The memory of Jewish life in Libya has been further erased with the demolition of a Jewish cemetery in Derna, on the Mediterranean coast in Cyrenaica. Report in JNS (with thanks: Nancy):
Before and after photos of the Derna cemetery, Libya (Photos: Or Shalom)
(JNS) – A Jewish cemetery in the eastern Libyan city of Derna has been demolished due to construction work at the site, the head of an Israeli center for the preservation of Libyan Jewish heritage said on Thursday.
Scores of graves believed to have once been at the site were destroyed over the last couple of weeks, said Pedhazur Benattia, chairman of the Or Shalom organization in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv.
He shared video footage of the site with the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
”There is nothing left there now,” Benattia told JNS, adding that such destruction was standard practice in the country.
Jews and Kurds affirmed their solidarity in London last week as the Kurdish enclave in north-eastern Syria was overrun by regime forces. Both peoples share a history of persecution, displacement and genocide, writes Lyn Julius on Substack:
Jews and Kurds at a meeting organised by the Jewish-Kurdish network in a UK parliamentary committee room on 19 January 2026
The young man stood at the back of a parliamentary committee room and tearfully pleaded for Israel to save his family. They were in Rojava, the Kurdish enclave in north-eastern Syria. Reports were filtering out of abductions and massacres as Syrian regime forces swept across the Kurdish-held territory. Islamic State prisoners had been released from jail and there was no knowing what destruction they would inflict.
The occasion at the UK parliament was an event attended by Jews and Kurds to focus on cooperation between these two Middle Eastern non-Arab minorities. Both peoples are indigenous, predating by several centuries the Arab conquest which had converted the Kurds to Islam and subjugated the Jews as dhimmis. Both peoples have clung on to their language and culture through thick and thin.
At the end of WWI, there were high hopes, with the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, that Assyrians and Kurds would enjoy an autonomous enclave, if not a homeland of their own. But only the 1917 Balfour Declaration, with its commitment for a home for the Jews, was endorsed at the 1920 San Remo conference and written into the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
A century later 30 million Kurds are still spread across four nations – Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. After 2003 and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi Kurdistan came closest to achieving autonomy, but has to fend off pressure from Tehran and Baghdad. The Jewish state has been embattled since the day it was declared.
In the 1960s Israel sent advisers and weapons to the Kurds in Iraq. In return, the Kurds helped smuggle 2,000 desperate Jews out of the country.
Both Kurds and Jews have faced persecution, displacement, genocide and the jihadist exterminationist threat. In 2014, when ISIS was on the rampage in northern Iraq, Jews stood with Kurds and Yazidis. Since the 7 October attacks on southern Israel, Kurds have joined Jews to demonstrate their solidarity.
The dominant narrative in the West assumes that only Arabs are entitled to political rights, while the Kurdish demand for self-determination is ignored. Zionism – Jewish self-determination – is demonised. But as this latest display of solidarity in a parliamentary committee room showed, Jews stand with Kurds and Kurds stand with Jews. May they turn solidarity into political action.
Eliezer Tsafrir, a senior Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) official who served as the last Mossad station chief in Tehran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has died at the age of 92. In retrospect, he regretted refusing the Shah’s request for Mossad to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris. Obituary in the Jerusalem Post:
Archival photo of Eliezer ”Geizi” Tsafrir in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Photo: Yossi Aloni/Maariv Archives)
Known as “Geizi,” Tsafrir’s intelligence career began during the War of Independence (1948-49) and extended through the Cold War-era Middle East, placing him at the center of some of Israel’s most consequential clandestine operations, particularly in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, and Lebanon.
Nowhere was that more evident than in Iran, where Tsafrir served during the collapse of the Shah’s regime and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – witnessing firsthand the moment one of Israel’s most important regional relationships imploded.
Born in Tiberias in 1932 to a Kurdish Jewish family that had emigrated overland from northern Iraq via Syria during the Ottoman period, Tsafrir became involved in security activity at a young age.
“From age 14, during Israel’s War of Independence, he carried messages between IDF positions in Tiberias,” Tsafrir’s son Raz told Radio North 104.5. “He served as an intelligence officer in Israel’s other wars, always in the field.”
