Shasha: where are the Middle Eastern Jews?

David Shasha (pictured) is having a bad week. Two articles on the trot have upset this director of the Sephardic Heritage Center in New York: the first by Columbia professor Joseph Massad on Al-Jazeera managed to offend so many that it was briefly pulled; the second on Open Zion, 'Throw away that rusty Key',  a response to an article on the Palestinian Nakba, was featured on Point of No Return.

About the first article, a bizarre and twisted rant conflating antisemites, Nazis and Zionists - the less said the better. What bothers Shasha most, writing in Mondoweiss about Massad's piece, is that Sephardim are absent from pro-Palestinian discourse. Massad insists on identifying Jews as Ashkenazim in his desperation to equate Jews with white settler colonialists: 

  It is therefore ironic that Massad, in seeking to counter Zionism, affirms its basic dogma that Jews are Europeans and not Middle Easterners. The contentious, ugly, and hateful battle between pro-Israel and anti-Israel forces is thus underscored by a rejection of Arab Jewish history and identity. 

There are only two voices permitted in this discussion, Shasha laments: the Ashkenazi voice and the Arab voice. Thus far, we couldn't agree more.

Then his argument begins to unravel:



Sephardim have no allies in this battle and those Sephardim who remain convinced that they are a part of this discussion are seriously mistaken.

A perfect example of this, Shasha continues,  is The Open Zion article by Lyn Julius, co-founder of Harif.


 What we see in all of Lyn Julius’ articles is a deeply devoted commitment to Zionism. Her advocacy marks Arab Jews as victims and supports the idea that the Jews of Middle East are indeed just like the Palestinians; homeless refugees who were oppressed by their host countries. What the article misses is the larger history of Jewish life in the Arab-Muslim world and some articulation of the glorious culture that it produced. All that we see is the hatred of the Arabs in a way that parrots the standard Israeli-Zionist approach.

Here Shasha is on much shakier ground: the glorious culture of Jewish life in the Arab Muslim world appears something of a red herring when Jews were forced to run for their lives from Arab countries. It's like saying that no discussion of the Jews escaping Nazi Germany is possible without a mention of the glorious contribution to German culture of Heine, Mendelssohn and Marx.

This is not to say that Jews from Arab countries were all Zionists - many were not. But one thing is sure: the establishment of Israel made the difference between life and death, offering the great mass of  Jewish refugees an unconditional  safe haven -  be they rich or poor, old or young, sick or healthy, uneducated or skilled.

It would be nice to know what Shasha means by 'the standard Israeli-Zionist approach', when  Israeli politics contains every shade of opinion and sentiment. However, it's no accident that Jews from Arab countries are amongst the political hawks, deeply mistrustful of their erstwhile Arab masters and still smarting from their recent experience of persecution and violence.

Shasha's argument then proceeds to leave the rails altogether, as he charges that the organisations Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC),  JIMENA and Harif are there to 'do the Israeli  government's bidding.'


 "These are organizations that work hand in glove with the Zionist organizations in a way that seeks to aid Israel in its attempt to negate the claims of the Palestinian Arabs. In the course of this advocacy the matter of anti-Sephardi racism on the part of Ashkenazi Israel is completely ignored.

 So these 'Sephardi' organisations are actually working against the better interests of Sephardim as a whole. Using Shasha's twisted logic, Sephardim should not be asking for recognition or compensation, because that benefits the Ashkenazi-dominated establishment in Israel. No mention of the rights of Jewish refugees outside Israel, either.

As for Shasha's smear that the three resource-starved organisations named above, who have struggled for years for public  attention, are 'fronts' for the Israeli government,  Stan Urman of JJAC told Point of No Return:

"JJAC generally, and me personally, have been vitriolically attacked by David. We must be doing something right!"

For Gina Waldman of JIMENA,  'there would be no greater honor".

Lyn Julius of Harif found the idea hilarious: "I never laughed so hard in my life," she said.

Egypt cuts off funding to remaining Jews

 Magda Haroun.. unclear why she is not continuing Weinstein's role


The ever-vigilant Elder of Ziyon quotes  a report in the Egyptian press that the Egyptian government has stopped paying a grant to Egypt's Jewish community following the death in March of its president Carmen Weinstein. This is a slap in the face for her successor Magda Haroun, who has not ceased to profess her loyalty to Egypt. In September, the Egyptian government cut off funding earmarked for restoration of Alexandria's synagogues. It sounds like Egypt wants nothing more to do with Jews, whether living or dead.


"An official in Egypt's Ministry of Social Affairs has stated that the small annual stipend that Egypt had been spending on the tiny Jewish community has been eliminated in the newest budget.

"Suad Makki, head of the Central Department for Financial and Administrative Affairs, told a meeting of the Commission on Human Rights of the Shura Council that the Egyptian government had been paying some $14,000 to the Jewish community almost every year since 1988. After the death earlier this year of Carmen Weinstein, the head of the community, Makki says that there is no longer a liaison.

"Egypt has an estimated 20 remaining Jews, all elderly women, according to the report.

"Weinstein was officially succeeded by Magda Haroun, and it is unclear why she is not continuing Weinstein's role, or if the cash-strapped Egyptian government is using Weinstein's death as an excuse."

Read post in full

Jewish archive exhibition to open in October

  

A Chumash dating back to 1568 and a Babylonian Talmud from 1793 are amongst items to be displayed as part of an exhibition of Jewish artefacts from Iraq at the National Archives building in Washington. The exhibition will open on 11 October 2013 and run until 5 January 2014. It could be the last time these items are seen in the US before they are shipped back to Iraq.

On May 6, 2003, just days after the Coalition forces took over Baghdad, 16 American soldiers from Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, a group assigned to search for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, entered Saddam Hussein’s flooded intelligence building. In the basement, under four feet of water, they found thousands of books and documents relating to the Jewish community of Iraq – materials that had belonged to synagogues and Jewish organizations in Baghdad.

The water-logged materials quickly became moldy in Baghdad’s intense heat and humidity. Seeking guidance, the Coalition Provisional Authority placed an urgent call to the nation’s foremost conservation experts at the National Archives. Just a week later, National Archives Director of Preservation Programs Doris Hamburg and Conservation Chief Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler arrived in Baghdad via military transport to assess the damage and make recommendations for preservation of the materials. Both experts share this extraordinary story and take you “behind the scenes” in this brief video [http://tinyurl.com/IraqiJA]. This video is in the public domain and not subject to any copyright restrictions. The National Archives encourages its use and free distribution.

Given limited treatment options in Baghdad, and with the agreement of Iraqi representatives, the materials were shipped to the United States for preservation and exhibition. Since then, these materials have been vacuum freeze-dried, preserved and photographed under the direction of the National Archives. The collection includes more than 2,700 Jewish books and tens of thousands of documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and English, dating from 1540 to the 1970s. A special website to launch this fall will make these historic materials freely available to all online as they are digitized and catalogued. This work was made possible through the assistance of the Department of State, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Center for Jewish History.

The Jews of Iraq have a rich past, extending back to Babylonia. These materials provide a tangible link to this community that flourished there, but in the second half of the twentieth century dispersed throughout the world. Today, fewer than five Jews remain.

Display highlights include:

• A Hebrew Bible with Commentaries from 1568 – one of the oldest books in the trove;
• A Babylonian Talmud from 1793;
• A Torah scroll fragment from Genesis - one of the 48 Torah scroll fragments found;
• A Zohar from 1815 – a text for the mystical and spiritual Jewish movement known as “Kabbalah”;
• An official 1918 letter to the Chief Rabbi regarding the allotment of sheep for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year);
• Materials from Jewish schools in Baghdad, including exam grades and a letter to the College Entrance Examination Board in Princeton regarding SAT scores;
• A Haggadah (Passover script) from 1902, hand lettered and decorated by an Iraqi Jewish youth ; and
• A lunar calendar in both Hebrew and Arabic from the Jewish year 5732 (1972-1973) - one of the last examples of Hebrew printed items produced in Baghdad.

