to Israel and other countries and when they come back they have no problems.”

“You must know that Iranian Jews are living in Iran since 30 centuries, Iranian Jewish culture being part of the country’s culture.” “We deeply feel Iranian.”

The Jewish community in Iran has probably the lowest rate of intermarriage and assimilation, he said.

In response to a question about Iranian president’s statements questioning the Holocaust, the MEP said Holocaust denial “is not the policy of the Iranian government but rather the personal thought of Ahmadinejad.”

“When do you speak to members of the government they don’t deny the Holocaust. You have to know that the President is not the most powerful leader of Iran. It is rather the Supreme leader, Aytollah Ali Khamenei , who decides the country’s policy and strategy.” Khamenei never denied the Holocaust, “ Morsadegh said.

The Tehran Jewish committee, the community’s central body, protested against the organization in 2006 of a confrerence on the Holocaust attended by several world Holocaust deniers.

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Only eight Jews left in Iraq

2008-11-09T14:32:00.009Z

" Because we are Jewish he knows we can do nothing."

Perhaps the most telling sentence of this Reuters piece: one of the last of eight Jews left in Iraq thinks he will get more leverage over his landlord if he talks to the press.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - One of the last eight Jews in Baghdad, a portly retired accountant, erupts in a bellyful of laughter when asked why he never married.

"I was a playboy. Don't write that!" he jokes, grinning. "How old do you think I am? Wrong. I'm 65! Don't write that! Write that I am 55!"

His government ID proves his age, and on the back it says, unmistakably: "Religion: Jewish."

He has made contact with a reporter, not because he wants to tell the story of his persecuted community, but because he wants to complain about the landlord who is raising his rent.

"Because we are Jewish he knows we can do nothing. He isn't afraid because he knows we have no tribe here. Don't use my name."

Once one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, Baghdad Jews have now nearly vanished while the country has been consumed by sectarian war.

Speaking in fluent English, the ex-accountant launches into a description of the Baghdad of his youth, one of the Muslim world's most cosmopolitan cities.

He recites the names of legendary social clubs where Jews, Christians and Muslims mingled in better days, with music and whisky and parties that ran through the night.

"So many people -- Muslim people -- say if the Jewish people come back it will be nicer," he says.

His family have left. Some are in London, some in the United States. His father was offered a chance to move to Canada, but turned it down because he wanted to die and be buried in Iraq.

The ex-accounted himself stayed, but if he can sell his father's house -- now a ruin bombed out in the Iran war in the 1980s -- he will finally leave.

"I want to sell the house and go. I like Iraq, but I am fed up. We had very nice times in Iraq, but now we don't like it."

Iraq's Jewish community dates from biblical times. According to Charles Tripp's History of Iraq, the country was home to 117,000 Jews in 1947.

Under Ottoman rule, well into the first half of the 20th century, Jews made up about a fifth of the population of the capital. Some of the villas in neighborhoods along the Tigris still have six-pointed stars of David in their stucco.

How many Jews are there now?

"We know them all," says the ex-accountant, counting.

There's the ex-accountant himself, plus the nephew with whom he shares a rented house in Baghdad's central Karrada district. There's the man who lives near them, the man who leads the community, the very old woman, the male doctor and the female dentist. And the man whose brother was a goldsmith.

The goldsmith married the dentist a few years ago. A few months later, he was abducted by gunmen.

"They came to his house and took him. He disappeared. They left his car, they left his mobile. They just took him."

So that leaves eight. Eight Jews left.

The synagogue in central Baghdad has been boarded up since 2003. The ex-accountant occasionally runs into some of the other Jews on the street, but confesses he isn't much for religion.

"We don't know how to pray," he says. "Hebrew books we have everywhere in the synagogue, but we don't know how to read it. Some words I know. The important one is Adonai. Adonai is God. We believe in God."

In the old days, Jews were an integral part of Iraqi life. A relative of the ex-accountant was finance minister decades ago. But beginning in the late 1940s, successive Arab governments accused Baghdad's Jews of supporting Zionism.

Some were jailed, others were barred from government posts, and thousands upon thousands left for Israel or the West.