Tsafrir later served as an intelligence officer in the Sinai Campaign in 1956 and the Six Day War in 1967. He joined the Shin Bet in the early 1950s, serving for 12 years, including as coordinator for Arab villages in the Jerusalem area. In 1962, he was recruited to the Mossad, then still a relatively young organization.
Much of Tsafrir’s career revolved around two pillars of early Israeli strategy: the “periphery doctrine,” which sought alliances with non-Arab states such as Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia; and the “strategy of minorities,” which aimed to build ties with non-Arab communities across the Middle East.
Appointed head of the Mossad station in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974, Tsafrir oversaw Israel’s clandestine assistance to Kurdish forces fighting Baghdad, an operation logistically dependent on close cooperation with pre-revolutionary Iran and its intelligence service, SAVAK.
“We supplied weapons, conducted courses, and gathered intelligence on the Iraqi army,” Tsafrir told The Jerusalem Post in 2021. Kurdish officers within the Iraqi military provided Israel with a rare intelligence window on a key regional adversary, he said.
Born in Tiberias in 1932 to a Kurdish Jewish family that had emigrated overland from northern Iraq via Syria during the Ottoman period, Tsafrir became involved in security activity at a young age.
“From age 14, during Israel’s War of Independence, he carried messages between IDF positions in Tiberias,” Tsafrir’s son Raz told Radio North 104.5. “He served as an intelligence officer in Israel’s other wars, always in the field.”
Tsafrir later served as an intelligence officer in the Sinai Campaign in 1956 and the Six Day War in 1967. He joined the Shin Bet in the early 1950s, serving for 12 years, including as coordinator for Arab villages in the Jerusalem area. In 1962, he was recruited to the Mossad, then still a relatively young organization.
Much of Tsafrir’s career revolved around two pillars of early Israeli strategy: the “periphery doctrine,” which sought alliances with non-Arab states such as Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia; and the “strategy of minorities,” which aimed to build ties with non-Arab communities across the Middle East.
Appointed head of the Mossad station in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974, Tsafrir oversaw Israel’s clandestine assistance to Kurdish forces fighting Baghdad, an operation logistically dependent on close cooperation with pre-revolutionary Iran and its intelligence service, SAVAK.
“We supplied weapons, conducted courses, and gathered intelligence on the Iraqi army,” Tsafrir told The Jerusalem Post in 2021. Kurdish officers within the Iraqi military provided Israel with a rare intelligence window on a key regional adversary, he said.
That mission ended abruptly in March 1975, following the Algiers Agreement between Iran and Iraq, which resolved their dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Iran withdrew support for the Kurds overnight, leaving Tsafrir and a small Mossad team exposed as Iraqi forces advanced. They were evacuated via Iran shortly before Iraqi troops closed the border.
“If they had reached us, they would have made us into shashlik [shish kebab],” Tsafrir later joked, recalling his narrow escape via Iran.
Following Kurdistan, Tsafrir was appointed Mossad station chief in Tehran. He assumed the post during a period of close Israeli-Iranian strategic cooperation and remained in place as Iran entered its most turbulent phase. His family lived in Iran, and his son remembers a country that, at the time, felt open and familiar.
“Warm people. A big country. Very comfortable living,” Raz Tzafrir recalled. “It was the only place besides Paris with an Israeli school. There was a huge Israeli community.”
That world collapsed in 1978. As protests spread, Tsafrir’s mission shifted from cooperation with Iranian intelligence to monitoring unrest and eventually to evacuating Israelis as the revolution gathered force.
The defining moment came when Tsafrir was summoned to meet the Shah himself.
“They told me the Shah wanted the Mossad to kill Khomeini in Paris,” Tsafrir later recounted. Israel refused.
“In retrospect, I regret it,” he said decades later, regarding that decision. “We could have saved the whole Iranian nation from this situation and Israel from the nuclear threat.”
As Tehran descended into chaos, Tsafrir oversaw the evacuation of more than 1,300 Israelis. His son remembers standing on the balcony at night, hearing gunfire and watching a city burn.
