How 4,500 Jews were rescued from Syria in the 1990s

Credit for the rescue of the remnant of Syrian Jewry usually goes to Judy Feld Carr, a Canadian housewife who raised funds to ransom individual Jews in the 1970s and 80s. The funds were delivered to Damascus Rabbi Abraham Hamra in order to provide bribes to the secret police. But the release between 1992 and 1995 of 4,500 Jews, held hostage by the butcher of Homs, Hafez al-Assad, may be attributed to  the efforts of a US-based committee, the Council for the Rescue of Syrian Jews, which operated between 1988 and 1992.  Egyptian-Jewish philanthropist and committee vice-president Clement Soffer, the recipient of several awards and honours,  here describes their work :

From left: Rescue Committee members Clement Soffer, Alice Sardell, Marcos Zalta and Jack Mann

 

 The Egyptian Jewish hero Eli Cohen, one of the greatest spies the world has ever known, recorded that Syria had appointed a huge number of secretive government officials. This led to the following situation:
In 1972, Steven Shalom, son of community leader  Isaac Shalom, in  association of Congressman Steven Solarz,  chairman  of the House Foreign Relations Committee in Congress, sought to assist the remaining Jews in  Syria. As a goodwill gesture towards the US,  Syria released 14 Jewish women, allowing them officially to come to the USA. The move was designed to improve relations between Syria and the US. The Jewish Congressman  Solarz represented the Brooklyn district where many Syrian Jews lived. They had reached out  to Judy Feld Carr to raise funds to pay for some of these women’s travel expenses. The 14  rescued women came to Brooklyn, NY. Six  got married and eight  returned to Syria owing to a clash of cultures and because they were missing their families.
 Jews were not treated as equal citizens in Syria: they were not allowed to travel abroad as complete families for fear that they might escape. Only one individual from each family was allowed to travel for business or medical reasons. If he did not return on the last day of his exit visa, his family was never heard from again. Jews could not travel between cities unless given permission and supervised by the mukhabarat secret Syrian police. Each family was assigned three mukhabarat to oversee Jewish families. Their mail was opened and read and their ‘phones tapped. Their Palestinian neighbours spied on them.
The bribes were paid to the secret police to reduce the pressure exerted on that community. Jewish men were killed in the street at random, women were raped in their apartments. Some were thrown into jail for no reason or falsely accused by their neighbors.
Some of Judy’s funds were used to bribe the mukhabarat to allow families to escape to Lebanon. A couple of families succeeded but many were arrested at the border and suffered untold punishments at the hands of the mukhabarat  after their arrest.
Bribery creates more pressure upon the victims in order for the blackmailer to demand an unending flow of  money. The bribes created more hardship and allowed the mukhabarat to ask for more and more money, while appearing to the government to be doing their jobs. A win-win for the mukhabarat.
That was the situation for 4,500 Jews in Syria in 1988. A US Jewish woman with Syrian roots, Alice Sardell Harari, formed a group called  the Council for the Rescue of Syrian Jews. The goal was to obtain equal citizenship for all Jews so  that they could travel freely out of the country.
I joined that committee. Mrs Alice Sardell Harari  was president.  I was appointed vice- president in late 1989, with fellow vice-presidents Marcos Zalta and Jack Mann.
That committee dedicated itself to successfully lobbying the US Congress and government officials. We obtained many resolutions punishing Syria for its treatment of the Jewish community. We organized simultaneous demonstrations in front of the Syrian embassy in Washington DC, London, Paris and Rome, demanding to Let My People Go.
We took full-page ads in the NY Times, The Washington Post and Wall Street journal  detailing  Jewish suffering in Syria. We created global pressure brought upon Syria to release its Jews.
The committee successfully lobbied the EU and the IMF to stop loans to Syria. Italy and Spain  canceled loans to Syria unless they released the Jews together with their families,  and treated them as equal citizens of Syria.
Syria understood and felt the enormous pressure. It was being treated as a pariah on the world political scene.
The coup de grace was my lobbying  of  Robert Maxwell, the British media mogul directly, to approach Soviet President Gorbachev to demand that Assad free the Jews or suffer the consequences of having the Soviet Union cancel arms supplies and loans. At that point Hafez El Assad caved in to allow all Jews to travel freely as families in 1992. The wealthy philanthropist  Edmond Safra offered to pay for their round-trip tickets to the US. All were resettled  in Brooklyn. None went to Canada.