By the time of Saddam Hussein's fall, the ex-accountant estimates there were only a few dozen Jews left. Western organizations came and evacuated most of the rest.

"A woman called Rachel, she came here took some of them to the Jewish community in London, I think," he said.

In 2003, he went to the Green Zone to meet a cousin who was born in the United States and had come to Iraq to work for the U.S.-run administration. The American woman was shocked when her mother put them in touch.

"She said: incredible! You are still here? She did not know she had a cousin in Iraq," he said.

Apart from his quarrel with his landlord, the ex-accountant says he has had few problems with the neighbors, most of whom don't know he is Jewish, some of whom don't care.

"Somebody says 'You are Christian', I don't say anything. Somebody says 'You are Muslim', I don't say anything. I think most people think we are Christian because they don't know there are still Jews in Iraq."

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...And you shall tell your children about Egypt

2008-11-08T21:27:00.031Z

The Israeli town of Bat-Yam, where many Egyptian Jews live, was the setting for a conference organised by the International Association of Jews from Egypt (headed by Levana Zamir) on 3 November, to highlight the multiculturalism of the Second Exodus. Successful though the conference was, however, Israeli schoolbooks still do not mention the ethnic cleansing of Egyptian Jews. A summary report follows:

Days before the conference it had already sold out. Some 200 participants of Egyptian origin attended, not only from Bat-Yam, Holon, Rishon, but also Haifa, Yokneam, Kiryat Ata in the north, and Beersheba, Ashdod and Ashkelon in the south. For the first time, the conference was attended by quite a few younger members born in Israel to Egyptian parents. Mr Uri Bouskila, deputy Mayor of Bat-Yam, and Mrs Ester Peron, Council member for Education at the Bat-Yam Municipality, welcomed the fact that a significant percentage of Bat-Yam citizens were of Egyptian origin. Multiculturalism and tradition being a priority in Bat-Yam, the town this year won the national prize for Education.

Multiculturalism, the main characteristic of the Jewish refugees of Egypt and their contribution to the Mediterranean Union: "After 50 years of aliyah," said Levana Zamir, the conference chairwoman and organiser, "the Jewish refugees from Egypt are finally being labelled a multicultural Aliya, and Jacqueline Kahanof – an Israeli writer born in Egypt - recognized as the precursor of the Mediterranean Option, now becoming a regional trend for the Mediterranean and the Middle East Union. Egyptian Jewry was heterogeneous, but those born in Egypt from non-Egyptian parents naturally absorbed that multiculturalism, its tolerance and the loving acceptance of the Other, a characteristic of Egyptian Jews around the world.

The Academic Session on the Multiculturalism of the Jews of Egypt was chaired by Moshe Zafarani - the National Supervisor for Communities Heritage at the Ministry of Education. Participating was Mrs Miryam Frenkel – Vice-Chairman of Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, Prof. Nahem Ilan – from the Lander Institute Jerusalem, and Levana Zamir – President of the International Association of Jews from Egypt.

Mr Moshe Zafarani urged the Egyptian Jews to tell their story to researchers and students at school, so as to preserve their heritage. Prof Nahem Ilan presented the series of books edited in Hebrew by the Ben-Zvi Institute about Oriental Jewish Communities in the 19th and the 20th centuries, and his last volume about Egypt. Miryam Frenkel outlined Egyptian multiculturalism over centuries before it became known as Levantine. "Jacqueline Kahanof, an Egyptian Jew writer who made aliya in the Fifties, after winning prestigious literature prizes in the United States, was a courageous warrior," said Frenkel. "She managed to transform the negative meaning of Levantine into a positive." The Ben-Zvi Institute is now translating her autobiographical book Soulam Yaacov (Jacob's ladder) from English to Hebrew. It describes her childhood and adolescence in Egypt.

Political Aspects between the Palestinian Refugees and the Jewish-Arab Refugees was presented by Yossi Ben-Aharon from his research on the subject. Mr. Ben-Aharon, born in Egypt, was Ambassador of Israel and Director-General of the Prime Minister's Office under Itzhak Shamir. "After the 29 November 1947 UN Partition resolution, "defenseless Jewish communities throughout the Arab world were victims of pogroms, seizure of property and persecution, he said. Palestinian Arabs began to flee from their homes much later, when Jewish militias began to respond to Arab attacks on them. The responsibility for the creation of the Arab refugee problem rests primarily on the shoulders of the Arab governments and on the Palestinian leadership," concluded Ben-Aharon.