“We were evacuated on the last El Al plane to leave Tehran,” Raz Tsafrir said. “My father stayed for months longer to get out all the Israelis and Jews who wanted to leave.”
“Thirty-four Israelis left, but there was a Jewish community of 84,000 still remaining,” he told the Post in 2021. “We couldn’t interfere, but we brought as many EL Al planes as possible so that as many as possible could leave.
Adam Louis-Klein is an anthropologist who was working in the South American jungle when news reached him of the Hamas 7 October 2023 attacks. Shocked at the unhinged antismitism these unleashed, Louis-Klein has been turning his analytical skills to studying antizionism (without the hyphen) , which he calls an ideology of hate.” In his Facebook post of 4 January he points to the absence of the study of dhimmitude in universities. The good news is that the Middle East Forum announced the establishment of an Institute of Dhimmitude Studies in November 2025.
Adam Louis-Klein, pioneer of ‘antizionism’ studies
“Where is the scholarship on dhimmitude in Islamic studies?
Point me to the literature—within contemporary Islamic studies or the postcolonial academy—that seriously examines the legacy of dhimmitude, the long history of Islamic Jew-hatred, and the role of conquest theologies in shaping modern annihilationist visions of Israel.Where are the analyses of Jewish communities under Islamic rule that confront subjugation, humiliation, and legal inferiority?
Where is the account of how classical doctrines of jihad, dhimma, and supersession continue to inform modern antizionism across the Islamic world?
The relevant authors are well known: Bat Ye’or, Andrew G. Bostom, Lyn Julius, Raymond Ibrahim, Bassam Tibi, Georges Bensoussan, Norman A. Stillman, Mark R. Cohen, David Littman, Eliyahu Ashtor, Richard L. Rubenstein, and others—none of whom are read, cited, or meaningfully engaged with in contemporary Islamic studies or the postcolonial academy at large.
‘Dhimmi’ also refers to a syndrome whoch fosters servility and appeasemment. Louis-Klein has issued this rousing call of defiance:
“The dhimmi Jew is never coming back. The age in which Jews could be tolerated as second-class participants in someone else’s moral order—granted provisional safety in exchange for silence, submission, or self-erasure—is over. Those who still expect Jews to play that role under new guises—under secular liberalism, progressive moralism, or activist radicalism—are mistaking history for eternity.
The Jew who must denounce Judaism to be accepted, renounce Peoplehood to be heard, or apologize for self-defense to remain within the academic fold is not a liberated Jew, but a rebranded dhimmi. And we reject it.
We will no longer inhabit moral frameworks that ask us to diminish ourselves in exchange for conditional belonging. Jewish life today is not lived on borrowed time or under borrowed sovereignty. It is lived from the center, with dignity, memory, and the unshakeable truth that we have always been, and will always be, a People. The age of dhimmitude—whether under empire, church, caliphate, or campus consensus—is finished. We are not guests in history. We are authors of it.”
An online lynch mob is persecuting Turku Avci, a Turkish Muslim student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is facing arrest ‘for being a Zionist’ if she returns to Turkey and her life is at risk. Her case illustrates how far relations between Turkey and Israel have deteriorated in the last two years after a state-sanctioned campaign of antisemitism. Report in the Jerusalem Post:
Turku Avci in Jerusalem (Photo: courtesy)
After a while, the number of messages became overwhelming. People were threatening her with rape and death. “They launched what could only be described as a coordinated jihadist-style lynch campaign,” she said.
The Post found 122,000 results for her name on Google in the past week alone.
She is unsure how safe she is in Israel, given that people in Turkey said they contacted their Palestinian friends to hunt her down and harm her.
Then, on Thursday last week, Avci learned that there is an arrest warrant in Turkey in her name. She is now unable to go back to Turkey, or even go to its embassy in Israel, and believes that if she sets foot in Turkey, she would be killed.
Interestingly, however, her lawyer in Turkey was unable to review the file for the arrest warrant and therefore cannot see its details or the reason for the warrant. Avci had, following a much less intense and much briefer incident with the media last year, sought a lawyer and passed him her power of attorney.
To Avci and her lawyer, the inability to access the information suggests that state security is in charge of the matter, as a police warrant would have been sent to her lawyer first rather than kept secret.