Full details here

Rabbi Yahya Youssef's last stand

 

Rabbi Yahya Youssef, minus the traditional peot (sidelocks), interviewed on Yemen TV (with thanks: Ahuva)

 Rabbi Yahya Youssef heads the last redoubt of Yemeni Jews - expelled from their hometown by the rebel Houthis in 2008 and locked in a compound in the capital San'a. His efforts to gain equality for his community seem sadly pathetic. Blogger Elder of Ziyon has this post:
 
A Yemen website reports that the leader of Yemen's Jewish community, Yahya Youssef, has urged that the nation halts its incitement against Jews published in the media and in school curricula.

Last week he said that the Jews of Yemen do not want a separate school system, but are happy to send their children to public schools where they learn Arabic and Islam; they learn English and Hebrew afterwards, it seems. Even so, he said that the Jewish children are harassed in school. Youssef is demanding equality.  (..)

Youssef also complained about the Houthis who drove the Jewish community out of the al-Salem area of Saada with little notice; they claimed that the Jews drank alcohol, a charge that Youssef denies - he says that Yemenite Jews don't even drink the wine that Judaism allows.

He says that a priceless library was left behind in Sadaa and he wants to ensure its safety.


Read post in full

Throw away that rusty key!

 Maysoon Zayid's husband keeps the rusty key to his lost home near Jerusalem as a symbol of his 'Right of Return'. But a peace settlement should recognise there were two Nakbas - one Jewish and one Arab, and an irrevocable exchange of populations. Read Lyn Julius's reply to Maysoon in Open Zion (The Daily Beast):

Dear Maysoon,

I was moved to read your piece commemorating the flight of your husband from a village near Jerusalem in 1948. He has kept the rusty iron key to his home. Yours was one of hundreds of articles in the global media, together with demonstrations and marches, marking your Nakba—the flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in 1948.

A picture dated February 10, 2009 shows the entrance of an abandoned Jewish synagogue with a removed Star of David from the wall in Fallujah, west of Baghdad. (Saddam Hussein / AFP / Getty Images)

But let me tell you a little known-fact: as your husband's family was fleeing their village, a greater number of Jewish refugees were streaming out of the Arab world with one suitcase—in the opposite direction.

Over 800,000 Jewish refugees fled in the years immediately following 1948. This is the Jewish Nakba—a forgotten tragedy shrouded in silence. One of those refugee families was mine. We lived in a comfortable house in a riverside Jewish neighbourhood in Baghdad.

"There is no place like home," as you say. Iraq was home to Jews for 2,600 years. A third of Baghdad was Jewish. But in 1948, persecution became so intolerable that my parents, along with 90 percent of Iraq's Jews, had no choice but to flee. The Jews lost everything—citizenship, homes, lands, businesses, synagogues, schools, hospitals and heritage. The same story repeated itself across the Arab world, as dispossessed Jews fled discrimination, abuse, riots and executions. Of a million Jews, only 4,000 remain.

You complain that there are Jews who deny the Arab Nakba. But plenty of Arabs and their supporters deny that Jews were ever refugees—let alone suffered a monumental injustice. They claim that Jews left the Arab world "of their own free will." Or they blame the Zionists—although a third of us resettled in the West.

If you are tempted to blame the Jewish exodus on Israel’s creation, let me assure you that Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism did not begin in 1948: If you then ask, what has the injustice against the Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries got to do with you Palestinians? The answer is: everything.

This Nakba Day happened to coincide with the 72nd anniversary of the Farhud against the Jews of Baghdad. The rape, mutilation and murder of hundreds of Jews was directly incited by the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem and 400 Palestinian teachers exiled to Iraq between 1939 and 1941. Seven years later, your leadership dragged five Arab states into a failed war to destroy Israel.

Israel is full of people who fled, not the German Nazis, but the Arabs: 52 percent of Israeli Jews descend from refugees from Muslim and Arab lands. Your husband's village—now renamed Musreya—was repopulated by Yemenite and Moroccan Jews.

Palestinians are not "red indians" and Israelis are not colonialists. Quite the opposite. We Jews of the Middle East and North Africa are indigenous—predating Islam in Palestine, and the region, by 1,000 years. Israel is not only the "largest and most successful refugee camp" in the region, but the authentic expression of a native Middle Eastern people.

Both sets of refugees suffered, with one glaring difference: the Arab refugees—and those 10,000 Jews chased out of Jerusalem and "the West Bank" by the Jordanian Arab Legion—fled the horrors of war. But the Jews living in Arab countries were non-combatants, targeted as members of the "Jewish minority of Palestine."

The Arab states continued to persecute Jews who stayed behind until the '60s and '70s, as a Canadian Parliamentary committee heard this month. The million Arabs who, as you put it, "held strong" and became Israelis—never suffered "ethnic cleansing" of this kind.

But let’s not get into a suffering contest. Let's see how we can best resolve the conflict between us and achieve peace.

Recognize that there were two Nakbas—one Jewish, one Arab. Stop clinging to that retrogressive yearning for "home." Will you correct the injustice done to you by committing another injustice—forcing the Jews who overcame great hardship to rebuild their lives in Musreya to return "home" to hostile Arab lands? They neither wish to return, nor are they able to.

Some 600,000 Jewish refugees—about the same number as the fleeing Palestinian refugees—were resettled in Israel. Let’s agree that an irrevocable exchange of populations occurred.

Palestinian refugees should be absorbed in the state of Palestine, or campaign for full civil rights in the Arab host countries where most were born. Both Arab and Jewish refugees ought to be able to claim compensation for lost assets from an international fund.

So throw away that rusty key, Maysoon. This obsession with the past is unhealthy. Get over it. We Jewish refugees did.

Read article and comments

The Jewish divas of the Arabic music scene

 The great Egyptian singer and actress Leila Murad



On the eve of a festival to celebrate their music in Israel, fascinating Haaretz article about the great female Jewish singers of the 1920s and 30s who dominated the Arabic music scene but whose fortunes plummeted on arrival in Israel. In its zeal to condemn Israeli society's 'contempt' and 'humiliation' of these 'bimbos' and their culture, the article fails to make clear that these Jewish women became prominent because Arab Muslim society was even more protective of its women. (With thanks: Orna)


They scorched the stages of Algeria and Tunis, in Casablanca and Baghdad, and also in Berlin and Paris. With bobbed hair − a daring style for the time − a thin cigarette in a holder between their fingers, they were among the leaders of the musical and cultural scene in their countries and even became international stars. They are the great Jewish female musicians and singers who were active in North Africa and the Middle East in the mid-20th century: Leila Mourad, Faiza Rushdi, Zohra El Fassia, Habiba Msika, Louisa Tounsia, Reinette L’Oranaise, Line Monty and Raymonde Abecassis. Msika, a Tunisian Jew, was an actress in the Arab world’s most prominent theater. El Fassia, a Moroccan Jew, was the first woman from that milieu to release a record album. Like many others, she too wrote the lyrics and music of the songs she performed.

Abecassis, the last of the giants of that generation, will be appearing Thursday with the Mediterranean Andalusian Orchestra of Ashkelon in a concert titled Ki Kolech Arev ‏(For Your Voice is Beautiful‏), conducted by Tom Cohen. The concert, which will be part of the Heart at the East Festival in Tel Aviv, will be dedicated to the women who were singing stars in Arab and Maghreb countries.

Why were Jewish female singers so prominent among the pioneers of modern Arab music? And how did it come about that in Morocco and other places, they are engraved in the collective memory and remembered with esteem − yet most Israelis never heard of them?

Shira Ohayon, the education director of the Mediterranean Andalusian Orchestra and a prominent Mizrahi feminist researcher and activist, conceived and produced the concert. She is researching the singers’ histories, has written essays about them on the Cafe Gibraltar website and plans to publish a book containing her findings. She says she started researching their stories when she started wondering why there were no female singers in the Andalusian Orchestra in Israel. Her father, who was born in Morocco, told her about the great singers of the past. The discovery that there were quite a few Jews among them surprised her. “I asked myself, Why Jewish women, specifically? After all, I know the conservative Moroccan Jewish way of life from home,” she says.

It turns out that the picture is a complex one. “Our knowledge here about Jews in Islamic countries is nourished by Zionist stereotypes that spoke about absorption by modernization, and portrayed the Jews who came from those backgrounds as coming from the back of beyond,” says Ohayon. “But of course, they didn’t all come from the same mold. They went through profound processes of secularization starting in the 1920s. Our history doesn’t start at the moment the Zionist movement discovered that it needed ‘natural workers’ and population distribution,” she says.