After a buffet break, where delicious Egyptian Kobeba, Pasteles etc. were served, as well as the succulent Bassboussa and Menenas, the audience watched the beautiful and poignant movie:
And you shall tell your children – The Second Exodus of the Jews of Egypt, produced in Israel by Levana Zamir, with the help of the Ministry of Justice: this professionally-made 30-minute film, shining with truth, reported without exaggeration the trials and tribulation of the Second Exodus, starting with glorious pictures of the Community before 1948, when most enjoyed financial security and joie de vivre, only to end as "hounded Jews". Pogroms in the Jewish Quarter in Cairo, bombs killing entire families, persecutions, mass arrests, abuse, riots, discrimination, prison, forced exile in a matter of days, sometimes hours, emptied Egypt of its Jews, who were 'ethnically cleansed', leaving their assets behind.

The more one talks about the Second Exodus of Egypt, the better - translated from Hebrew "Kol Hamarbeh Lessaper 'al Yetssiyat Mitzrayim Hasheniya, Harei Ze Meshoubah" (from the Hagada): The leaders of various Associations of Jews from Egypt, participated in this round table: Arieh Ohanna (Tel-Aviv), Dr. Ada Aharoni (WCJE), Lucy Kalamaro and Baroukh Zamir (Bat-Yam) - chaired by Levana Zamir.

Arieh Ohanna deplored the fact that the mass expulsion of the Jews from Egypt, their painful ethnic cleansing and their becoming refugees, are not documented in Hebrew school books in Israel, not even the latest.

Benoit Belbel, today known as Barukh Zamir, brought his own testimony as Assir-Tzion in Egypt (Prisoner of Zion ) following the Suez War in 1956. For the first time, an Assir-Tzion from Egypt testified LIVE in front of a large audience about the tortures he suffered at the El-Al'aa prison in Cairo, leaving physical signs on his back until today. He had been expelled in 1957, and in spite of his French nationality he choose to make aliya. This testimony is encouraging others to testify too, because our parents, who saw their whole life collapsing overnight, are not here to testify anymore, and we are the Last of the Mohicans to do so.

Lucy Kalamaro, who left Egypt with her family in 1964, preferred not to talk about her good and bad days in Egypt on this occasion, but about her own Zionist feelings, aroused in Egypt out fear of Gamal Abdel Nasser's policy towards the Jews. She understood then that the only place to live for her and for her family is Eretz Israel. She choose to make aliya, although she had other choices.

Dr. Ada Aharoni stressed the importance of the Second Exodus narrative for the advancement of peace. She reported how astonished a group of young Palestinians were when she told them about the expulsion of the Jews of Egypt – "We are quits, then," they exclaimed.

The multicultural contribution of the Jews of Egypt to the Egyptian movie industry: To end the conference on a happier note, Eyal Sagui-Bizawi – born in Bat-Yam to Egyptian parents, and working today on his thesis on the Jews of Egypt at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - gave a fascinating presentation about the contribution of the Jews of Egypt to the Egyptian movie industry until the mid-twentieth century. He drew us back to nostalgia while screening some lovely clips of Egyptian movies, produced by Togo Mizrahi and others with Egyptian Jewish artists Layla Mourad, Rakya Ibrahim, Nagua Salem, Camelia, Elias Mouhadab etc., showing the multiculturalism of this bygone cosmopolitan Golden Era.

The liberal but still traditional religious attitude of the Jews of Egypt was wonderfully presented by Rabbi Shay Peron, born in Israel to Egyptian-Jewish parents. This liberal but still traditional attitude was no doubt influenced by the bygone cosmopolitan atmosphere in Egypt.

Closing the event with live songs in Arabic, French and Hebrew, the famous singer Varda, a second generation Egyptian, closed this enjoyable, historic and most successful event, with songs in Egyptian Arabic, French and Hebrew.