“Only the prosecutor knows,” she said.
Avci’s parents had to change their location for a week and have been receiving threats. “It’s really difficult for them because they have nothing to do with this. I’m really upset that I involved my family in this, and if something happens, it’s not something I can ever forgive myself for, and it’s just for nothing, you know, we didn’t do anything wrong as a family, nothing,” she said.
“On the other hand, I don’t have to be afraid anymore about saying what I want,” Avci noted.
Although she cannot return to Turkey, her options in Israel are also limited. She came to study at the Hebrew University on a privately funded scholarship she found for herself. However, the donors no longer wanted to support her after October 7, and she also cannot work in Israel under her student visa. Avci therefore had to move out of her dorms and has since been couch-surfing, with no money to rent her own place.
Al-Hurra is a US-funded medium aimed at Arabic readers. This article by Randa Jebai acquaints them with the Iranian Jews of California who have escaped persecution but still feel a strong Iranian identity:
A street in Beverly Hills
On a quiet street stands a jewelry store with an unusual name: Unicorn. The name, its owner explains, is no accident. Farid Nasseri, an Iranian Jew who emigrated to the United States at age 16, says, “The unicorn is a symbol of purity, magic and strength,” before beginning to recount a story about wounds that remain open despite years of stability.
“I grew up in an Iranian city where religious fundamentalism was deeply rooted,” Nasseri says. “As a Jewish child, some secular Muslims welcomed me, but others rejected me simply because I was Jewish.”
Behind his calm voice lies a memory of silent violence. Migration was not a search for a better life, but an escape from psychological pressure and daily persecution that followed his identity through the streets of Tehran.
After the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s, everything changed. “They knew I was Jewish. I was harassed and beaten from a young age. I remember a winter day when they tore off the head covering my mother had made for me and beat me until I hit the wall. In that moment, I decided to leave,” Nasseri recalls.
The decision was not easy: family, home, memory. But freedom, he says, was worth more than all of it.
Iran’s Jews are not newcomers to the land. They are among the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Lawrence Sternfeld (previously known as Lior – ed), a historian specializing in Persian Jewish history, said in an interview with Alhurra that their roots date back some 2,700 years, to the Babylonian exile. Their presence initially concentrated in Isfahan, before spreading to other regions.
Their relationship with Zoroastrian society was uneven, but it improved after the Islamic conquest, when Jews were granted the status of a “protected religious minority.” Over time, however, the Jewish experience was not uniform across Iran; conditions varied by region and era. Even so, Jews emerged as custodians of Iranian arts, language and music.
They are, Sternfeld notes, the only officially recognized religious minority that does not belong to a non-Persian ethnic group. Yet the adoption of Shiite Islam as the state religion imposed legal and social restrictions that diminished the status of Jews and other minorities.
Before the 1979 revolution, Iran’s Jewish population numbered about 100,000. After the revolution, it fell to roughly 23,000, more than half of whom live in Tehran, about 10 percent in Isfahan, and the rest in cities such as Shiraz and Hamadan. Despite the decline, the community continues to maintain schools, restaurants, and religious and social institutions—making Iran, paradoxically, the largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel.
Life after the revolution, however, changed fundamentally. According to Sternfeld, Jews were barred from senior positions in government and the military and faced restrictions in education, inheritance, and the management of private schools. They were also forced to draw a sharp line between their religious identity and Israel, amid official anti-Zionist rhetoric that directly affected their daily lives.
When I began researching the lives of Iranian Jews in Beverly Hills, I found that novelist Gina Nahai is nearly the only literary voice to have documented this experience (Many Persian Jewish women writers exist -ed). She herself fled Iran with her family because of their Jewish faith. I met Nahai in the heart of Beverly Hills, in a home that reflects both her identity and her comfortable standard of living. She explained what compelled her to write her novels: “I wanted to record the story of Iranian Jews in the United States, especially in Los Angeles. Forty years have passed, and what happened during that time is what truly shaped our identity.”
Nahai added, “Our children who were born here and have never seen Iran still feel a strong Iranian identity. They listen to old Persian songs, speak Persian, respect the culture and enjoy the food. What we feared losing after the revolution remained—and even grew stronger.”
