At this time of year, when the Torah portion of Yitro, Moses’s father-in-law, is read, Tunisian Jews celebrate a tradition unique to them: Seudat Yitro. The festival is supposed to have originated in the 19th century when a jaundice epidemic spread among the cities and killed mainly children and infants. But the epidemic ceased abruptly when Parashat Yitro was read. The table is set as for a child’s tea party. Vered Guttman explains:
The Feast of Jethro, or Seudat Yitro in Hebrew, is an ancient tradition celebrated on the Thursday before parashat Jethro by Tunisian Jews (which is close to the holiday of Tu B’Shvat.) The holiday is also known as the Festival of Sons, a feast that celebrates the sons of the family (and yes, Festival of Daughters is a thing too. Read all about it here.) Since the festive meal is served to children, it is treated almost like a dolls party – the meal is served on small dishes only, including mini cups and flatware (think of saucers for plates, dessert forks and shot glasses.) Mini challahs are baked and cookies, marzipan and candies in the shapes of children and animals are part of the feast.
The meal used to start with a table covered with sweets, including candies, halva and Tunisian staples like makroud (farina and date cookies) and debla, rose-shaped fried cookies (in the photo above.) Tunisian Jews who emigrated to France added Pièce Montée (croquembouche) as a regular component of the feast.
The sweet opening was followed by a meal of vegetable pies called maakouda (here’s one example), salads, green fava beans, and the main course was always stuffed pigeon, another “kid size” dish that comes instead of stuffed chicken. Another reason for serving pigeon relates to one of the reasons for marking the Festival of Sons. According to Daat website for Jewish and spiritual studies, there was a mysterious pandemic that caused the death of boys in the community, and serving pigeon meat helped cure and defeat the disease. There’s also a tradition that says that the pandemic ended on the week of Parashat Jethro (Jethro Torah portion) and that’s why the holiday is celebrated on this week. By the way, pigeons were always a part of the Arab cuisine but are hard to find in Israel or in America.
Our history under Islamic rule exposes the moral bankruptcy of anti-Zionism and the fantasy that Jews can survive without sovereignty. The Jewish world’s failure to teach this history is dangerous, argues Rachel Wahba in Times of Israel:
Rachel Wahba and her father’s photos on his cancelled Egyptian passport (Courtesy)
It is critical to understand, hard as it may be for those who grew up free outside the Middle East and North Africa, that Jews being sovereign in what is considered “their region” ever since the Muslim conquest, is haram, a sin, unnatural.
There was a time in Persia in which when it started to rain, Jewish shopkeepers shuttered up their shops as quickly as they could and ran home. No, not because they were scared of the rain, but because they could be killed if a raindrop hit them: The rain that touched the Jew would pollute the earth.
For American Jews to imagine this reality is a stretch. It wasn’t a stretch for my mother, who watched the Shia date merchant wash his hands to cleanse himself after doing business with the Jew, her father, in Basra when she was a little girl. As a Jew, she was subject to demeaning slurs and threats every day on the streets of Baghdad on her way home from school.
There are no Jews left in my parents’ native lands. There was an equal number of displaced Jews from Arab lands as Arabs displaced from Israel in 1948. This should be common knowledge. We did not remain “refugees” after we were forced out, kicked out, ethnically cleansed from all over the Middle East and North Africa. We struggled in a new Israel, run by Western Jews. It was not easy. Racism was rife; we were the “primitive” Arab Jews to Ashkenazim wanting Israel to be Austria, while Arab nations waged one war after another.
There was plenty of land in the Arab world to allow displaced people a home. There was one reason not to, and to keep these people indoctrinated to hate Jews in refugee camps. One reason to create generations of a stateless population, from whom massive funds are denied and are used instead for war against the Jews.
It is the same reason Hamas has cynically told us with utmost cruelty how it works for them: The more Palestinians that suffer and die, the sooner the world will turn against Jews, and the sooner Israel will be destroyed. It’s not complicated. Wage war on Israel, have Israel fight for her survival in terrible wars, and have the world turn on Israel.
The anti-Israel crowd goosesteps towards Islamist goals, and somehow doesn’t have the bandwidth to ask what the hell is going on as Hamas, Iran’s proxy, goes genocidally wild, and the Islamic regime of Iran slaughters tens of thousands of feminists and poets and people who want to be free.