Raymonde Abecassis

“These processes affected the women a great deal. Women began to study. In 1886 the first Alliance school for girls was established in Tetouan, the city my mother came from. The legal age at which girls could marry was raised. The development of colonialism at the time strengthened the financial position of the Jews, many of whom were merchants and had connections overseas, and increased their openness to new ideas.”

It was in this atmosphere of mixed cultures and languages that the female singers appeared. Their successful appearances in Europe also exposed them to the feminist ideas of the period, says Ohayon.
“Habiba Msika became a legend. She was an admired artist, a hot subject of conversation during the 1920s in the Maghreb, France and the Middle East,” musicologist Mohammed Emskeen writes in an essay published in honor of the Atlantic Andalusian Music Festival held in Essaouira, Morocco last October. The festival was dedicated to the female singers and their contribution to Jewish-Arab music and culture. Msika was the first Arab woman to perform onstage, in 1911. She appeared throughout Europe and the Maghreb, living and loving freely. Coco Chanel described her as having “a fiery temperament under her Eastern graces.” She met a tragic end: In 1930, a jealous lover murdered her by setting her ablaze. Books were written and films made about her life.

Another superstar was Leila Mourad, the daughter of a well-known Jewish family of cantors and liturgical poets. “To the Egyptians, she’s an Egyptian in every way, a cultural icon, alongside other stars of Arab music such as Umm Kulthum and Asmahan,” says Ohayon. The Jewish community distanced itself from Mourad when she converted to Islam to marry the well-known actor Anwar Wagdi. Other Jewish stars in Egyptian film and theater such as Raqia Ibrahim, Camelia ‏(Liliane Levy Cohen‏), Nagma Ibrahim and Nagwa Salem also won recognition from the musical establishment and the audience, even though they remained Jewish and some even expressed solidarity with the State of Israel and the Zionist movement.

Ohayon says that in addition to these stars, “in Iraq there was Salima Pasha, a hugely popular star, who was the wife of Iraq’s greatest singer, Nazem al-Ghazali. There was Maya Casabianca, a native of Morocco, who was the wife of Farid al-Atrash. We can wonder how that could happen. After all, she was a Jewish woman who went with a Muslim man. In those communities, families sat shiva for women who did that, mourning them as if they had died. But these women had a different status. They were already deeply involved in Arab life, and here, too, they crossed boundaries.”

There were also Line Monty, “the Algerian Edith Piaf”; Reinette L’Oranaise, a rabbi’s daughter who became blind and became a virtuoso oud player; Louisa Tounsia and others.


But Zohra El Fassia was fairly well known in Israel, if only because of the poem by Erez Biton lamenting her fate here.

El Fassia, who died in 1994, is a cultural heroine in Morocco. In the Atlantic Andalusian Music Festival in Essaouira, an evening was held in her honor, says Ohayon. “Among the Muslim leaders of culture in Morocco, she was seen as an integral part of Moroccan culture and collective memory, and her contribution to folk music ‏(the chaabi and malhun styles‏) is held in high esteem there.

“Erez Biton described the collapse of these stars here in Israel very well,” Ohayon says. “The poem ‘Zohra El Fassia’ is an excellent allegory for the culture of Morocco’s Jews, which was an object of mockery. It seems some of the singers realized what was in store for them here and didn’t immigrate to Israel. Line Monty moved to France. Salima Pasha stayed in Iraq. She never came to Israel, so she avoided that fate.

“In the case of the musicians, in addition to the contempt for Mizrahi culture, which the Zionist movement regarded as an inferior subculture or folklore at best, Israeli society held the Mizrahi women in contempt as well,” Ohayon continues. “The society regarded them as frehot ‏(bimbos‏) − in other words, as women who were cheap, vulgar, flighty and uneducated.”

Today, Ohayon says, Jewish Mizrahi women are humiliated twice: once by Israeli society, which was built on an ethos of a rejection of the East in general and rejection of Arab culture in particular, and again by Mizrahi men, who use religious or other explanations to exclude them from the field of culture and song, in direct opposition to what is transpiring in their countries of origin.

But the development of Jewish musicians will not be severed so easily. Young Israeli singers who did not grow up listening to Arabic music are returning to their roots, or embracing the genre as a kind of rebellion.

Read article in full

Canadian refugee hearings: Gladys's story

 Gladys Daoud

The transcripts of the Canadian Parliamentary committee investigation into the plight of Jewish refugees on 2 and 7 May 2013 have now been published. The committee heard testimony from Libyan-born Gina Waldman and Iraqi-born Gladys Daoud and Lisette Shashoua. Here is Gladys's story (with thanks to all those who emailed me):


  After World War I, Iraq became independent from the Ottoman Empire. Jews played an important role in the financial, cultural, and political life of the new country. Iraqi Jews occupied prominent positions in the ministries of finance and justice and in Parliament. Furthermore, Jewish lawyers were instrumental in drafting the constitution of the new state.

    My grandfather sent my father and his two brothers to France for their education. My father became a doctor, and was lucky to return to Baghdad before World War II. His two brothers, one a real estate developer and the other a medical student, ended their short lives in a concentration camp in Germany, but that is another story.

    My father returned to Iraq and established his medical practice after serving in the Iraqi army as a colonel. My parents' life in Iraq until the creation of the State of Israel was relatively happy, even though it was marred by tragic events that occurred at various intervals. For example, my paternal grandfather was murdered. His murder was not investigated by the police, and his murderer was never brought to justice.

     In 1941 the people of Baghdad, encouraged by the pro-Nazi government at the time, went on a murderous rampage in the Jewish quarter, killing close to 200 Jews and pillaging homes and businesses. My maternal grandfather miraculously survived despite being hunted by rebels trying to get hold of the key to the country's treasury. In spite of that, my parents endured and prospered.

    After the creation of the State of Israel, the Iraqi government embarked on a policy of ethnic cleansing and persecution of its Jewish population. Prominent Jews were publicly hanged. Jewish businesses were confiscated. Import licences were cancelled. Jewish public servants were fired.

    Jews were forbidden from leaving the country under the pretense that they would join the Zionist enemy and attack Iraq. Under international pressure, the government finally relented, and allowed Jews to leave Iraq provided they abandoned all of their assets in favour of the state. Out of 150,000 Jews, 140,000 left the country, abandoning all of their possessions with the exception of one suitcase of clothes.

    Those who stayed behind were deluded optimists who believed that the violence directed at the Jews would pass, and that coexistence in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbours was still possible.

    Things took a turn for the worse in 1963, after the Baath regime took power. Their first priority was to embark on an ethnic cleansing policy towards the Iraqi Jews. They banned all exit visas for Jews, and actively promoted a culture of hatred and incitement towards them.

    I was a teenager going to school in 1967 when the Six Day War took place. I saw my entire world collapse around me. All Jews in Baghdad were declared spies and enemies of the people. The radio was blaring all day, calling the people to action to kill the Jews. Needless to say, we were terrified, and we had nowhere to go.

    The government proceeded with a plan of total isolation and economic strangulation. Employers were instructed to fire their Jewish employees. Christian and Muslim co-workers and business partners were terrified of being associated with enemies of the state, and thus all Jewish-owned businesses closed their doors, and our school lost all its teachers. Our Muslim and Christian friends whom we grew up with no longer dared to speak to us.

    My father's medical clinic was adjacent to the local government intelligence office. His patients were afraid of being seen there, so the only patients he treated were policemen and the intelligence officers who were treated free of charge while keeping a close watch on his movements.

    As Jewish students, we were refused admittance to any higher education. The few students who were already enrolled in university were regularly beaten by their classmates while the teachers and administration turned a blind eye.

    I finished my government high school exam in June 1967. I ranked second in all of Iraq and was immediately accepted into Baghdad University. In fact, I had also applied to McGill and MIT and was accepted at both of these universities. However, on learning that I was of the Jewish faith, my acceptance at Baghdad University was retracted and I was refused a passport to study abroad. For the four years that followed, I endured the life of a non-person and watched all my hopes and aspirations go to ashes as I sat confined to my room, between four walls, thinking of what other young people all over the world were doing.