The decision to emigrate was not planned. “We left our home in Tehran with our bedrooms and clothes still there. We thought we would return every summer. But we lost everything: our businesses and our house were confiscated,” she said.
This new book by Hillel Cohen complicates the picture of social interaction between Ashkenazim, Mizrahim and Arabs before the establishment of the state of Israel. (However, in his wistful Ottomanism, there is, in my view, a danger that Cohen might be applying a moral equivalence to both Arab and Jewish nationalism.) Review in the Shepherd Express:
Could the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine been averted or at least ameliorated? It’s an underlying theme in Hillel Cohen’s Enemies, a Love Story. As an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Cohen has written about the conflict before. Here, he focuses on relations between Palestine’s Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, who lived among the Arab majority for centuries, and how those relations altered with the influx of the Ashkenazim, European Jews intent on forming a new sort of Jewish community in the Holy Land.
Cohen complicates the picture many of us have, shading black and white into many shades of gray. Jews and Arabs were never homogenous in attitude or belief, and Zionism was not a monolith in its formative decades. Mizrahim and Arabs often got along well under Ottoman Turkish rule, albeit Jewish life in the empire was not without difficulties. Some Mizrahim resented the arrival of the Ashkenazim and others worked with them. For their part, many European Jews looked down on the Mizrahim as socially and culturally inferior.
As much as anything, Enemies is a reminder that history is seldom simple. The State of Israel was established in 1948 largely by Ashkenazim Zionists, who turned themselves into the new nation’s elite. The Mizrahim often felt negatively stereotyped, trapped in low-wage jobs. Feeling excluded, many gravitated toward right-wing populism and extreme forms of Israeli nationalism.
Enemies, A Love Story is stocked with citations from the early 20th century by Jews and Arabs seeking accommodation. Alas, competing ideas of nationalism, a Western import in a region where religious rather than ethnic identity had been prevalent, shipwrecked chances for conciliation. Cohen writes with the wisdom of a historian who understands the challenge of accounting for inconvenient facts.
Survivors of the terrorist attack on the Al-Ghriba synagogue on 9 May 2023 are despairing that they will ever see justice, as a Tunisian court postpones concluding the case for the fourth time.
A plaque erected inside the al-Ghriba synagogue in memory of Benjamin Haddad and Aviel Haddad, murdered in the 9 May 2023 terrorist attack
In the attack on the Al-Ghriba synagogue, on the island of Djerba, two Jewish visitors for the annual Lag ba’ Omer pilgrimage, Benjamin Haddad, a French citizen, and his cousin, Aviel Haddad, a Tunisian-Israeli citizen, were shot dead, along with three security personnel.
Although the attacker was killed, his alleged accomplices were due to stand trial on 13 January in Tunis. The survivors, who are being represented by Tunisian lawyers, were not informed that the trial was taking place, nor told that it was being postponed for the fourth time until 13 February. The media have been silent about the affair.
The sister of Benjamin Haddad, who made a futile trip to Tunis, has complained that the survivors have been abandoned by both the French and the Tunisian authorities.
Moreover, under the increasingly authoritarian rule of president Kais Saied, the government is reluctant to acknowledge the antisemitic nature of the al-Ghriba attack.
The American Sephardi Federation has publicised the case. Details can be obtained by writing to attentaghriba2023@gmail.com.
In a landmark hearing set for Monday 19 January 2026 in Paris, the Lawee family plans to put French human rights principles on trial. The family fled Iraq in the 1950s and rented its abandoned home to France for use as its Baghdad embassy. Relying on discriminatory laws stripping the Jews of their property, Paris long ago stopped paying the Lawees rent. Important article in The New York Times:
The Lawee family mansion, now the French embassy in Baghdad (Photo: courtesy)
The family’s lawyers contend the case is analogous to claims made by the descendants of Holocaust victims, who are entitled to restitution from the French government for property stolen during the Nazi era. “The French state’s decision to submit to the antisemitic regulations of a foreign state is unconstitutional, illegal and violates international conventions,” Jean-Pierre Mignard and Imrane Ghermi, lawyers for the family, argued in a complaint filed in 2024.