There is something very wrong with Jews who think being anti-Zionist is a badge of honor, who want to be loved by friends who feel sexy wrapped in keffiyehs. Jews who march on the streets all over the West with their non-Jewish “anti-Zionists” blabbing Palestinianism, the death cult ideology/religion that is based on genocide of Jews, are obscene.
But of course, if we don’t know the history, and identify with how “from the River to the Sea Palestine will be free” rhymes, as if it’s some chant from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, we are an easy mark for anti-West ideologies and Islamists who know exactly what they are doing.
A Paris court has thrown out the case brought by the Lawee family for unpaid rent on the French embassy in Baghdad, implying that the family should risk their lives by turning to a partial Iraqi court. While the Lawee brothers were not subject to the 1951 law that seized Jewish assets, the French government’s defence relies on a 1967 amendment that froze the assets of any Iraqi Jew that obtained another citizenship and did not disclose it. The Lawees obtained their Canadian citizenship in 1967. The family have vowed to continue their fight for justice. Shirli Sitbon reports in Haaretz:
Ezra, left, and Khedouri Lawee (Photo courtesy: Philip Khazzam)
“I’m disappointed, because I believed this was a true tribunal, but instead what I see is that it is nothing but a mouthpiece repeating the same fiction France has been feeding us for years: that France has no jurisdiction over its own embassy. I feel embarrassed for France,” says Philip Khazzam, the grandson of Ezra Lawee.
In its ruling, the court wrote that the contract signed in 1964 was not subject to French law because it “does not stipulate that the parties wanted it to be subject to French law.”
“The fact that the contract was written in French, was signed by a representative of the French state to house a French public service and that part of the rent was paid in France in francs until 1974, or that the contract doesn’t mention an Iraqi jurisdiction in case of a dispute, does not prove the parties wanted the contract to be subjected to French law,” the court wrote in the ruling.
“The court doesn’t tell the family whom it should turn to,” Jean-Pierre Mignard, the lawyer representing the Lawee family, told Haaretz. “We can only deduce that the only competent court is Baghdad’s Shi’ite court, which is part of Iraq’s institutions. It cannot be impartial in such a case.
“Imagine the Lawees, an Iraqi Jewish family, going to Baghdad, to seek justice and reparations. It’s surreal. It’s unthinkable. Can you imagine us going to the Baghdad court with bulletproof vests. Our clients wouldn’t even be able to go to Iraq. This decision means my clients have no access to a judge or a court.”
In a hearing last month, France’s public legal adviser argued the court should declare itself incompetent because “The contract does not stipulate that it abides by French law; therefore we can assume Iraqi law should be applied. It is not impossible to get a ruling from the Iraqi state.”
It’s a majestic house in the Abu Nawas neighborhood of Baghdad, near the Tigris River. It appears frozen in time in the Lawee family’s black-and-white photographs.
The Lawee family built the house in the 1930s and lived in it until 1948, when the family immigrated to Canada. Their departure was influenced heavily by the Farhud, the pogrom carried out by mobs against Baghdad’s Jewish community from June 1–2, 1941 that killed at least 180 people and wounded thousands.
“My grandfather knew the king, and his contacts advised him to leave because the situation would only become more dangerous for Jews. The king was later beheaded,” Khazzam said.
The Lawee brothers were able to maintain ownership of the house by moving to Canada in 1948, since several members of their family remained in their home when Iraq passed its 1951 law seizing the property of Jews who had left the country.
In 1964 they found what they believed to be the ideal tenant: the French state.
“They thought that by renting the house, they could potentially return to it, and in any case, their house would being occupied meant it was better preserved from squatters,” Khazzam explained.
Little did the brothers know that 62 years after they rented their home, they would accuse the French government of squatting in their family home in court.
While the Lawee brothers were not subject to the 1951 law that seized Jewish assets, the French government’s defense relies on a 1967 amendment that froze the assets of any Iraqi Jew that obtained another citizenship and did not disclose it. The Lawees obtained their Canadian citizenship in 1967.
The Iraqi Ba’ath party came to power in 1969 and, citing the new amendment, demanded to be the sole beneficiary of the rent payments, according to court documents. The French Embassy continued to pay rent to the Lawee family for another five years, until the payments stopped in 1974.