Harari writes a flawed piece referencing the Jewish exodus from Arab countries

This article by the celebrated author and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari is notable for describing the trauma experienced by Israelis who hail from Arab and Muslim countries (like his own family): it is not often that you read about this in The Financial Times. However, Harari’s argument is marred by moral equivalence. The Palestinian trauma of displacement was purely avoidable. It  is a result of the failed Arab and Muslim campaign to eradicate the Jewish state.  Unlike the Arab states who have wiped out their Jewish communities, Israel has never attempted transfer or ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, despite the calls of a few extremist politicians.

Yuval Noah Harari

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fuelled by the mutual horror of destruction. The current war has confirmed Palestinians’ deepest fears. After the Hamas attack on October 7 2023, calls for the utter destruction of the Gaza Strip and their mass killing and expulsion have become routine in the Israeli media and among some members of Israel’s ruling coalition. On October 7, the deputy Speaker of parliament, Nissim Vaturi, tweeted “Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” On November 1, Israel’s minister of heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, posted “The North of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes.” And on November 11, Israel’s minister of agriculture, Avi Dichter, said that “we are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba”.

If it wasn’t for Egyptian resistance and international pressure, it is not unreasonable to believe that Israel would have attempted to drive the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip into the Sinai desert. As it is, according to Palestinian health officials, Israeli forces have so far killed more than 31,000, including combatants but largely civilians, and have forced more than 85 per cent of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip — almost 2mn people — out of their homes.

Israelis carry their own historical traumas. The founding event of modern Jewish and Israeli identity is the Holocaust, when the Nazis exterminated about 6mn Jews, and wiped out most of Europe’s Jewish communities. Then in 1948, the Palestinians and their Arab allies made a concerted effort to annihilate the nascent state of Israel, and to kill or expel all its Jewish inhabitants.

In the wake of their defeat and subsequent Arab defeats in the 1956 and 1967 wars, Arab countries took revenge by destroying their own defenceless Jewish communities. About 800,000 Jews were driven out of their ancestral homes in countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. At least half of Israeli Jews are the descendants of these Middle Eastern refugees. Jewish fears of murder and expulsion are not just the outcome of such historical memories.

They are also lived experiences that constitute part of the daily routines of Israelis. Each and every Israeli knows that they personally might be murdered or abducted any day by Palestinian or Islamist terrorists, whether in their homes or while travelling anywhere in the world. When Israelis analyse the intentions of Palestinians, they conclude that if they are ever given the chance, Palestinians will probably kill or expel the 7mn Jews currently living between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

Palestinian leaders and their allies from Tehran to New York have repeatedly argued that the Jewish presence in the land between the river and the sea is a colonial injustice that sooner or later must be “made right”.  The Israeli wish to remove the Palestinian existential threat poses an existential threat to Palestinians and vice versa Some may argue that “righting the injustice” doesn’t mean killing or expelling all Israeli Jews, but rather establishing a democratic Palestinian state in which Jews will be welcomed as citizens.

However, Israelis find this extremely difficult to believe, especially given the absence of any lasting Arab democracies and the fate of the Jewish communities in countries like Egypt and Iraq. Jews arrived on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates at least 1,000 years before the Arabs conquered Egypt and Iraq in the 7th century CE. No one could argue that the Jewish communities of Cairo or Baghdad were a recent colonialist implant. Yet after 1948 these communities were totally wiped out. There are virtually none left in any Arab country, other than the 2,000 Jews of Morocco and the 1,000 of Tunisia. Considering the recent violent history of Jews and Arabs, what basis is there to believe that Jewish communities will be able to survive under Palestinian rule?  The current war has confirmed Israelis’ deepest fears. After Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, Hamas and other militants turned it into an armed base to attack Israel. On October 7, Hamas terrorists killed, raped and took hostage more than 1,000 Israeli civilians. Entire communities were systematically destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis had to flee their homes. If any Jews harboured hopes that they could live in a Palestinian state, what happened to Jewish villages such as Be’eri and Kfar Aza and to Nova music festival attendees proved that Jewish communities cannot survive under Palestinian rule for even a single day.