France counters that the damages claimed by the family “are directly caused by decisions adopted by the Iraqi authorities.” But in disavowing all responsibility, President Emmanuel Macron’s government finds itself in the awkward position of relying on discriminatory Iraqi laws in its defense.
The Lawee brothers designed the large house with classic columns, curved porticos and expansive rooms, each with his wife and children taking a side, and everyone gathering on the roof or in the garden, Mayer Lawee recalled. But in the late 1940s, amid mounting animosity against Jews over the establishment of Israel, he said, Iraq’s king urged the family to leave.
Much of the family soon settled in Canada, where the brothers built similar homes on neighboring Montreal lots with features deliberately reminiscent of their Baghdad mansion. Still, two relatives remained in the Iraqi house for a decade, then entrusted it to a caretaker until the family’s agent made a deal with France in 1964.
The precise terms of that agreement, just what happened afterward and which laws apply are in dispute. But it is clear that for six turbulent decades, through the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein and two U.S.-led invasions, France has continued using the house as its official outpost in Baghdad.
Since 1969, when Iraq claimed ownership of the mansion, France has paid rent to the Iraqi government. The family contends that France at first also kept paying it according to the original deal, but stopped in 1974, and ignored its inquiries.
France has argued that Iraqi laws depriving Jews of property, beginning in the 1950s, justified French compliance with the Iraqi authorities. It has also demanded more proof of the family’s claims.
Younger members of the family grew up with elders speaking Arabic and waxing nostalgic about homes that they would never see again, that subsequent generations could never know.
“I consider myself Iraqi, and then a Canadian, which is funny since I’ve never been to Iraq,” said Philip Khazzam, 66, a grandson of Ezra Lawee.
The Baghdad house loomed large in family lore, and as his elders aged, Mr. Khazzam grew more interested in what happened. The more he dug, he said, the more he became convinced that France had acted unjustly by profiting from Iraq’s discrimination with no objection or explanation.
“I’ve only seen pictures of our house. But still, it lives in me every day,” Mr. Khazzam said. “Which is why it matters to me — all the decades later and halfway around the world — much more than an ordinary building ever could. It still is a part of our family.”
Mr. Macron has portrayed France as a leader in restitution efforts as debates about restoring property unjustly acquired through war, totalitarianism or colonialism have swept Europe.
In practice, though, the French have been slow to return looted goods, drawing sharp criticism and recently prompting legal changes to speed the process.
The Lawees hope that shifting sentiment and laws will influence the court to take an expansive view of their claim, framing it in this wider context. Still, experts in cultural property law said the family does not have a traditional restitution claim, like Nazi-era looting cases. France tightly circumscribes what qualifies for restitution. The family’s claim, based on one country’s submission to another’s discriminatory policies, seems to fall squarely outside that category, they say.
Evelien Campfens, an art and cultural heritage law lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, said that French restitution measures technically would not apply to the Lawee home because it is outside France. But because the property has an intangible value and precious memories for the family, she said, it may be possible for their lawyers to draw an analogy to the looted property in traditional restitution cases.
The effort may be more politically powerful than legally sound, according to Anne-Sophie Nardon, a French cultural property lawyer. “I think the goal is to first make the case public and force the government to speak and enter into negotiations,” she said.
But failed talks are what led to court. French officials in 2021 responded to the family’s inquiries after attempts over decades yielded no responses. The family hoped France would exert influence in Iraq to help it reclaim the home.
Instead, France suggested the family try to re-establish Iraqi citizenship to potentially regain ownership rights, rather than attempt an untested diplomatic process. The family says no Iraqi lawyer would handle its case, and in 2024, it took its claim to a French administrative court.
In November, Mr. Khazzam wrote to Mr. Macron, urging France to resolve the matter in mediation. “France does not want to occupy stolen property,” he said. “This is for the dictators and thieves who run failing states.”
Mr. Macron has not answered. His office did not respond to a request for comment.