    I applied for a secretarial job at the Belgian consulate and was accepted. Three weeks later, I was called into the consul's office and informed very politely that although I was not being asked to leave, they had received word that my father would be imprisoned should I not leave immediately. Needless to say, I did just that.

    My family's bank accounts were frozen, our property was confiscated, and we were only able to survive thanks to the money that my mother had the foresight to bury in our garden. We were forbidden to leave Baghdad. Our telephone line was cancelled, and we could not meet with other Jewish families since this could lead to an accusation that we were conspiring against the state. Our condition was desperate.

    To make things worse, the government decided to publicly execute 14 Iraqis in 1969, most of whom were innocent Jews. I personally knew a couple of them who were students like me, unable to work or study and trying to keep busy by learning a foreign language. They were hanged in the public square and the population was given the day off and invited to gather and dance in celebration underneath the dangling corpses. I still have nightmares about being back in Baghdad and reliving the anguish of those days.

    Those were not the only Jews who lost their lives. Every so often, a Jew would randomly be arrested, never to be heard from again. Their families to this day have no closure.

    The situation was so desperate that we had no choice but to seek to escape by any means possible. Many left on foot or on the back of a mule, across the mountains in northern Iraq and into Iran with the help of Kurdish guides. Some were arrested and brought back. Those who were carrying any diplomas or valuables with them would try to flush them down a toilet so as not to provide proof about their intended flight. These secret departures added to the despair of those left behind. They saw their close friends and relatives disappear while they were left behind not knowing what the next day might bring.

    On April 17, 1971, with one suitcase of clothes and some pocket change, my parents and I locked the front door of our home in Baghdad for the last time and started a long journey to come to Montreal to seek a new beginning.

Read transcript in full

Transcripts of hearings: 2 May; 7 May here and here 

Expulsion of Jews had no 'political consequences'

Canadian Parliament to investigate Jewish refugees 

More proof that Tunisian Salafists hate all Jews

This video was shot a few days ago in the Tunisian tourist resort of Sousse. It shows Tunisian Salafists smashing bottles of alcohol. About two minutes into the clip, the Salafists are shouting down their favourite bogeyman - the Jews.

Mark their words. You can clearly hear the Arabic 'al Yahud'. Are demonstrators railing at Israel, or are they shouting, ' Down with the Jews, but not Tunisian Jews' ? No.

 When it comes to purveying the 'demon drink',  the worst offenders, in these Islamists' eyes, are in fact Tunisian Jews. After all, they originated the famous Boukha - or fig brandy.

Tell that to Ahmed Maher of the BBC. Recently a reader received a BBC reply to her complaint relating to Ahmed Maher’s claim in a BBC website news piece:

 “Several media reports spoke about YouTube videos that showed radical Islamists threatening Tunisian Jews. Despite searching extensively, I did not find any of them.” 

The reader provided four video clips in support of the complaint – viewable here, here, here and here.

The mind-boggling reply she received could have come straight of Alice in Wonderland:

 “We have reviewed Ahmed Maher’s article “Tunisia’s last Jews at ease despite troubled past”, and discussed your complaint with him. Regarding the You Tube links, Mr Maher reaffirms that he conducted an extensive search in Arabic and English to find clips or links of Salafists or hardliners attacking “Tunisian Jews” – a specification he makes clear in his piece.

    "He found clips of rallies in support of Osama Bin Laden, but stresses he did not find anything attacking “Tunisian Jews” specifically (my emphasis - ed) . Mr Maher says: “The chants heard in the four links cited [in your complaint] are against ‘the State of Israel and Jews but not Tunisian Jews’. 

    "The chants were echoed across several Muslim countries in the past two years in the wake of the Arab spring (and even before the revolutions) by extremists (even lay people and leftists in Egypt in particular who attacked the headquarters of the Israeli embassy in Giza in August 2011) to protest what they term ‘the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the blockade of the Gaza strip’.

    "They chanted it in Tunisia during the visit of the Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah. Again, the chants, which are in Arabic, were not directed at ‘Tunisian Jews’ but ‘Israel’ in general.

    “I spoke to Sheikh Bashir Bin Hassan, one of the most prominent Salafi, Wahabi sheikhs in post-revolution Tunisian, and asked him again about two things: the chants and the protest in front of the Tunis synagogue. He said: ‘The chants were not aimed at the Tunisian Jews; make no mistake. It was directed at Israel because Israel is a very sensitive issue in the Muslim world. Our Prophet Muhammad asked us to take good care and protect non-Muslims living in our countries like Christians and Jews.’

 "Get it?" says the excellent BBC Watch blog." According to the BBC, if Tunisian Islamists (and presumably any elsewhere too) chant “Killing the Jews is a duty” or “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud” or ”the army of Mohammed will return”, then local Jews have nothing whatsoever to worry about because in fact they are not referring to them – or indeed to Jews at all – but to Israel, which should apparently be perfectly understandable.

"And the BBC website’s Middle East desk is quite sure of that because a prominent Salafist – who obviously thinks it unremarkable to chant hate speech relating to “the Zionist entity’s policies” in front of a synagogue in Tunisia – told them so.

BBC Watch concludes:

" If that is the level of understanding and interpretation prevalent among staff at the BBC’s Middle East desk, then the only conclusion can be that the licence fee payer is funding an outfit not fit for purpose."

 No doubt the BBC would also rubbish the latest video (above ) from Sousse.

As for Mr Maher's playing down 'exaggerated' media reports of Tunisian antisemitism, he maintains that all the Tunisian Jews he interviewed told him, "we are fed up" :

"I have not put words into their mouths, neither did I push them to speak on this angle. There is no question about that.”

As pointed out by Point of No Return, Mr Maher has selectively interviewed 'dhimmi' Tunisian Jews with a vested interest in playing down 'exaggerated' media reports of Tunisian antisemitism.

However,  Mr Maher's colleague Magdi Abdelhadi, in his two-part radio series on the Exodus of Jews from Arab countries, Heart and Soul, broadcast six months ago, managed to find three Tunisian Jews who held the opposite view.

" It is the Salafists we fear", restauranteur Jacob Lellouche is heard to say.

Whatever happened to BBC standards of impartial reporting?

Knesset to confirm 30 November as Refugee Day

Point of No Return exclusive (with thanks: Levana)

The Israeli Knesset is expected to confirm 30 November as the Memorial Day for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

Moroccan-born MK Shimon Ohayon (pictured) this week tabled a bill stipulating the Memorial Day as part of "the Rights of Jewish Refugees who were uprooted, expelled or fled from Arab countries with the establishment of the state of Israel or in the wake of it."

The date chosen, 30 November, is the day after 29 November 1947, which marks the passing of UN Resolution 181 on the Partition of Palestine.

The subsequent furore in the Arab world that year led to antisemitic unrest in Egypt and Libya, and pogroms in Syria, Aden and Bahrain. November was traditionally a notorious month for anti-Jewish disturbances in Arab countries coinciding with the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.

The Israeli Ministry for Tourism will  be responsible for the observance of Memorial Day, working together with the Ministries for Education, Culture and Sport. The Israeli Foreign ministry will also be expected to organise special events outside Israel. If 30 November falls on a Friday or Saturday, the Day will be observed at the start of the following week.

Although the idea of a Memorial Day has long been in the pipeline, it was heavily promoted by Danny Ayalon, deputy foreign minister in the last government.

Shimon Ohayon is a new arrival in the Knesset, where he represents Yisrael Beytenu. Next week he is due to meet representatives of the organisations of Jews from Arab countries as well as Sam Grundwerg, Director of the World Jewish Congress in Israel and Edna Weinstock-Gabay, Director of Global Strategic Initiatives.

The meeting will lay the groundwork for a cross-party group to promote awareness in the Knesset  of Jewish refugees from Arab Countries.

Moroccan book fair slammed for its Jew-hatred

When it comes to the treatment of Jews, the  Moroccans -  and notably their king - tend to get a very good press (see previous post).  This is why the blatant display of books encouraging Jew-hatred at the Casablanca book fair alarmed the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (which monitors antisemitism)  enough to send a letter to the Moroccan Minister of Culture (with thanks: Ralph):

In a letter addressed to Mohammed Amine Sbihi, Moroccan Minister of Culture, Shimon Samuels, director of International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, presented the results of his fourth annual investigation into incitement to antisemitism on the bookstands of the SIEL book fair.