Top photo left to right: Esther Peron of the Bat Yam Council, Uri Bouskila, Bat Yam deputy mayor, and Levana Zamir, conference chairwoman and organiser. Bottom: menenas and kahk b'semsem, typical delicacies served in the conference break

At last, Iraq's last Jews find their voice

2008-11-06T20:06:00.013Z

The long-neglected and little-known experiences of Iraq's Jews have finally been published in a new book, Iraq's last Jews. Tamar Morad, the book's lead editor, tells Jamie Glazov of Front Page magazine all about it (with thanks: Eliyahu):

Morad: The book is an oral history collection for which we interviewed a total of 64 Iraqi Jews living in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Israel. Twenty of these first-person accounts appear in the book. It tells the story of the last generation of Iraqi Jews: of wealthy businessmen and Communists, popular musicians and reformist writers, Iraqi patriots and early Zionists. It records the personal experiences of those who lived through the “golden age” of the community, in the 1920s and 1930s, when Jews lived and thrived in Iraq’s urban centers, mainly Baghdad. It tells the personal tales of undercover Israeli agents who helped orchestrate the mass emigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel in 1950-1 and those who argued for the lives of their loved ones in the brutal prisons of Saddam Hussein. It describes persecution suffered by Jews at the hands of Muslim leaders and mobs but it also describes acts of heroism and bravery by Muslims who saved the lives of their Jewish neighbors when they were under attack.

FP:What were some of the main factors that led to the disappearance of the Jewish community in Iraq?

Morad: The community was the oldest in the Jewish Diaspora, at 2,600 years, and was the focal point of Judaism for many centuries—the place where the Talmud was written and where Jews traveled to from all corners of the globe to consult the rabbinic experts at the world’s most renowned yeshivas. But in the middle of the 20^th century that history came to an end, a result of Arab hostility, Zionist emigration, Nazi influences and, conclusively, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

"Various experts put varying weight on each of these factors but it’s clear that all were factors. The British-installed King Faisal, who took the throne in 1921, encouraged tolerance to all religious minorities and Jewish life thrived under his reign. Jews enjoyed key positions in government, law, journalism, business, and culture. Jewish boys waved Iraqi flags. Demographically, Jews comprised fully one-third of Baghdad’s population; Jews were also numerous in Mosul and Basra and smaller cities like Al Hilla.

But King Faisal died in 1933 and his much less tolerant son Ghazi came to power that year.. Meanwhile, in the following years, the British expelled Palestinian leaders from Palestine and many settled in Iraq, bringing with them anti-British, anti-Zionist and increasingly pro-Nazi sentiment. The Farhoud, in 1941, a pogrom in Baghdad in which dozens of Jews were killed and hundreds wounded, was largely an outgrowth of this burgeoning Nazi ideology among Iraqi leaders and, increasingly, ordinary Iraqis. The Farhoud was a major turning point for the Jews of Iraq. Zionism—until then simply a religious yearning for the restoration of Israel—suddenly became a real alternative, particularly after its creation in 1948.

The year of Israel’s creation was also the year in which Shafiq Adas, Iraq’s wealthiest citizen and a Jew, was hanged in the doorway of his Basra home—lynched by a government humiliated by the defeat of the Arab armies at the hands of Israel in the War of Independence. Iraqi Jews thought: If this fate befell Shafiq Adas, who was so accepted in the government’s inner circles, what might happen to us?

During the 1940s and especially after Adas’ smurder, Israeli emissaries from the Mossad’s precursor, the Mossad L’Aliya Bet, began encouraging and nurturing the growing desire among Iraqi Jews to leave. People like Shlomo Hillel and Mordechai Ben Porat, whose accounts are included in our book, were at the forefront of these efforts, and many local activists enabled efforts to smuggle Jews over the borders, first to the east via Jordan, Syria and Lebanon; then via Iran to the east. In 1949, Hillel, backed by his Mossad boss in Tel Aviv, spearheaded what later became known as Operation Ezra and Nehemia which brought most of the 130,000 Jews of Iraq on more than 900 flights to Israel.