Hemin Baban summarises the 20th century history of Iraq’s Jews in the Kurdistan Chronicle and does not shy away from describing the 1941 Farhud massacre (where Kurds were among those Muslims who saved Jews), the Jews’ dispossession and attempts to preserve Jewish memory. The article puts the number of Jews living in Baghdad at five. However, it is concerning that Baban has consulted non-Jewish Kurds such as Randjar Cohen and Sherko Osman who have been exposed as imposters. They are quoted as saying there are 2,500 Jews still living in Kurdistan. This is nothing but a fantasy, as the entire community of 18,000 Kurdish Jews was arlifted to Israel in 1949. (With thanks: Niran, Sami)
A Baghdad Midrash or religious school, founded in 1839 (photo: Hemin Baban)
Iraqi Jew Sami Surani, survived the massacre with his family. He recalls the details of those nights: “We were at my grandfather’s house. My father and uncle locked and bolted the door tightly, stacking heavy furniture against it to keep attackers out. From outside, we heard women and children screaming as they were killed and assaulted.”
He still remembers his father’s words that night: “It is a shame we bring children into this world,” the man wept. “What sin have children committed to be born into this cruel world?”
“Through the windows, we saw Jewish shops looted and destroyed,” Surani relates. “We had nothing but tears and prayers for God’s mercy. We lived in constant fear for over two months, never leaving the house.”
The massacre coincided with the Jewish festival of Shavuot and with the return of Regent Abd al-Ilah to Baghdad. “The attackers thought the Jewish gathering for traditional prayers by the Tigris was to welcome the regent,” Surani recalls. “They threw some into the river, stormed buses, and killed Jews inside.”
During the Farhud, Jewish homes in Baghdad were marked in red, making them easy targets for mobs to storm, kill residents, loot property, and assault women and girls, with the complicity of some police officers, according to Surani.
He confirms, citing a document from the British High Commissioner in Baghdad, that the massacre’s victims numbered around 2,000 Jews.
At the same time, he remembers Muslims who risked their lives to save Jews. “Some Muslims, many of them Kurds, fought off mobs to protect Jews. We honor them, just as we honor General Mustafa Barzani, who openly declared that Jews must be protected and that no one should dare harm them. Later, his son Masoud Barzani, and the Kurds generally, also helped many Jews escape Iraq, something Jews remain grateful for to this day.”
The organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries values Jewish-owned assets and institutions at around $34 billion (Photo: Hemin Baban)
Only five remain
Iraq’s Jews are among the world’s oldest Jewish communities, tracing their roots back to the Assyrian exile of the Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, and the Babylonian exile of Judah in 586 BC, when tens of thousands were deported from Jerusalem to settle in Babylon and Kurdistan. But in the 20th century, they faced systematic persecution that reduced their numbers from about 140,000 to just five by 2024, according to the organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries.
Benjamin Elias, in his sixties, from a well-known philanthropic family, is one of those who refused to emigrate. He chose to remain in what he calls “the land of religions, temples, and prophets,” rich in Jewish heritage. He complains of harassment fueled by politicized propaganda targeting Jews and other minorities.
Today Elias lives quietly in a Baghdad neighborhood, keeping to a small circle of acquaintances, like the few remaining Jews. He performs his rituals at home, away from closed synagogues, visits his family graves in secret, and laments a society shaped by decades of state-led incitement against minorities, especially Jews.
According to Iraq’s first census in 1920, Jews made up 3.1% of the population – over 87,000 people. By 1947, the proportion dropped to 2.6%. After the mass expulsion in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (named after two prominent Jewish figures), it fell to about 0.08%, or 10,000-12,000 people.
The Jews of Kurdistan
Iraq’s 2005 constitution made no mention of Jews or their religion. Nor were they included in the 2012 law regulating Christian, Yezidi, and Mandaean endowments. They were also excluded from regaining Iraqi nationality under the 2006 Nationality Law, while hate speech from clerics and politicians went unpunished.
In contrast, the Kurdistan Region officially recognized Jews within the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs in 2015, under the Law on the Protection of Components No. 5, which encourages the return of displaced groups and guarantees their rights.
This representation is headed by 62-year-old Sherko Osman, a Jew from Erbil whose grandfather was a rabbi. “The history of Kurdistan’s Jews stretches back 25 centuries,” Osman says. “We freely practice our rituals and daily life, facing no restrictions. We are respected in our identity.”