Reactions to the massacre in the Muslim world and elsewhere fed Israeli fears of extermination. Even before Israel began its bombardment and invasion of Gaza, numerous voices justified and even celebrated the murder and abduction of Israeli civilians as a step towards righting historical injustices. Every time demonstrators in London or New York chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, Israelis conclude that “they really do want to exterminate us”. Of course, Hamas by itself lacks the military capabilities to defeat and destroy Israel. But the war has demonstrated that an alliance of powerful regional forces that back it, including Hizbollah, the Houthis and Iran, poses an existential threat to Israel. It would be wrong to equate the situation of Israelis and Palestinians. They have different histories, live under different conditions and face different threats. The point this article makes is only that both have good reasons to believe that the other side wishes to kill or expel all of them.

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Arabs, Jews, the Holocaust and its aftermath

Writing in Fathom, Sabrina Soffer argues that ‘the lasting effects of Nazi ideology on Arab-Israeli relations post-1948 underscore the imperative to critically address hateful propaganda and education in shaping Arab-Israeli tensions’. While acknowledging the instances of Arab solidarity and protection of Jews during the Holocaust, she also grapples with ‘the more ominous aspects, including the collaboration with Nazi forces and the merging of antisemitic Nazi and Soviet propaganda with Islamist fundamentalism.

The wartime Mufti of Jerusalem inspecting German troops

Assessing the role of Arabs and Muslims during the Holocaust requires an examination of the influence of Vichy and Italian presence in specific Middle Eastern regions. The Vichy occupation of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, coupled with Italian presence in Libya, introduced Nazism to the Arab population. In her book, Uprooted, Lyn Julius describes how Nazi antisemitism triggered an ‘identity crisis,’ reshaping the perception of Jews among many Muslims.

Previously considered as inferior yet deserving of protection known as dhimmis or people of the book, Jews were now associated with conspiratorial power by the Nazis. Instead of Jew-hatred being directed downward, whereby Jews were viewed as the inferior religious group, it now punched upward under the Nazi conspiracy that Jews had ultimate power and sought world dominance; this fostered a belief that Jews represented both sides of an evil token.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt by Hasan al-Bana in 1928, endeavoured to Islamize society through the promotion of religious law and social programs. Al-Banna worshipped Adolf Hitler and modelled his movement on Nazi ideology as he rose to prominence, translating Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” into the Arabic “My Jihad” and other antisemitic Nazi tabloids into Arabic while strategizing to eliminate any source in the way of his Islamization, or purification, mission. The Jews, of course, were that source. Al-Bana influenced the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood movement led by Haj Amin al-Husseyni and eventually, Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer who advocated jihad as an offensive war against all non-believers giving rise to the Islamist groups of our day including Hamas and Al-Qaeda.

Some Muslims, untouched by the Brotherhood’s radicalism and Nazi ideology disavowed the antisemitic notions and rejected pseudo-scientific racial science, adhering to the Quranic citation of the Jewish people as B’nai Israel. Such recognition resulted in an acknowledgement of the Abrahamic connection between Jews and Muslims that would demand protection over Jewish brothers, as dhimmis.

But practical interests superseded ideology and religion, leading to pervasive antisemitism in the Middle East. As stated by Satloff, ‘the preoccupation of most Arabs was survival,’—the essential needs of finding food, water, and employment. Some individuals seized the opportunity presented by Nazi infiltration to exploit Jews for commercial gain. Those of the upper and political echelons sought to challenge colonial rule and saw some Jews as collaborators with the colonialists, although displaying less interest in persecuting Jews for religion’s sake. All the while, many Arabs perceived Hitler’s ideology as a means to liberation.

Up until the 1930s, when Nazis sought to instigate an anti-colonial Arab uprising, Nazis considered Arabs just a level above Jews on the purity scale. Near Tunis, a German officer said to an Arab, ‘Your time will come. We will finish with the Jews and then we will take care of you.’ Indeed, in Morocco and Algeria, some Arabs were dispatched to desert concentration camps and drafted into forced labour as the Nazis lost Jewish manpower.