After the mass exodus, only about 10,000 Jews remained in Iraq, mostly the wealthiest who had the most to lose if they left. But burgeoning Arab nationalism, Arab anger about their countries’ stunning defeat at Israel’s hands in 1967, and the rise of the Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussein put a final end to the community. Hundreds of Jews were imprisoned and tortured starting in 1968 and then there were the infamous Jan. 27, 1969, hangings in which nine Jews (along with other Iraqis) were hanged in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, following bogus trials in which they were accused of spying for Israel against Iraq. By the mid-1970s, most Jews had left and the community consisted of a mere 20 when U.S. tanks rolled into the Iraqi capital in 2003. Now less than a handful of Jews live in Iraq.

FP: Tell us about some of the people who tell their stories in this book.

Morad: One of my favorites—well, they are all my favorites, honestly—is by Shlomo el-Kevity, who tells the story of his father and uncle, the musical duo known as the Kuwaity Brothers, the most famous musicians in Iraq in the first part of the 20^th century and known and celebrated widely throughout the Arab world at that time. Shlomo describes how music was the realm of the Jews in Iraq, as during Ottoman times Muslims were forbidden from playing music so Jews became the stewards of Iraqi music. The Kuwaity Brothers established Iraqi radio and the Iraqi Broadcasting Authority Orchestra—radios only played live music then. Shlomo describes how the prime minister, Nuri el-Said, turned on his radio on Yom Kippur in 1942 to hear silence—and was confused and infuriated. When he called the Broadcasting Authority to ask why, he was told that there was no music because the Jews didn’t work on Yom Kippur.

Israeli novelist Sami Michael and Israeli filmmaker Salim Fattal both describe how like many other Jews, they turned to Communism as the solution to growing anti-Semitism in Iraq. They decry the subordination of that storyline by Israeli leaders who have always preferred to emphasize the Zionist nature of Iraqi Jews.

In addition to the dramatic Operation Ezra and Nehemia tales I just mentioned, there is Ilana Marcus, the Mossad’s air stewardess on many of the flights to Israel, who recounts—more than the anticipation of passengers—their uncertainty and even trepidation, flying for the first time in their lives and fearful of leaving behind everything they knew to come to a land they only knew about in prayer books.

Then there is Oddil Dallall, who describes her life, and mothering two young sons, during the imprisonment of her husband Yitzhak, who was ultimately hanged by Saddam. Richard Obadiah talks about his father, the headmaster of the Frank Iny School, the last Jewish school in Iraq, and how his father felt the day he closed the school doors for the last time in the mid-1970s. Aida Zelouf describes what it was like to be one of the last Jews to leave, in 1974, since her father, Meir Basri, was the community’s leader at the time and was pained to leave any Jews behind.

But for me, the most moving words are the very last ones of the book, an observation from a Shiite Muslim named Dhiaa Kashi, “Many Iraqis, and I am one of them, feel that if the Jews had stayed in Iraq, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now and might not have experienced all the atrocities we have in the last 50 years. That is because if the Jews had been allowed to stay in their positions of power, as the elite of society, they would have managed the country far better than it was indeed managed. They would have been a moderating influence on society. Second, if the conditions had been right for them to stay in the country in the first place, that would have meant that we wouldn’t have had to experience this extreme brand of Arab nationalism.”

FP: Why is this book important?

Morad: Because it will help the world preserve this incredibly rich and important piece of Jewish history. Jews can visit Europe and see the sites where their ancestors lived and died but the Arab world is largely closed off to Jews so it is therefore even more important to tell these stories and remind the world of the Jews of Arab lands.

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Obama effect could lead to a Mizrahi PM in Israel

2008-11-06T07:33:00.008Z

Following the election of Barak Obama as the next US president, Israel could soon witness the appointment of a Mizrahi Prime Minister, according to Haaretz:

"A day before Obama's victory, MK Silvan Shalom (Likud), who is Mizrahi, or of oriental Jewish descent, cautiously told Haaretz: "If America gets a black president perhaps Israel will get a Mizrahi president. We import every fashion from America, maybe we'll import this fashion that will allow us for the first time to elect a Mizrahi prime minister."

"Shalom almost immediately qualified his words: "Obama isn't president only because he is black, but because he has the background, education and record of accomplishment. He did not reach the White House from Harlem, but broke through in such a way that will permeate through to here."