A Jewish man praying at the Tomb of Prophet Nahum (Photo: Hemin Baban)
Most Jews in Kurdistan today are descendants of families scattered by expulsion or those who concealed their faith for safety. Osman notes full coordination with the regional government to preserve Jewish heritage sites, such as the shrine of the prophet Nahum, alongside other ongoing restoration efforts.
Ranjdar Cohen, who leads the nongovernmental organization Aramik, affirms the national belonging of Kurdistan’s Jews. “We are not concerned with politics. We are an ancient religious community, proud of our faith and culture, loyal to the land where we live. Yet some exploit our cause by linking us to Israel, sowing division among Iraqis.”
“There are around 2,500 Jews in Kurdistan, enjoying greater freedom here,” he adds. “We call on both the federal and regional governments to protect Jewish heritage and to ease visits by Jews to Iraq and their sacred sites.”
The Jewish cemetery in Baghdad’s Habibiyah neighborhood contains nearly 4,000 graves, including victims of the notorious Farhud massacre (Photo: Hemin Baban)
A heritage crumbling without rescue
In Baghdad’s Bataween district, once home to Jews, visitors now see dozens of abandoned houses and buildings fallen into ruin. Among the few remaining landmarks is the Meir Tweig Synagogue, which in 1950 became the registration center for Jews preparing for emigration.
There are no precise statistics on Jewish properties in Iraq, but estimates purport that there are 12,000 abandoned properties. The organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries values Jewish-owned assets and institutions at around $34 billion, left behind by 135,000 Iraqi Jews.
The Jewish Heritage Foundation, with the American Society for Overseas Research, documented in 2020 about 297 Jewish heritage sites in Iraq. Only 30 remain today, 21 of them in extremely poor condition. These included synagogues (40%, 118 sites), neighborhoods (32%, 96), and schools (16%, 48). A full 89% were deemed “extinct.”
Another site is Baghdad’s Habibiyah Jewish cemetery in Sadr City, with 4,000 graves, including rabbis and Jews executed as “Israeli spies.” The cemetery itself tells their tragic story. It was established in 1962 after a government order moved over 3,000 Jewish remains from the Nahda cemetery to make way for the never-built Baghdad Tower project. The land later became a parking lot called “Karaj al-Nahda.”
Two pages from a long list documenting Jewish people who were stripped of Iraqi citizenship under Law No. 1 of 1950.
Niran Bassoon’s mission: Memory in exile
Though exiled from Iraq at the age of 16, Iraqi Jew Niran Bassoon, who is now 68 and in London, did not surrender to despair. Instead, she devoted her life to documenting the history of Iraqi Jews and reviving their nearly erased heritage.
Eight years ago, she turned part of her home into a small studio, launching her YouTube channel Noor W Nar (“Light and Fire”), broadcasting dialogues with Iraqi Jews, many of whom were witnesses to the Farhud and other expulsions. Alone, without a team, she has published over 150 interviews, making her channel a platform followed by Iraqis of all backgrounds.
Niran Basson, an Iraqi Jewish activist exiled at the age of 16, now lives in London.
Her home is also filled with photos documenting Jewish life in Iraq. Her channel has become a window to a community that once played a pivotal role in the nation’s story before being erased by fanaticism and conflict.
Her family had resisted leaving Iraq during the expulsions of 1950-1951. But in August 1973, harsh circumstances forced them out, and her passport was stamped “one-time exit only,” banning her return after her Iraqi nationality was stripped. “Iraq, the birthplace of my ancestors, is still a big part of my life,” she says sorrowfully. “I grew up loving it despite the distance. I inherited my father’s passion for journalism and for documenting the role of Jews in Iraq, that’s what inspired my channel.”
Salim Bassoon, her father, was a pioneer of Iraqi journalism in the last century, repeatedly arrested and exiled. After decades of resilience, he finally left to protect his family. “The Kurds helped save many Jews, helping them cross the border to Iran,” Niran recalls. “But returning to Iraq is now impossible. At best, I dream of visiting, without having to hide my Jewish identity.”
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.