One prime example of lasting impact in Middle East dynamics occurred at a sinister meeting in 1941 between the Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Haj-Amin al Husseyni, and Adolf Hitler. Al-Husseyni expressed to Hitler that Arabs were Germany’s ‘natural friends’ because they had the same enemies as Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists. Just as the Jews and the allied powers thwarted the pursuit of lebensraum toward a pure German empire, they too hindered Arab nationalism.

Thus, Arabs were ‘prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts.’  Nazi support of the 1936 Arab Riots in British Mandate Palestine influenced the formation of the Ba’ath, the Arab Socialist Nationalist Party, which asserted the unity of all Arabic speaking people to form a singular Arab state in the Arabian Peninsula. In addition to pan-Arabism, the party’s ideology aligned with Arab socialist, Arab nationalist, and anti-imperial interests. With the ultimate aim of unifying Palestine, Syria and Iraq, Mufti al-Husseyni sought the support of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Al-Futuwwa groups, originally called Nazi scouts modelled on the Nazi youth, popped up in Palestine and Iraq, as well as the student-formed religious-oriented Young Egypt Party that sought to fend off the British and influence Egyptian politics from the outside-in. In collaboration with Hitler, Husseyni widely disseminated anti-allied and anti-Jewish propaganda to the Arab world, alleging that a Jewish ‘worldwide conspiracy’ had sponsored Soviet Communism. His appeals for the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab Lands and anywhere they were found eventually materialised in the aftermath of 1948; his plans for Nazi-like extermination camps in Palestine were, fortunately, never realised.

The Iraqi Farhud of 1941 (a massacre of several hundred Jews) exemplifies the merging of Husseini’s initiatives, nationalist zeal, and anti-Jewish sentiment. This Nazi-inspired pogrom was led by Rashid Ali al-Kailani, who formed a pro-German government to fight British colonial influence in Iraq. Al-Husseini’s propaganda efforts exceeded the scope of his political motivations. Antisemitic sentiment among the Arab public preceded the Mufti’s conversation with Hitler: In 1930, the Egyptian-established Muslim Brotherhood had begun receiving financial and ideological assistance from Nazi Germany. Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were translated into Arabic in 1930 and 1926, respectively.

The importation of Nazi antisemitism made Jews an easy scapegoat that influenced publications such as a 1940 editorial in the Algerian newspaper El-Balagh that voiced the desire to expel Jews to ‘a faraway desert’ or ‘desert’ under ‘rigorous international control;’ that same year, rumours spread in Tunisia about the Jews debilitating the war effort and kidnapping a Muslim girl. Predictably, the toxic blend of bigoted fabrications, hateful ideology, and propaganda triggered violent anti-Jewish riots in Iraq, Tunis, and Cairo among other Arab cities from 1941 through the 1950s and 60s, mirroring similar events on European streets.

Gad Sachar and Yehoshua Duweib, Jewish survivors of Vichy labour camps in Tunisia, discussed the impact of antisemitic propaganda on the public: Arabs goading, beyond ‘indifference’ or ‘just following orders.’ They recall Arab residents ‘mock[ing] and laugh[ing]’ as Germans herded up and forced Jews to march through Tunis. Testimonies of Jews like Harry Alexander, a survivor of a Vichy camp in Djelfa, shared how ‘orders’ of stripping Jews involved Arabs tying them to a post, and beating them naked, or burying Jews with their head in the sand while gleefully smiling appeared a guilty pleasure.

Husseini also encouraged Muslim soldiers to fight alongside the Vichy and Italian regimes upon their establishment in 1943. While ‘their direct military contribution was negligible, they furnished rolls upon rolls of propaganda film for the German war effort.’ Leo Löwenthal’s The Prophets of Deceit discusses how hate and facism can sweep into and dominate a society. A backdrop of domestic political turmoil, dire economic distress, and general disenchantment—coupled with widespread dissemination of factual distortion and conspiracy theories—established a fertile ground for the digestion of propaganda and the eventual attempt at the execution of the disseminators’ agenda.