In 1978, the French Embassy signed a new lease – this time with Iraq’s Secretary-General for the Administration of Property of Jews Stripped of Iraqi Nationality. In 1983, the French Embassy signed a new contract directly with the city of Baghdad, which has since been renewed several times, according to court documents.
The Lawee house has become a symbol that tells not only the story of the family who was forced to abandon it, but also the fate of the 135,000 Iraqi Jews who lived and thrived in Iraq for 2,600 years until they were forced out of their homes and to surrender their possessions.
According to Georges Bensoussan, a Jewish historian born in Morocco, France’s position on the dispossession of Jews in Nazi Germany versus Arab countries highlights a “double standard.”
“One reason is that there was such a focus on World War II looting France was forced to create a commission to deal with the issue. But what happened with Jews in the Arab world has remained under the radar, so France chose to entirely ignore the issue and the case of the embassy,” Bensoussan said.
“People don’t really know about the story of Jews from the Arab world – it’s not taught in school, and some people don’t really want to know, because they think that criticizing Arab countries’ attitude could get them into trouble.”
A statement signed by the Chief Rabbi of the Syrian-Jewish community, Saul J Kassin, claims that the activities of Rabbi Yosef Hamra and his son Henry do not reflect his community’s views. The Hamras have made several visits to Syria in cooperation with Moaz Mustafa, whom the chief rabbi describes as a Syrian-Palestinian activist (with thanks: Sarah):
The Great Aleppo synagogue, visited by Henry Hamra recently
The Chief Rabbi made his statement in November 2025 when Rabbi Hamra and his son Henry attended a hearing of the US Helsinki Commission. Among other things, the Commission promotes human rights.
Rabbi Kassin states that Rabbi Yosef Hamra, the brother of the last rabbi of Damascus, Abraham Hamra, had no authority to represent the Syrian-Jewish community in the US.
‘Our community does not engage in political advocacy on Syrian affairs,’Rabbi Kassin wrote.
Rabbi Yosef drew criticism when he was seen blessing the president of the post-Assad Syrian regime, Ahmed al Sheraa during his visit to Washington in 2025. Al-Sheraa is a former member of al-Qaeda but has claimed to have renounced his Islamist sympathies.
Rabbi Yosef’s son Henry Hamra has been leading an initiative to preserve Jewish heritage in Syria through the newly-created Jewish Heritage Foundation. He has offered to help Syrian Jews recover their property.
In his determination to revive the Syrian community, Henry Hamra stood as a candidate in the local elections. He was not elected.
Henry Hamra has made several visits to Syria in cooperation with Moaz Mustafa, an activist born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Mustafa, who advocates for democracy in Syria, was critical of the Assad regime. But he has been accused of downplaying massacres committed by the al-Sheraa (al-Jolani) regime and having links with the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 2025, government forces have been involved in massacres of Christians, Alawites, Druze and most recently Kurds in north-eastern Syria.
If Jews return to Syria, many are sceptical that the government would protect them or guarantee their rights.
Philip Khazzam, who is leading his family’s campaign for justice for non-payment of rent by France on its Baghdad embassy, formerly Beit Lawee, a Jewish family home, has vowed to continue fighting for justice. He called the court’s recommendation that the family take its case to the Iraqi courts ‘preposterous’. His lawyers have argued that the case resembles claims brought in Europe to recover Jewish property looted by the Nazis. Ynet News reports (With thanks: Imre):
According to the family, France stopped paying rent to the legal heirs in the 1970s after the regime of Saddam Hussein ordered that rent payments be made to the Iraqi Finance Ministry, following the nationalization of Jewish-owned properties. While France continues to use the building to this day, the family alleges that rental payments now go to the Iraqi government, which does not forward the funds to the rightful heirs.
The suit demanded retroactive rent totaling approximately $22 million, along with an additional $11 million in damages. However, the court ruled that the family’s losses stemmed from decisions made by Iraqi authorities, placing the dispute outside the scope of French legal jurisdiction.
Speaking to The New York Times, Khazzam called the recommendation to seek justice in Iraq “preposterous,” noting that “Iraq basically ran us out of our country, and then stole our home.”
The family’s lawyers, Jean-Pierre Mignard and Imrane Ghermi, argued that France violated its own laws and international human rights obligations by relying on discriminatory Iraqi policies to avoid compensating the family. They likened the case to claims brought in Europe to recover Jewish property looted by the Nazis during World War II.