The fair, which took place from 29 March to 7 April, is the largest in the Arab world, with 150 Moroccan stands, 30 Lebanese, 20 Syrian, 10 Egyptian, five Saudi, two Palestinian and one Libyan. 
Mr Samuels declared:"It is frightening to note that ... in spite of the Arab Spring, Jew-hatred remains an implacable constant of the Arab literature on display at the last three book fairs, leaving an indelible stain on the SIEL event."




Read article in full (French)

Why is the Moroccan King funding Jewish sites?

 The King of Morocco was virtually the sole funder of the restored Cape Verde Jewish cemetery (photo: AFP)


What lies behind the King of Morocco's drive to restore synagogues and Jewish cemeteries? Are his motives pure, or is he just trying to attract Jewish tourism and improve Morocco's standing with the US? The Times of Israel investigates:

With virtually no practising Jews on Cape Verde today, the cemeteries had fallen into neglect. Now a Washington-based nonprofit is spearheading their restoration.

The Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project has a board stuffed with prominent Jewish Washingtonians, but its funding comes almost entirely from one man — King Mohammed VI of Morocco. According to the group’s US tax filings, the king was the organization’s sole donor in 2011 and 2012, giving $100,000 each year.

Andre Azoulay, a senior Jewish adviser to the king and a member of the project’s advisory board, told JTA that the effort is reflective of the king’s “deep commitment” to preserving Jewish heritage in Morocco and elsewhere. But even if, as some speculate, it is motivated by a desire to attract tourists and curry favor with American Jews, the king’s drive clearly sets Morocco apart from other Middle Eastern countries where Jewish sites have faced increasing threats under new Islamist governments.

“This is all part of a strong push from His Majesty the King that started three, four years ago, when we saw cemeteries have become vulnerable because of lacking care by all of us,” Azoulay told JTA.

Approximately 3,000 Jews are living in Morocco, a North African monarchy about the size of Texas that had been home to a large and thriving Jewish community for centuries. In the 19th century, a number of Moroccan-Jewish families resettled in Cape Verde, attracted by the financial potential of this transatlantic hub.

Over time the families totally assimilated, though their Creole-speaking, Christian descendants include some of Cape Verde’s most prominent businessmen and politicians, including the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Carlos Alberto Wahnon de Carvalho Veiga.

Unlike many Arab countries with once sizable Jewish communities, Morocco has taken wide-ranging steps to preserve its Jewish history. The Casablanca Jewish museum was restored, the small but colorful 17th century synagogue in Fez was renovated, and dozens of former Jewish schools and more than 100 synagogues were rehabilitated with funding from the crown.

In 2011, in a move that Azoulay calls unprecedented in the modern Middle East, the Moroccan constitution was changed to note that the country has been “nourished and enriched … [by] Hebraic influences,” among others. The Moroccan parliament adopted the new language along with amendments that transferred some powers from the king to elected parties.

“I am not trying to paint a one-sided rosy picture. There are some difficult and maybe black pages in the book of Moroccan Jewry,” Azoulay told JTA. “But there are many, many more beautiful chapters.”

The king’s restoration activity already has brought benefits in the form of increased Jewish tourism. More than 19,000 Israelis entered Morocco in 2010, a 42 percent leap from the previous year, according to Israel’s Tourism Ministry. The World Federation of Moroccan Jewry says the kingdom receives another 30,000 non-Israeli Jews annually.

Among them was Joel Rubinfeld, the Brussels-based co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament, who spent 12 days in Morocco in March meeting with government officials and visiting his mother’s hometown. Rubinfeld believes the government’s intention to honor the country’s Jewish past is sincere, but he said other considerations are at work as well.

“There may certainly be pragmatic incentives: attracting tourism and investments down the line,” Rubinfeld said. “For some, it is a political calculation to improve Morocco’s international standing.”

A Moroccan diplomat, who spoke to JTA on condition of anonymity, said the restoration project could bring political dividends for Morocco, which has been accused of human rights abuses in Western Sahara, a disputed territory to which the kingdom lays partial claim.

“To Morocco’s great consternation, the US last month proposed the UN peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara help monitor human rights,” the diplomat said. “It’s very useful for us to have someone — a strong lobby group, perhaps — to help talk the State Department out of this idea. The Jewish lobby is a very strong one.”

The board of the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project includes Howard Berman, a former California congressman who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee until his defeat last year; Daniel Mariaschin, the executive director of B’nai B’rith International; Herman Cohen, a former US assistant secretary of state; and Toby Dershowitz, who heads a Washington public affairs consultancy.

But Azoulay grows indignant at any suggestion the king has his eye on the economic or political benefits of his largesse.

“This effort is the concrete manifestation of a consensus in Moroccan society, that our society is partly built on Jewish culture, a culture deeply rooted in three millennia of history,” he said.

“You have to understand the purity of it,” Azoulay added. “Those who think it is to attract tourists are just out of order.”

As popular revolutions have swept the Arab world since late 2010, Jewish heritage has suffered under newly empowered Islamist governments. Two Jewish cemeteries were desecrated earlier this year in Tunisia, prompting Israel to express concerns for the safety of the country’s Jews, the daily Maariv reported.

In Egypt, the government prevented several dozen Israelis from making the annual Passover pilgrimage to Alexandria’s main synagogue, one of the few properly maintained and functioning Jewish sites in the country. Egypt also briefly censored a film about the flight of its Jews following Israel’s establishment.

But in Morocco, a similar film, titled “Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes from the Mellah,” won a prize last month at the Tangier Film Festival. It also triggered protests from a few hundred Islamists and left-wing activists saying the film promoted “normalization” of ties with Israel, The Associated Press reported.

Read article in full

This Shavuot pogrom haunts us still

 A scene from the Farhud of 1941 by artist Nissim Zalayet

Over 70 years later, the Nazi demons unleashed by the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad are still with us, argues Lyn Julius in The Times of Israel. The Arab war against Israel is simply a continuation of the ethnic cleansing it started:

Salim Fattal was just eleven when the two-day Baghdad pogrom known as the Farhud erupted on Shavuot 72 years ago, yet its memory is engraved deep in his soul. Despite the passage of time, the shrieks and wails of the pogrom’s 179 Jewish victims still echo in his ears. 

On 1 June, the first day of Shavuot in 1941, Fattal, his widowed mother and four siblings endured unimaginable terror, as he describes in his vivid memoir In the Alleys of Baghdad:

Helpless Jews had been cornered in their homes and fallen easy prey to robbers, murderers and rapists, who abused their victims to their heart’s content, with no let or hindrance. They slit throats, slashed off limbs, smashed skulls. They made no distinction between women, children and old people. In that gory scene, blind hatred of Jews and the joy of murder for its own sake reinforced each other.

Salim’s uncle Meir was pulled off a bus by a raging mob baying for Jewish blood, and never seen again. 

Salim and his family managed to get through the night unscathed by bribing a local policeman to stand guard over their house. Haggling over how much he would be paid for each bullet he fired at the rioters, the policeman finally settled with the family at a quarter of a dinar for each shot.

The Farhud (Arabic for “violent dispossession”) marked an irrevocable break between Jews and Arabs in Iraq and paved the way for the dissolution of the 2,600-year-old Jewish community barely 10 years later. Loyal and productive citizens comprising a fifth of Baghdad, the Jews had not known anything like the Farhud in living memory. Before the victims’ blood was dry, army and police warned the Jews not to testify against the murderers and looters. Even the official report on the massacre was not published until 1958.

Read article in full

Remember the Farhud for the future's sake

 The brutal antisemitism of the Farhud culminated in the hanging of Shafik Ades in 1948
 

The festival of Shavuot starts tomorrow. For Iraqi Jews, it will be indelibly associated with the Farhud of Shavuot 1941. Zvi Gabay in Israel Hayom reminds us why the memory of this bloody pogrom is important, 72 years on:

On Shavuot, the holiday which Jews around the globe begin celebrating this Tuesday night, Iraqi Jews mark 72 years since the Farhud -- the 1941 riots in which 137 people were slaughtered and hundreds more injured. The Babylonian (Iraqi) Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda has inscribed the victims' names, and Iraqi Jews worldwide recall the horrible disgrace of those events, which were so reminiscent of Kristallnacht in Germany. The Farhud riots were carried out by a mob that had been incited to violence, and resulted in the Iraqi Jewish community losing faith in the country they had called home for millennium; the community of some 140,000 Jewish people dwindled to just a sparse few today. 