All this being said, any recounting of what really happened is incomplete without the testimonies of those who stood against the encouragement of hateful fabrications, malicious ideologies, and the violence instigated by propaganda. Many Jews were saved by Muslims during the 1941 Farhud. Accounts such as those of Abraham Cohen, Victor Cohen, and Mirella Hassan from Tunisia (who were sheltered and supported by Tunisian Muslims) and the stories of Yehuda Chacamon and Victor Kanaf (Polish Jews treated with humanity by Arab guards in internment camps in Libya and Morocco) must firmly stand out in historical memory. Victor Kanaf even characterised Jewish-Muslim relations during that time as akin to a ‘honeymoon’ in reference to Jewish-Arab communal dynamics.

Pro-Jewish sympathy among the Arab population was pronounced among the devout and influential. In Algiers, Abdelhamid Ben Badis of the Muslim religious establishment, and leader of Algeria’s Islah (Reform) Party, founded the Algerian League of Muslims and Jews. While Moroccan Sultan Muhammad V signed anti-Jewish decrees pertaining to residence and employment, he insisted upon laws that protected Jewish lives, appalled that Vichy based its anti-Jewish laws on race [determined by Jewish bloodline] as opposed to their religious identification religion [professed as either Jewish, Christian, or Muslim], publicly declaring, ‘just as in the past, the Israelites will remain under my protection, I refuse to make any distinction between my subjects.’ Other notable figures from the Middle East, though not Arab, include Turkish Diplomat Nedcdet Kent, who jumped on a cattle car headed to Auschwitz, refusing to disembark until the Nazis released eighty Jews. Abdul Husai Sardhari, an Iranian diplomat stationed in Paris, valiantly protected 150 Jews. The roster of the virtuous individuals is extensive, showcasing the numerous instances of human kindness, empathy and compassion during periods of agonising adversity.

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Harif video : Germans and Nazis in the Middle East 

Libyan Jews want to preserve the memory of Jewish life

Penina Solomon and David Gerbi are two Libyan-born Jews forced to leave in 1967. In this podcast they speak to Robert Hannon of Northern Soundings (Alaska) about their exile from Libya and how they plan to memorialise the now extinct community.

To see the recording, click here.

“I don’t have anything more in Libya,’ says Penina Solomon, a Jewish refugee from Libya who moved to California with her American husband. ‘We are like sand in the desert, blown to the four corners of the world’, she muses. She is an artist and poet.

Dr David Gerbi also fled Libya in 1967 but resettled in Rome where he practises as a psychotherapist. Yet he attempted to maintain his links with his country of birth, spending time during the Arab Spring with Berbers. In 2012  he had to flee for his lfe after an attempt to re-open a Tripoli synagogue. In the last year, he arranged a secret meeting between the Israeli and Libyan foreign ministers in order to promote normalised relations between the two countries.

Penina Solomon spent a year as a labourer in Italy before joining a kibbutz in Israel.

Now that no Jews live in Libya, both Dr David Gerbi and Penina Solomon are devoted to keeping the memory of Jewish life in Libya alive.

More about David Gerbi

How my Iraqi ‘friends’ betrayed me

These are the reminiscences of a Jewish insurance manager who left Iraq for Canada in 1972. His family had cordial relations with the family of Ayad Alawi, who became vice president and prime minister of Iraq after the US invasion of 2003.  But trust was only skin-deep. Despite superficially friendly relations, the manager’s business associates turned against him; as a member of the Baath party,  Alawi even plotted to kidnap the insurance manager’s son.

Ayad Alawi became prime minister of Iraq

“I feel it is time to open old wounds.

I was appreciated by Muslim friends and was invited into their homes to meet prominent politicians and academics.

Things had changed on the eve of  the third Arab-Israeli war in in 1965.

Our neighbour Ayad Alawi, a Baathist, used our private ‘phone to communicate with his Kurdish girl friend, whom he later married.

We had a cordial relationship with his Lebanese mother and often exchanged meals with them. Ayad’s uncle Dr Abdul Karim Alawi was our family doctor when Ayad was out of politics.

Ayad Alawi and his Baathist friends planned to kidnap our son and hijack our car. His mother, a great friend of my late wife, cautioned us to leave our home and settle elsewhere to avoid the great harm awaiting us.

We listened, and moved out on the same day to a distant neighbourhood.

After the hanging of the nine innocent Iraqi Jews on 9 January 1969, my Muslim partners sent a messenger to my home, telling me not to show my face in their office – a betrayal of a successful partnership of almost 48 years.