France’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the ruling and did not send a representative to the court hearing. In its official response, the ministry maintained that any harm caused to the family resulted from sovereign decisions made by Iraq, and that France bears no legal responsibility.
Despite the ruling, Khazzam vowed to appeal. “We will continue our fight for justice in France,” he said. “We have just begun.”
Following a hearing on 19 January, a French court told the Jewish Lawee family that it was not the right authority to handle the lawsuit for unpaid rent on the French embassy in Baghdad. The building is still officially owned by the family.
According to the New York Times, the court said that the case should be heard in Iraq where the family’s ancestors fled persecution.
Speaking on a Harif online Zoom, Philip Khazzam, who is leading the family’s campaign, called the suggestion ‘ridiculous’.
It might not even be safe for a him to visit Iraq.
There is no record of any Jew suing the Iraqi government for lost property. According to Khazzam, no Iraqi lawyer had agreed to handle the case.
France had paid rent on the embassy until 1969, when it was persuaded by the Saddam Hussein regime to pay the rent partly in dinars to the Iraqi government and partly in Francs to the family. The French ceased paying the family’s share after 1974.
Iraq ‘froze’ the property, valued today at $34 billion, of over 100,000 Jews in 1951.
On his latest visit to Syria (reported on by Jane Arraf of NPR), Henry Hamra, who is spearheading a drive to have the rights of Syrian Jews restored, has vowed to help owners have their properties returned to them. Hamra , 48, is the nephew of the last rabbi of Damascus, Abraham Hamra. Control of Jewish properties passed from the Syrian government to a Jewish heritage organisation. However, many Jews remain sceptical that Syria, under the al-Sheraa regime, will become a hospitable place to minorities. Christians, Alawites, Druze and recently Kurds have been massacred.
The Great Synagogue of Aleppo, seemingly restored after being damaged in the 1947 riots (Jane Arraf/NPR)
In December, just days before Hamra’s visit to Aleppo, the Syrian government licensed a Jewish heritage foundation he leads, transferring control of Jewish religious properties from the government to the organization.
The organization will also help restore private property appropriated when the Jewish community left to its Jewish owners.
“What we’re trying to do is come see the properties, come see the synagogues and see what’s the condition,” says Hamra, now 48. “I’m calling on all the people who have properties to come and we’ll help them find them and give them back to them.”
A remarkable journey over the past year largely engineered by Syrian-American activist Mouaz Moustafa has led Hamra to this day, taking custody of the keys to Jewish properties by the latest in a series of caretakers over decades and envisioning a time when Syrian Jews might return.
On Hamra’s first visit to Syria with his father last year, Syrian government officials pledged help in restoring properties back to their Jewish owners.
In a wrinkle of history, the new Syrian president restoring Jewish rights, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is a onetime al-Qaida commander who renounced the militant Islamist group’s ideology.
A court in Lyon, France, has begun its trial against a 55-year-old man to determine whether antisemitism was a motive behind the murder of his 89-year-old Jewish neighbour in 2022. At the time, an antisemitic motive was almost immediately ruled out. The Jerusalem Post reports:
René Hadjaj, thrown out of a window in 2022
While the defendant, Rachid Kheniche, denies antisemitic motivation, he has so far been charged with aggravated murder because of the victim’s religion.
The incident took place in May 2022, when Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building. Kheniche admitted to the act, but said he was having a paranoid attack on the day of the murder. Nevertheless, following two psychiatric assessments, Kheniche was found to be criminally responsible.
Fez-born Yona Elfassi’s research into Morocco’s history eventually grew into a vocation to teach Darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect. His project, Limud Darija, allows diaspora Moroccan Jews to connect with their ancestors through language, culture, and stories. Now Muslims are reachng out too, the Times of Israel reports:
Yona Elfassi with some of his students (screenshot)
Through this shared connection, divisions begin to fade,” Elfassi said. “The Israelis the Muslim Moroccans meet are seen as Moroccans like themselves, as family. They are talking a common language, talking about what unites them, people are begun to be seen as individuals.” The Muslims and Jews, he said, get the chance “to bond over music and heritage and language, not political or war-related topics, and they do not further the false ‘pro-Palestine’ vs ‘pro-Israel’ dichotomy, and instead humanize everyone as individuals, as human beings.”