Iraqi Jews were harassed for no apparent reason. The Jews, who had lived in Iraq for 2,600 years, weren't subverting the country from within, like the Palestinian Arabs who fought against the Jewish settlements, and eventually the State of Israel. Actually, Jews were the targets of hostility in every Arab country in which they lived, not just in Iraq. One-hundred-and-thirty-three Jews were killed in Libya as anti-Jewish violence reached its peak in the North African country in November 1945; in Aden, Yemen, some 100 Jews were murdered in November 1947; in Egypt, the Jews were ejected from their homes and expelled from the state. And, despite all the international attention paid to the "Palestinian Nakba," little has been said about the great injustice that the Jews of Arabia suffered. It's true that history is not a competition of tragedies, but it's important to note the ethnic cleansing that spread throughout the Arab nations. The scope of this tragedy was quite extensive -- some 856,000 Jews were forced to flee their homes in Arab countries, compared to the 650,000 Palestinian refugees. And yet, for unknown reasons, the government in Israel still hasn't placed the catastrophe that befell Arab Jews high on its domestic, or international, agenda. 

Jews were being harassed before Israel was declared a state. Historian Edwin Black, Prof. Shmuel Moreh and Dr. Zvi Yehuda have published research that uncovers the links between then-Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's pro-Nazi government and the Third Reich in Germany. Iraq implemented discriminatory regulations against Jews that affected all aspects of their daily life, and afterward incited mobs to violence against the Jews. The Farhud riots of 1941 were the culmination of these efforts. 

The fusion of xenophobic-tinged nationalism and a contagious anti-Jewish sentiment created a reality that was ripe with Jew hatred. Then-German Ambassador to Iraq, Dr. Fritz Grobba, readily fueled the attitude, and Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had fled from Palestine, found Iraq to be a convenient arena for anti-Jewish activities. The brutal, anti-Jewish environment culminated in the hanging of Shafiq Ades, a wealthy Jewish businessman, in Basra's central square, as inflammatory, anti-Jewish radio broadcasts and speeches at the U.N. podium filled the air. 

Finally, with no other choice, the Jews of Iraq gathered their belongings and deserted their country, the Iraq that they had ushered into the modern age. Iraqi Jews left behind their private belongings and the ancient property of their communities, including the supposed burial sites of the prophets Ezekiel, Jonah, Nahum Alqoshi and Ezra the Scribe, which the Iraqi government proceeded to take over.

There were, of course, Iraqis who refused to condone attacks against the Jewish population, but they were mostly silenced. The Jews had become the scapegoat in the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, just as today Israel stands between Iran and the Arabs in their conflict. Were the Jews still residing in Arab countries, it's reasonable to assume that their communities would have been ravaged in the recent uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria. 

Read article in full

On the supposed 'whiteness' of Israeli Jews

 Yitnish Aynaw, the current Miss Israel, arrived from Ethiopia aged 12

This year's Miss Israel is a young lady of black Ethiopian heritage. But how many people, including prominent intellectuals and leaders, believe the myth that most Israelis are white? Jeff Weintraub puts them to rights.

In 2003 a very great man, Nelson Mandela, made a very inaccurate and unfortunate statement:

Why should there be one standard for one country, especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white.

That remark was was especially bizarre because the country Mandela referred to as "black" was Iraq. I very much doubt that this was the way Saddam Hussein would have described himself.

As I pointed out in 2008, Mandela's statement reflected a misconception about Israel that is all too prevalent. His description of Israel as a "white" country was no doubt based on a taken-for-granted assumption that Israeli Jews are of European origin.

 In fact, about half of Israeli Jews are Middle Eastern Jews, or Mizrahim (sometimes also called Sephardim, though strictly speaking that term covers only Jews who can trace their ancestry back to pre-1492 Spain)--and for most of the history of Israel, until the arrival of the Russian Jews in the 1990s, a solid majority of Israeli Jews were Mizrahim.

These people are not Europeans or ex-Europeans, but refugees from the Arab world and Iran (and their descendants), and the now-vanished Jewish communities they represent had roots in the Middle East, including what is now Iraq, that long pre-dated the coming of Islam.

(For some details, see A historic optical illusion - Israel & the invisible Middle Eastern Jews and Irwin Cotler on the Middle Eastern Jews & the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as the very useful website Point of No Return.)

If they are "white," then so are Iraqis ... not to mention Syrians, Algerians, Egyptians, Saudis, and so on.


Read post in full

Al-Alusi: Iraqi Jews are bridge to peace

 Iraqi ex-MP Mithal al-Alusi paid a heavy price for his support for normalisation with Israel: his two sons and a bodyguard were blown up. But he still believes in peace, and that 400,000 Iraqi Jews in Israel can help achieve it, he tells The Times of Israel (with thanks: Lily):

An anti-Baath activist since the mid 1970s, Alusi was forced to flee the Middle East for Germany, where in 2002 he staged a takeover of the Iraqi embassy in protest of Saddam’s human rights abuses. The following year, after the American invasion in March, he was back in Iraq heading the de-Baathification commission responsible of cleansing the administration of Saddam loyalists.

As an outspoken advocate of normalization with Israel, Alusi traveled to Tel Aviv in 2004 to take part in the annual counterterrorism conference at Herzliyah’s Interdisciplinary Center. Upon his return to Iraq, he was stripped of his official positions for violating a law banning Iraqis from traveling to Israel.

On February 8, 2005, gunmen ambushed Alusi’s convoy driving through western Baghdad, killing his two sons Ayman and Jamal and his bodyguard. He had no doubt the attack was a response to his pro-Israel stance.

“I will repeat it, even if these terrorists try to kill me again, peace is the only solution. Peace with Israel is the only solution for Iraq. Peace with everybody, but no peace for the terrorists,” Alusi told AFP that day.

Mithal Al-Alusi (photo credit: courtesy)

Alusi stood behind those words and traveled to Israel again in September 2008. A supreme court decision three months later saved him from prosecution after a parliamentary majority removed his diplomatic immunity. The court abrogated the Saddam-era law, ruling that it was no longer a crime for Iraqis to travel to Israel.

If the opportunity arose, Alusi would travel to Israel again. With 400,000 Iraqi Jews and their descendants currently living in Israel, Alusi believes that Iraq is well-positioned to serve as a bridge between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Peace will only come about through the will of the people, not through agreements signed by leaders,” he said. “But no peace can emerge with the existence of organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”

Iraq and Israel have shared interests in combating the Iranian threat and Islamist terrorism as well. But security coordination, not to mention full diplomatic relations, cannot come about as long as Maliki is in power, he said.

“I’ve never heard of fascists and traitors calling for peace,” he said of his own government. “As long as a militia is in power, there can be no peace.”

Read article in full

More about Mithal al-Alusi

Iraqi Torah scroll fragments to be buried in NY

 The Jewish archive was found in a sewage-flooded basement in the Iraqi secret police HQ


Fragments of Torah scrolls,  unfit for use (Psoulim)  and beyond repair or preservation, are to be handed over to the Iraqi-Jewish community and buried in their cemetery in New York, Point of No Return has learnt. They were seized by Saddam Hussein's secret police along with other artefacts and books belonging to the Baghdad Jewish community and shipped to Washington for restoration.

The request by the US-based World Organisation of Jews from Iraq (WOJI ) to bury the scroll fragments has been approved by the Iraqis, according to Iraqi media reports. Iraq's National Security Adviser confirmed the decision to WOJI, but no date has been fixed for the handover. The Iraqi government would arrange the approval through a written document agreed with the State Department, but the process has been painfully slow.


The so-called Jewish archive consists of hundreds of items seized from Jewish homes and synagogues in the 1970s by the Iraqi Muhabarat, or secret police.  US soldiers found them during the 2003 invasion, floating in the sewage-flooded basement of the Muhabarat's headquarters. A tug-of-war has ensued between the Iraqi government and those who argue that the documents should stay in the US, or be returned to the Iraq-Jewish community from which they were stolen. The vast majority of Iraqi Jews and their descendants live in Israel.