They made twice as much money as I did,  working under their names.

We were the first family allowed to leave the country with an Iraqi passport because we had
contributed to putting  insurance documentation into Arabic.

I was instrumental  in creating the Bagdad Insurance Association to sanction members who abused the trust of their clients.

In July 1972 we settled in Montreal. I passed the insurance exams in September of the same year . I worked as a marine manager in a local Jewish insurance agency for five years. I formed my own insurance agency and represented various insurance companies. I was appreciated by many for my hard work.

If I was able to make it in Bagdad under abusive conditions, then I could easily make it anywhere ! (to quote Frank Sinatra’s song New York, New York).”

 

‘Red hand’ pin is a sinister reminder of the Farhud

With thanks: Edna

‘Red hand’ pins outnumbered the yellow ‘Bring the hostages home’ pins at the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood this year. But, unbeknown to the naive glitterati who think they are expressing their ‘solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza’ there is a darker association behind the ‘red hand’. 

To many, the red hand is symbolic of the horrific lynching of two Israelis who lost their way on the West Bank during the 2000 Intifada.

But to Sarah Sassoon, it recalls the ordeal suffered by her grandparents during the Farhud massacre of Iraqi Jews by a rioting mob in 1941.

She has posted a video on her Instagram account explaining that Jewish homes were marked out in advance by the rioters with a red palm print.

Sarah Sassoon made an Instagram video to highlight the dark association of the Red Hand print with the Farhud

She cites Heskel Haddad’s testimony, as quoted in a BBC piece by Sarah Erlich:

‘The violence continued through the night. A red hand sign or hamsa had been painted on Jewish homes to mark them out .”

Marking out Jewish homes for violence was also noted in Libya prior to the 1945, 1948 and 1967 pogroms.

 

About the Oscars (with thanks: Monica )

 

Hollywood Jews are like turkeys for Christmas

A woke film director who smeared Israel for its war against genocidal terrorism demonstrated  he had not learned the lessons of history or shown any understanding that there is a direct link between Nazism and Hamas. Lyn Julius writes in the Times of Israel (Jewish News):

Jonathan Glazer

The world has grown accustomed to the tiresome spectacle of Hollywood’s liberal luvvies using the Oscars as a platform to make political speeches – and  Jonathan Glazer was unfortunately no exception.

Glazer is the director of ‘ The Zone of Interest’, a German-language film about the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz whose house was immediately outside the camp. The film is a powerful study of the banality of Nazi evil. It won a well-deserved Oscar for Best International Film. Receiving the award, Glazer was joined on stage by fellow Jews,  producer James Wilson and financial backer Leonard Blavatnik.

‘Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” Glazer declared, “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

That statement is so mindboggling in its contorted, morally bankrupt, virtue-signalling ignorance that one wonders if Glazer has studied any history at all.

One cannot help but compare Glazer to Marius von Mayenburg, whose play Nachtland is having a short run in London. Nachtland tells the story of Nicola and Philipp, German siblings who find a painting by A. Hitler in their father’s attic. In an effort to find a Nazi provenance for the painting so that they can sell it for a fortune, the family’s past associations with Martin Bormann are revealed. It is up to Philipp’s  Jewish wife Judith to make the moral case for why the family should not be making money from the blood of dead Jews.

Nicola brings up the Palestinians in order to tell Judith to ‘learn from the lessons of history’.

‘Isn’t it surprising that the Jews of all people should know better than to ‘erect camps, build walls and kill innocents’, she declares.

Judith retorts: ‘If you think you can talk about Israel and point fingers as if it has nothing whatsover to do with Germany, then (…) I’m not  going to do your homework for you, and I can’t give you absolution …with your vain perpetrator cult…look it up yourself, al-Husseini, Arafat, Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas charter.”

Interestingly enough, these words, written before the 7 October Hamas massacre, were cut out of the script on the night I saw Nachtland. The director clearly thought that, spoken against the background of the current Israel-Hamas war,  they would prove too controversial for some in the audience. But they are in the playtext.