Limud Darija students describe how the program has connected them more deeply with people in their own lives as well. “My parents talked between them in Moroccan language, but by the time I was an adult, I forgot,” said Yehudit Levy, a retired schoolteacher in Ganei Tikva, Israel, who has studied with Elfassi for three years. “Since I started to learn with Yona, everything comes up — songs, music, food, poetry, all the traditional things come up. I smell Morocco when I am in the class.”
Noam Sibony, a Limud Darija alumnus, is a neuroscience researcher and musician living in Toronto. The 28-year-old spent nine months volunteering in Lod, an Israeli city whose population is Arab and Jewish, at a community center, working with local children and youth. Limud Darija, he said, showed him how learning the language of another culture can help build relationships that transcend regional politics and conflicts.
Ashkenazi Jews responded to the ‘critical race theory’ vogue sweeping the US by emphasising Jewish diversity. But 7 October only reinforced the misconception, in progressive circles, that all Jews were white supremacists. What all Jews should do, argue Maia Zelkha and Aurèle Tobelem, is emphasise their Levantine Jewish practices and origins. Important article in Yad Mizrah:
Jewish girl from the Megouna tribe. Photo by Jean Besancenot in 1934
By 2020, racial self-flagellation and masochism were considered the responsible things to partake in. The Mizrahi Jew became the mascot of Ashkenazi anti-racism, our only apparent function to be paraded before the left as evidence of millennia of DEI compliance.
Mizrahi and Sephardi organizations that had existed for decades began to be invited into mainstream Jewish institutions and gained a different kind of relevance altogether, fueling conversations about who gets counted as “Jews of Color,” and how Mizrahim fit (or don’t fit) into American racial frameworks. Popular manifestos began to be published on who is the “right” or “wrong” kind of Jew in this evil, Ashkenormative world that supposedly erases Mizrahi Jews. New and curious categories of “Mizrahi” Jews began to emerge, including figures who, on closer inspection, were not Jewish at all. The campaign against imperial whiteness, the effort to reframe Jewish–Arab relations as an ideological counterweight to pro-Palestinian social justice politics, and the defense of Zionism itself came to hinge on the recovery of Jewish “brownness”—a project in which Mizrahi Jews became largely unwitting, and frequently unwilling, symbols. To be more specific, the majority of Mizrahi Jews in Israel had no fucking clue that their identity was being repackaged by American DEI vultures. A monster began to grow: growling, drooling, and slumbering in the shadows.
And then the monster awakened. No need to describe in detail the horror of October 7th. We all know what happened that day, and we know what happened after—the celebrations, the institutional statements of support, the calls for more violence. Progressive Jews were beside themselves. “Hadn’t we marched with you in your time of need?” they cried out. “Weren’t we also your faithful allies?”, they screamed into the void of the internet, as various progressive causes abandoned them to support the perpetrators of the massacre. (Spoiler alert: they were never “allies” to begin with).
Their cries fell on deaf ears. No matter the amount of Jewish families slaughtered, women raped, or hostages taken—the Palestinians were the “brown” victims, and the Jews were the “white” oppressors. The Palestinians were simply resisting white supremacy. October 7th, then, was justified, because it was an act of resistance against white oppression, colonialism. They were Jesus, the brown Palestinian—the pure one, the son of God—crucified by white Judas.
And so Jews, of all colors, began to try to find a life raft in the raging storm of mythological hatred. They took to arguing in broken Arabic with Pakistani Muslims on Omegle, or recruiting Nigerian Christians to Judaism, desperate to perform a fundamentally non-Western identity—jettisoning, in the process, centuries of Jewish contributions to European science, philosophy, and ethics. The costume followed: the sudra, or its $80 keffiyeh-styled substitute, probably stitched by Suleiman rather than Shlomo. Enthusiastically taking on the left’s moral geometry of indigenous versus colonizer—oppressor versus oppressed—brown versus non-brown—by self-orientalizing. Anything to shed themselves from this new label of “white colonizer” (but really just the label of “white”) that the political left immediately associated with Zionism in a post-October 7th world. Didn’t these arrogant leftists know that MIZRAHI AND SEPHARDI JEWS EXIST???!!
This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, of the Middle East and North Africa, documenting the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution.
Point of No Return
Jewish Refugees from Arab and Muslim Countries
One-stop blog on the Middle East's forgotten Jewish refugees - updated daily.