Items from the collection are due to be displayed in a special exhibition at the National Archive and Records Administration in downtown Washington DC this autumn.

WJC approves Jewish refugee motion ( updated)

New WJC secretary-general Robert Singer

Jewish Refugees from the Middle East were on the agenda at the World Jewish Congress plenary in Budapest this week. Some 500 delegates from 70 countries took part in an hour-long session discussing the issue, Point of No Return has learnt.

 Led by president Rabbi Elie Abadie and director Stan Urman,  members of the Justice for Jews from Arab Countries Board were present at the Budapest meeting and several were billed to address the delegates. 

The delegates passed a resolution urging the international community to recognize the legitimate rights of Jewish refugees in the Middle East who were forced to flee their countries after 1948.

Robert Singer, whose appointment as WJC secretary-general was ratified at the Budapest plenary, pledged to continue the work of his predecessor Dan Diker, who chaired the September 2012  WJC conference in Jerusalem calling for Justice for Jewish Refugees. The Jerusalem conference, organised in association with the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was followed by a high-profile meeting on Jewish refugees in the UN building in New York.

The man most credited with thrusting the issue to the fore is Israel's former deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon. Robert Singer pledged to keep up the momentum generated by Mr Ayalon.
 

The World Jewish Congress  is the international organization representing Jewish communities in 100 countries to governments, parliaments and international organizations. The Plenary Assembly is the highest decision-making body of the organization. It meets every four years and elects the WJC officers.


WJC resolution on Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: Plenary Assembly of the World Jewish Congress, meeting in Budapest on 5-7 May 2013,

 that upon the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, the status and treatment of Jews in most Arab countries deteriorated dramatically as many Arab countries declared war against Israel,

RECORDS that the treatment of Jews by Arab leaders and Muslim populations varied from country to country. In some places, Jews were forbidden to leave (e.g. Syria); in others, Jews were displaced en masse (e.g. Iraq); in some countries, Jews faced edicts of expulsion (e.g. Egypt); while in others, Jews, especially those in Morocco, lived in relative peace under the protection of Muslim rulers;

FURTHER RECORDS with great sadness that in virtually all Arab countries a variety of different measures were taken pursuant to official decrees and legislation enacted by Arab regimes, including: denial of human and civil rights to Jews and other minorities; expropriation of their property; stripping them of their citizenship; and other means of livelihood, with Jews often being victims of murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and expulsions, which together with political upheaval, resulted in the mass uprooting of more than 800,000 Jews from their countries of birth in some 10 Arab countries where the Jewish population is now virtually non existent;

 RECALLS that on two separate occasions, in 1957 and 1967, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) declared that Jews fleeing from Arab countries were indeed ‘bona fide’ refugees who “fall under the mandate of my (UNHCR) office”;

OBSERVES that as a matter of law and equity, there were two refugee populations created as a result of the longstanding dispute as a result of the war waged against the independent state of Israel;

 NOTES HOWEVER that when the issue of ‘refugees’ is raised within the context of the Middle East, people invariably refer to ‘Palestinian refugees’, not Jews displaced from Arab countries;

 FURTHER NOTES that neither the mass violations of human rights nor the displacement of Jews from Arab countries has ever been recognized and adequately addressed by the international community;

 RECALLS that since 1947, the United Nations General Assembly’s vote on partition, the predominant focus of the United Nations has been on Palestinian refugees, manifested in:1088 resolutions on the Middle East conflict, including 172 resolutions on Palestinian refugees; Numerous UN agencies and organizations being mandated or newly created, to provide protection and relief to Palestinian refugees; The disbursement, by the international community over the last 58 years, of tens of billions of dollars to provide services and assistance to Palestinian refugees;

 RECALLS that during that same period, there have been: no UN resolutions; no support provided by UN agencies; and no financial assistance forthcoming from the international community, to ameliorate the plight of Jewish and other refugees from Arab countries;

FURTHER RECALLS that in all relevant international bilateral or multilateral agreements, (i.e. UN Resolution 242, The Road Map, The Madrid Conference, etc.), the reference to ‘refugees’ is generic, allowing for the recognition and inclusion of all Middle East refugees including not only Jews, but also Christians and other minorities; that the Knesset, the Government of Israel and the US Congress, have underscored the importance of pursuing rights and redress for Jewish refugees from Arab countries and that the World Jewish Congress has been a strong voice in highlighting this issue in the United Nations and to governments around the world; that it would constitute an injustice, were the international community to recognize rights for one victim population - Palestinian refugees - without recognizing rights for other victims of the very same events, being Jewish refugees from Arab countries;

 REITERATES its call to the international community to recognize the rights of and provide redress to, the Jewish refugees who were forced to leave their native Arab countries in the years and decades following Israel’s independence in 1948;

RESOLVES as a matter of high priority,to elevate the status and urgency of the issue of the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, including by galvanizing political action, encouraging public education and action campaigns and outreach to the media; pursuing rights to their identity, protection and preservation of their heritage sites, religious patrimony and cemeteries; and raising these rights and the means to achieve their redress, in all meetings with governments, heads of state and or senior officials, and in particular the United Nations and member states of the Quartet.

Expulsion of Jews had 'no political consequences'

The Arab world has committed a terrible crime against its Jewish citizens, yet the international community has exacted no political price. "There have been no political consequences", as Gina Waldman puts it to the Canadian parliamentary committee investigating Jewish refugees this week. Instead, the tables are turned: Israel, which gave safe haven to the majority of these refugees - is in the dock: world-famous figures such as Professor Stephen Hawking have joined the Israel academic boycott - allowing themselves to be suckered by genocidal fascists and ethnic cleansers.   

Gina Waldman, wearing her grandmother's bridal dress, gives testimony to the UN Human Rights Commission in 2008


VANCOUVER, Canada (JTA) -- Jewish refugees from Arab countries have been ignored by the Western world, the Canadian Parliament was told in its first-ever hearings on the issue.

"The expulsion of nearly 1 million Jews from nine Arab countries has had no political consequences," Gina Waldman, president of JIMENA, a nonprofit group dedicated to the preservation of Mizrahi and Sephardic culture, told the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development on Tuesday.

The hearings on Tuesday, as well as May 2, are part of a new push by Jewish groups and the Israeli government to highlight the plight of the refugees in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"The two refugee populations were created as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict," David Koschitzky, the chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Chair, told the Jewish Voice. "Unfortunately, the plight of Jewish refugees has been completely omitted from Canada's Middle East policy, while that of the Palestinians features prominently."

According to JIMENA, the goal of the hearings is to urge the Canadian Parliament to pass legislation stating that a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement must deal with all issues relating to refugees, including Jewish refugees. The U.S. Congress passed similar legislation in 2008.

Last fall, Israel's then-deputy foreign minister, Daniel Ayalon, launched the "I am a Refugee" campaign in a bid to create parity between the struggle of Jewish and Palestinian refugees. Ayalon included publicizing the issue through Israel’s diplomatic missions.

According to information presented at the hearings, 856,000 Jews from Arab countries were displaced between 1948 and 1952, compared with 756,000 Palestinians.

On Tuesday 7 May, the committee heard testimony from Libyan-born Gina Waldman herself and two Jewish refugees from Iraq. One goes by the name of 'Chantal.' Here are Gina's and Chantal's stories: 

Read JTA article in full 

Transcripts of hearings: 2 May; 7 May here and here

Gina Waldman's story 

Chantal's story 

JJAC kicks of Canadian study into Jewish refugees

Canadian parliament investigates Jewish refugees 

Remembering the Jewish refugees of Jerusalem

It's been 46 years since the re-unification of Jerusalem: two internally-displaced Jewish refugees, Carmella and Sarah, interviewed in 2011 for CiFWatch by IsraeliNurse,   were able to to re-connect with the Old City where they had been born. Their families were brutally evicted by the Jordanian Legion in 1948:

Perhaps most significantly – because there exists a clear political agenda to make Jews appear as newcomers and non-native inhabitants of the city – rarely does a Western audience get to hear that Jews in fact made up the majority of the city’s population at least from the mid-nineteenth century, or that many of them became internally displaced when they were forced to leave their homes both before and during the War of Independence.
 
