Baghdad Jews: Only an estimated 7 Jews remain in Iraq

Hat Tip: Eli Friedman

I am a Jew of Sephardic/Mizrahi and Ethiopian ancestry. The following story really touched me as my father's family were refugees from Iraq. During the Farhud pogroms of the early 1940s my dad's family experienced intense persecution and lost loved ones.

We should note that in Israel a Muslim has full civil rights. On the other hand, in the Arab world Jews and other non-Muslims face intense persecution. The treatment of Jews and non-Muslims in Islamic countries explains the mass exodus of the 1940s-1950s.

Here is an excerpt of a New York Times article about Baghdad Jews that is very much worth reading:

Baghdad Jews Have Become a Fearful Few
By: Stephen Farrell

"I have no future here to stay."

Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon.

The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah’s prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar’s sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago.

Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.

Among those who remain is a former car salesman who describes himself as the “rabbi, slaughterer and one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Iraq.”

Although many of his Muslim friends and immediate neighbors know he is Jewish (“I’m proud, I’m Jewish, not ashamed. I’m not hiding,” he wrote at one point.), he was wary of being named because it could draw more dangerous attention to him or his friends. To protect him, he is referred to as Saleh’s grandson, because his or his father’s name would be too easily recognizable here. Interviews with him were conducted by correspondence over the course of several months.

He lamented that Jews in Baghdad had had no meeting place since the Meir Tweig synagogue, the last in the city, was closed in 2003, after it became too dangerous to gather openly.

Posted in: Indigenous Jews,jimena,The New York Times