Marius von Mayenburg knows what Jonathan Glazer could not be bothered to find out: that there there is a direct link between the Holocaust, the Palestinian Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al Husseini and the Nazi-inspired  Muslim Brotherhood, whose  Gaza branch – Hamas –  was founded in 1987 by Ahmed Yassin.

Like turkeys voting for Christmas, the Hollywood glitterati who sport their Free Palestine pins and abjure their Jewishness have no idea that they are actually supporting a form of antisemitism that would murder them – as Jews – if it could.

It takes a non-Jewish German to have the moral clarity that Glazer and Co so clearly lack.

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Article on the last Yemenite Jews misinforms

One of the most popular articles currently on the Times of Israel  website states that an Arab country helped relocate Jews from Yemen to Cairo in 2021. However, the article, originally in Hebrew by Shalom Yerushalmi of Zman Israel, contains inaccuracies:

Prime Minister Netanyahu admires the Torah scroll brought out by the last group of Yemenite Jews to be airlifted to Israel. On the far right is Rabbi Sulman Dahari, not Levi Salem Marhabi, as erroneously stated in the ToI article.

The article by Shalom Yerushalmi states that in 2021, an Arab country helped Israel evacuate close to 100 Jews from Yemen and move them to Egypt. In fact no more than 13 Jews moved to Egypt. These were the followers of Rabbi Yahya Youssef, a staunch anti-Zionist who bent over backwards to try and remain in Yemen.

Three other families were relocated from Yemen to Abu Dhabi using the good offices of the senior rabbi of the Gulf community, Rabbi Elie Abadie, but they are not mentioned in the article.

The ToI article claims:

“According to sources in the unnamed Arab country, Jews who live today in the closed compound in Cairo are not a burden on the Egyptian authorities. They are engaged in goldsmithing and earn their own living. Their artistic products have become in high demand in the city…. The Egyptian police are the ones keeping an eye on the new community today.”

It is doubtful if the group is still in Egypt. At the time, in the face of opposition from Rabbi Yahya Youssef, some of the 13 had already expressed their wish to make aliya.  If the group had remained in Egypt, why are they never included in figures for the Cairo Jewish community, which is always estimated to number fewer than five Jews? Where is this ‘closed compound’ and why has the community leader, Magda Haroun, never mentioned them?

The article also misleads about the one Jew who remains in Yemen, Levi Salem Marhabi. It says that  Marhabi returned to Yemen shortly after taking a photo with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister was  pictured admiring a Torah scroll which was brought out by the last group of  17  Jews to be airlifted to Israel in 2016.  In fact the man on the far right of the photo is Rabbi Salman Dahari, not Levi Salem Marhabi.

Marhabi was indeed  arrested, together with others, on charges of having helped to smuggle out the Torah scroll to Israel, but he was living in Yemen, not Israel. In spite of a campaign for his release, he remains in a Houthi jail and in frail health.

 

The amazing story of a looted artifact from Algeria

At an exhibition held in Paris on the Jews of Algeria in 2013 Milena Kartowski-Aïach spotted a singular object: a tefillin bag given to her great-grandfather and looted by the Nazis during WWII. The bag, on which it was customary to embroider the Barmitzvah boy’s name, has since been restituted to her. But she is donating it not to France, but to Israel, where she has begun a new life. She tells the bag’s extraordinary story in Distinctions magazine (Winter 2024):

Milena and her great-grandfather, an opera singer in Algeria, dressed as Hamlet, in a montage with the bag

The small artifact, our family heirloom, is a tefillin bag dating from 1888 and found in a shed in Germany after the war by the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, whose aim was to recover property that the Nazis looted. This bar mitzvah bag, which was used in a celebration in Algiers, belonged to Élie Léon Lévi-Valensin, my great-grandfather, who died destitute in Algiers in 1945. It is a looted object that has remained in the collections of the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris (mahJ) since 1951, one among the 100 looted objects it holds, and the only one from North Africa.

In many ways, this bag is making history. It is the first liturgical object ever to be returned to its owners. It is the first object to be returned from Islamic lands. It is the first object to be returned that has no monetary value. It is a proof of the Holocaust in North Africa. Its words, embroidered with gold thread, contain a hint of Ladino, a trace of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

A display of Tefillin bags greeted the visitor to the ‘Jews of Algeria’ exhibition in Paris in 2013

And a name, the name of a man, is finally pronounced and recognized here: Élie Léon Lévi-Valensin.