Recently I met up with two ladies whose memories of their childhood in Jerusalem are part of the story of the city itself. Both were born there – Carmella in 1935 and Sarah in 1921. In a country in which one receives such a variety of often unexpected answers to the question ‘where did your family originate?’ it is fairly rare to meet people who do not have a reply. Carmella looked puzzled for an instant, and then replied “Oh – my mother came from Tsfat and my father from Jerusalem”. As for Sarah – the answer to her was obvious; “From the Old City”.

Carmella

 Neither of them could tell me exactly how many generations of their family had lived in Jerusalem before them, but Sarah was proud to recount how her great- grandfather, who lived in the Rothschild Building built in 1870 in the Jewish Quarter, had met the building’s sponsor, Baron Rothschild, when he came with his daughter to tour the sites of his investment.  Apparently, the whole neighbourhood had been busy preparing delicacies in honour of the distinguished visitor – mostly citron (etrog) cakes – but the Baron’s clerks had warned him in advance not to partake of anything cooked in the Jewish Quarter due to the famously insanitary conditions there. In fact the only thing which the Baron consumed throughout his entire visit to the Old City was a glass of water drawn from the cistern at Sarah’s great-grandfather’s sparsely furnished house.  

A clue to the origins of both families perhaps comes from the fact that the languages they spoke at home were Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and Arabic, with a smattering of Yiddish for good measure. 

Ladino was the predominant language among Jews in Palestine between the 17^th and 19^th centuries after Sephardi Jews who were exiled from Spain in 1492 returned to the land of their forefathers,  settling in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tsfat, Tiberius and even Schem and Gaza.  

However, after so many generations of life in the Jewish Quarter, Sarah’s family, along with almost half of the Jewish population of the Old City, finally had to leave it in 1936 as a result of the riots which were part of the Arab revolt. This, of course, was not the first case of Jerusalemites who were no less indigenous than their expellers being forced out of their homes: in the 1929 riots some 4,000 Jews had also fled Neve Ya’akov, Motsa, Romema, Beit HaKerem and Talpiot. Neither was this phenomenon confined to Jerusalem; in the 1929 riots Carmella’s grandfather’s brother and his wife were both slaughtered by an axe-wielding mob in Tsfat.   

Jewish refugees leaving the Old City -1936

Carmella described their home: one of six houses built around a communal courtyard and lacking electricity, sewage or running water, but with a strong community life in which people readily shared what little they had. Both women spent their childhood under the British Mandate with regular curfews from 5 p.m. until 7 a.m. the next day. Sometimes they knew that the curfew was a reaction to activities by Jewish underground groups, but more often they had no idea why they were under curfew. One 9^th of Av, Carmella’s father and the neighbours in the yard wanted to pray. Because of the curfew they could not go to the synagogue and there were not enough men to make up a minyan, (prayer quorum) so they snuck out to bring additional men from surrounding streets to the prayers. Unfortunately, someone left the door to the courtyard open by mistake, and the British promptly arrested them all, imprisoning them in the Russian compound until the next morning.

On November 29^th, 1947, friends and family gathered at Carmella’s parents’ home – the only one in the neighbourhood with a radio – to listen tensely to the UN vote on partition. As the votes were announced, they made lists of the results on scraps of paper. “We have a state!” cried Carmella’s brother, but as they set off to dance in celebration on Jaffa Road, their father urged caution; “Let’s see what happens tomorrow morning.” And indeed, difficult days lay ahead.  

During the siege of Jerusalem, their daily routine revolved mostly around the fight to survive. Water was strictly rationed as the British-built pipeline had been sabotaged by the Arab militias. Initially they had to rely upon the original cisterns which collected rainwater from the roofs of the houses: Sarah and Carmella painstakingly explained to me the knack behind filling a bucket on a rope from a deep cistern.  Later, water tankers began to arrive intermittently in Jerusalem and Carmella and her siblings would spend hours standing in line waiting to take their rations home in buckets and tin cans. 

Queuing for water, Jerusalem 1948.

The precious fresh water would be stored in large clay pots – both Sarah and Carmella call them by the Ladino name ‘Tanaja’. One contained fresh drinking and cooking water and the other water which had already been used to wash their hands. Once a week – before Shabbat – the children would be washed, the laundry then done in the same water, the floor then washed with that soapy water and anything left used to water the few plants such as mint and lemon balm which they grew in tin cans in the yard.

Food too was strictly rationed with each item weighed scrupulously by the shop-keeper in exchange for coupons. Carmella’s family lived mostly off bean or lentil soup with small amounts of meat becoming a rare delicacy and bread limited to 200 grams per person. Carmella’s father used to give his portion of bread to the children, saying “I’m grown already”. Just before Pessach a truck-load of fresh vegetables managed to make it through the blockade. Carmella recounts how that became a whole day’s entertainment as everyone gathered around just to gaze at the vegetables – the likes of which they had not seen for so long.

Fuel was also severely rationed and because they had no electricity, both light and heat came from the paraffin they had to stand hours in line waiting for every time the arrival of a lorry load was announced by megaphone. That winter was a particularly harsh one in Jerusalem, and often the only way they had of warming themselves was to stand around the kettle or cooking pots.

On the afternoon of the Declaration of Independence Carmella’s family once more gathered around their radio, but yet again violence followed their celebrations: the next day shops were burned to the ground in the Old City and less than two weeks later it fell to the Jordanian forces.  Many of the men were arrested and taken prisoner by the Arab legion, including Carmella’s father. He returned only almost a year later, but Carmella says “We don’t know what he went through there. He never talked about it”.  The women and children were transported by lorry to the Katamon neighbourhood from which the Christian Arab residents had fled and four or five families found shelter in each empty house. Carmella’s family later moved to the Nahalat Zion neighbourhood which had been built in 1908 to answer the growing need for housing outside the walls of the crowded Old City.  

Jewish girl, Rachel Levy, 7, fleeing from street with burning buildings as the Arabs sack Jerusalem after its surrender. May 28, 1948. John Phillips

With war still raging and the Arab Legion installed in the Old City, the nights became unbearable with repeated shelling forcing them to huddle together in the lower storey of their building, along with all the other neighbours. The lack of food and water became even worse; children had not been able to go to school for a year and few people had work as factories and workshops had closed due to lack of materials.

Like all the other young men, Carmella’s brothers were of course fighting in the army, specifically at Latrun and Ma’ale HaHamisha. The dead from the battles were brought to Bikur Holim hospital and every morning, Carmella and her mother would make their way there to check that the names of her brothers did not appear on the list of names of the dead attached to a tree in the courtyard with a drawing pin.

After the first cease-fire, there was an improvement in the amount of goods which got through to Jerusalem, and the schools re-opened at last, but the fighting still continued, as did the shelling by the Arab Legion.  Carmella’s best friend was injured and her father killed by a direct hit on their house.  
By 1967, Camella was married and living in Kiryat HaYovel . Her husband, like many others, had been called up some three months before the war broke out and was stationed on the Egyptian front.  Once more the women of the family found themselves alone in wartime. Day after day they would hear Nasser threatening total annihilation of the Jewish state on the radio and there was a real fear that the tiny young country would not be able to survive such an onslaught.  With a shortage of air-raid shelters making for unbearable over-crowding, Carmella and her two small children took to sleeping in the corridor outside their apartment as an alternative.

Soon, soldiers coming to visit their families began telling them that the Old City had been re-taken:  stories which at first they did not believe as there had been no official announcement on the radio. Gradually they began to realise that after 19 years they could indeed finally go to the Western Wall. It was the festival of Shavuot, and so as observant Jews they walked all the way to the Old City – along with Carmella’s youngest sister who was nine months pregnant at the time and yet insisted upon not missing out on such a momentous occasion.

 Carmella was surprised to see that the Old City retained many of the features she remembered from 19 years before – the same paved streets, the same lack of electricity, sewage or running water – and that it was terribly neglected.  When they arrived at the Western wall, they at first wondered if they had come to the right place; their memories were of a narrow, confined area beside the wall where they had always prayed, but now it was an open area with plenty of room for the crowds of people who had come to be part of the miracle.  Torah scrolls appeared from nowhere, and people prayed and sang, elated not only by the fact that their most holy site which they had been unable to visit for 19 years was once more accessible, but full of relief that their country actually still existed.

Read article in full