"Meanwhile, (Dr Yusef) Jabrin was similarly asked whether an Arab could ever become prime minister of Israel. "Certainly," the Hadash activist, who is also a cosignatory of "the future vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel," said.

"The only difference between me and MK Shalom's [opinion] is that we're talking about different time frames. There will be a Mizrahi prime minister long before there is an Arab prime minister, whose election will have to be based on peace in the region. No matter, it took blacks 143 years since the abolition of slavery and 50 years since end of segregation [for a black man to become president]."

"Prof. Hannah Herzog of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University also said she was optimistic over incorporating minorities and women in Israeli politics.

"My feminist friends in the U.S. were torn when symbols of the two great movements of the 60s were up for election: a woman and a black," she said. "Obama is indeed a breakthrough for minorities, and women, and Israeli society looks a lot at the U.S."

"At least for a few days, talk among Israeli minorities has been filled with hope but that optimism will soon be replaced by quarrels over who the real "blacks" of Israel are. "In Israel we say Mizrahis are black though in the U.S. we would be considered white," MK Shalom Simhon (Labor), who is also Mizrahi, said.

"Being black isn't just a color. It's about feeling discriminated. So our 'blacks' were not slaves but they feel a sense of lack of solidarity even from the supposedly liberal Ashkenazis who sympathize with Arabs, women and homosexuals. Their liberalism falls short when it comes to Mizrahis."

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Bahrain parliament wants to renew Israel boycott

2008-11-05T07:17:00.005Z

One step forward, one step back.

Bahrain's parliament, where Islamists are strongly represented, is pressing the Gulf Arab emirate's government to reopen the country's Israel Boycott Office, which was closed two years ago under pressure from Washington. Michael Freund writes in The Jerusalem Post:

"Prior to its closure, the boycott office had overseen government efforts to bar entry to Israeli-made goods in accordance with the Arab League's economic and trade embargo against the Jewish state.

At a meeting held late last week, the legislature's committee on foreign affairs, defense and national security also called for an end to all formal contacts with the Jewish state.

"Now that the committee has agreed on reopening the office, we request the Foreign Ministry to support the decisions by the representatives of the people and to put an end to all forms of contact between Bahrain and the Zionist entity," committee chairman Adel al-Mouawda said, according to Gulf News.

"The authorities should also allow the re-opening of the Israel boycott office and ban any form of communication with the Zionist entity," he added, following a meeting with Bahraini Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid Bin Ahmad al-Khalifa.

The US and Bahrain signed a free trade agreement in September 2004. It was ratified by Congress in December 2005 and went into effect the following year once the Bahraini government finalized various changes to its trade legislation. The US conditioned the deal on Bahrain's removal of restrictions on trade with the Jewish state, and Bahraini officials assured Washington that they would cancel the anti-Israel embargo and close down the Israel Boycott Office.

But the move sparked opposition among Bahraini legislators, particularly among the sizable Islamist bloc in parliament, which has been outspoken in its criticism of any moves to normalize relations with Israel.

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Bahrain names Jewish ambassador to Washington

Iranian Jews pay back Alliance Israelite generosity

2008-11-05T07:03:00.009Z

Jews in Arab countries and Iran owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the French-based school system which hauled them out of their misery and ghettoes. The AIU's good work continues in Israel today, Karmel Melamed reports in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles:

"Nearly 350 Iranian Jewish members of the newly formed “Friends of Alliance Israelite in Southern California” a non-profit organization, gathered that day at the private residence of Jacqueline and Isaac Moradi in Beverly Hills to raise funds for the AIU’s agricultural school Mikveh Israel in Israel. Between 1898 and 1979, the AIU provided secular and Jewish education to Jews living through out Iran, an effort that indirectly resulted in Iranian Jews gaining wealth and leaving their ghettos.

" Gity Barkhordar, one of the event’s organizers said ticket sales and fundraising efforts at the event together generated roughly $1 million, which will be donated to Mikveh Israel for their renovation projects. It should be noted that Mikveh Israel was established in 1870 by the AIU on a tract of land southeast of Tel Aviv which they leased from the Sultan of Turkey. Even today, the school is still active in helping new immigrants to Israel to learn Hebrew and about agriculture techniques-- interestingly some of these new immigrants are Iranian Jews."

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