An Algerian Jew, of French nationality, an opera singer and the artistic director of the Kursaal of Algiers (the capital’s comic opera house) whose grave remains in the Saint-Eugène cemetery of Algiers in the same vault as his parents. Under French colonial rule in the 1920s, he was the first to program a concert of classical Algerian Arabo-Andalusian music in a public theater in Algiers, with an orchestra made up of Jewish and Muslim musicians. This was a seminal political act that paved the way for Algerian theater in Arabic, led by Mahieddine Bachtarzi and his troupe, which also was made up of Jewish and Muslim actors.

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The Mosul Jewess who was a brilliant Torah scholar

In honour of  International Women’s Day, Point of No Return is showcasing the extraordinary Osnat Barazani, a brilliant 16th century scholar and head of the Yeshiva in Mosul, Kurdistan. ANU Museum has this profile:

Osnat Barazani was both brilliant and beautiful

According to local tradition, the Jews of Kurdistan are descendants of the ten tribes exiled by the Assyrians in the 8th century B.C. Much later, Benjamin of Tudela recorded them in his journey logs after visiting Kurdistan in the 12th century, reporting some 100 Jewish communities and 25,000 Jews living there. Since then until the Turkish occupation in the 16th century we hardly know anything about Kurdish Jews, however responsas written during the 16th and 17th centuries make up for that and reveal their history and ways of life.

The most notable rabbi of that time was Shmuel Adoni Barazani, son of rabbi Nathanel Adoni Barazani, founder of the dynasty who headed the Mosul Jewish community and was titled “The Holy”. Shmuel followed his father and founded many Yeshivot across Kurdistan. He was admired by many, and considered to be a genius. He and his wife did not have any sons but he did not spend time lamenting the end of his dynasty but instead put forth all his educational efforts in his only daughter, Osnat, who was brilliant since a young age.

Barazani trained his gifted daughter in Torah study and in ruling Halacha. She did not let him down and got more and more skilled and experienced. She grew up to be a beautiful woman with a reputation as a sharp scholar, a wonderful debater and an extremely intelligent scholar.

Called by all “The Tanait” for her greatness in Torah, a title only used for the sages of the Mishna, she wrote: “I grew upon the knees of sages, pleasing my late father greatly with my wisdom, he taught me nothing but the holy work of studying the Torah day and night”.

When the time has come, her father married her to his senior disciple, rabbi Yaacov Mizrahi, but on one condition – that Osnat’s husband will able her to continue her study and will not force her to desert her intellectual tasks for housework. Now how many fathers, let alone rabbis, do you know today who would demand that from their son in law? Imagine how odd it must have been 300 hundred years ago!

We should mention that although the Kurdish society was patriarchal, women there enjoyed relative tolerance. They did not have to wear a veil, even after most of the Kurds converted to Islam; they had rights and were also known as brave warriors – which still stands correct in these very days – just watch the news.

Following her father’s last will, Osnat kept on studying and ruling after her marriage. When her husband died she already had reputation as a Halachic authority, therefore she was appointed head of the Yeshiva in Mosul thus becaming leader of the entire community of the Jews of Kurdistan.

Osnat “The Tanait” gained wide recognition and admiration. Rabbi Pinhas Hariri wrote to her: “My rabbi and teacher, we are always willing to serve you with pure faith”. The community of Baghdad asked her to choose for them a rabbi from one of her Yeshiva students. Not only did she consent, she actually sent the pick of the litter – her own son Shmuel (named after her father) who also became a famous rabbi, just like his mother and grandfather. Since then, the Adoni-Barazanis served as rabbis in Baghdad for over 150 years, until 1743. In her high position she had to spend much of her time managing the Yeshiva, including struggling with some financial troubles. In one letter she sent to Jewish communities, asking for their support, she refers also to her difficulties as a woman “I have nothing valuable to sell, nor a son to collect for me, and I know it is not natural for a woman to ask for donations”. We learn from this that in spite of her high status and her acceptance, rabbi Osnat believed in the conventions of her time.

In the book of Proverbs (31, 30) it is argued that: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.”

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More about Osnat (Asenath)

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