Month: July 2011

Jews of Tunisia are catapulted into the limelight

Mohamed Ghannem, cardiologist and aspiring Tunisian minister

The Jasmine revolution has catapulted Jews into the limelight, and will herald a better era for Tunisia’s 1,500-strong community, argues Mohamed Ghannem in ‘Ou en sont les juifs tunisiens?’ (Information Juive July/August 2011 – article not yet online). Ghannem is an expatriate cardiologist working in France who has visited Israel. His name has been put forward as a possible minister in the new Tunisia.

Ghannem believes, somewhat controversially, that until the Six Day War broke out in 1967, Arabs and Jews lived in ‘perfect harmony’. The Jews came under president Bourguiba’s protection. Today there are some 1,400 Jews living peacefully in Tunisia, 1,200 of them in Djerba.

As a result of the revolution of 14 January, the Jews have acquired a higher profile, according to Ghannem. Before the revolution, the Jews almost never featured in the media, except as model loyal citizens – (‘more Tunisian than the Tunisians’ ). Currently there have been a dozen TV programmes about them. The cancellation of the Ghriba pilgrimage this year was announced on National TV. Even Al-Jazeera did a filmed report.

“During the January revolution – and in spite of the power vacuum and reigning sense of insecurity – not a single Jew was molested or worried. No Jewish building was touched. In truth only a small mausoleum at the heart of a Jewish cemetery in Gabes was damaged. No grave was desecrated,” Ghannem writes.

“If in the past, Jews have been marginalised in Tunisian politics, they are being sought out by Tunisian political parties and some (Jews ) have become politically active.

“The Jews, like other Tunisian citizens, have thrown themselves into the rebuilding of their country. They feel freeer and more secure in their commitment to investment and enterprise.

” For Tunisian Jews this revolution is, I think, proof that it promises democracy and freedom for all without distinction and is based on universal values.”

My comment: Perhaps Dr Ghannem is being over-optimistic when he says that not a single Jew has been worried by the revolution. There is evidenceto the contrary. What about Islamist demonstrations outside the Great synagogue? What about the attack on a Djerba wedding? What about the moves afoot to make normalisation with Israel against the law?

Tel Aviv homeless upset at leftist hypocrisy

Kfar Shalem – the common man’s struggle against encroaching redevelopment

With Israelis camping out in the streets in protest against a chronic shortage of affordable housing, who should jump on the bandwagon but Mya Guarnieri, al-Jazeera‘s woman in Tel Aviv. Guarnieri wonders why the media have been ignoring the good citizens of Kfar Shalem, an area of south Tel Aviv threatened with demolition which she wrote about in February.

Kfar Shalem may not be familiar to most Israelis but it is certainly known to readers of this blog, when Point of No Return covered the mostly-Mizrahi residents’ struggle to fight eviction in 2007.

Young anti-Zionist radicals like Guarnieri can’t resist politicising what is essentially nothing more sinister than the common man’s universal fight against encroaching urban gentrification and redevelopment.

In her article for +972 blog, Israel has manipulated the poor Mizrahim for political ends, exploiting them to keep Palestinians from reclaiming their homes:

Once an economically depressed neighborhood of South Tel Aviv, Kfar Shalem, “was once a Palestinian village, Salame. Jewish forces ran the Arab residents out in early 1948, months before Israel was established and (what some refer to as) the War of Independence began.

The young state gave the empty Palestinian homes to impoverished Mizrachi Jews. The idea, some residents of Kfar Shalem admit today, was to discourage dispossessed Palestinians from returning. The Jewish occupants were to “guard” the houses.

These new residents also created facts on the ground and, after the 1948 War, the municipality of Tel Aviv annexed Jaffa and Salame—both of which were destined for a Palestinian state under the partition plan approved by the UN in November of 1947.

Not a word of course, about the Arab aggression that caused the ‘War of Independence’. Nor is Guarnieri remotely troubled by the thought that the impoverished Mizrahi Jews could have themselves been dispossessed of their homes in their Arab countries of birth. For Guarnieri, Arabs can only ever be victims.

This blog has already drawn attention to the double standard among far-leftists for whom Arab property rights invariably trump Jewish rights, for example in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah. These leftists are only ever exercised by injustice against Jews when the Ashkenazi-dominated ruling elite can be blamed.

Curiously enough, however, this form of leftist hypocrisy has not escaped some of the residents of Kfar Shalem themselves: they obviously find the attentions of anti-Zionists like Guarnieri rather irksome. She herself admits, but was too cowardly to include in her report for Al-Jazeera:

.. many of the Jewish Israelis I interviewed were upset with their fellow citizens for not doing more to help them in their battle against homelessness. Some also expressed frustration with the Israeli left because they felt that such activists reserve their sympathies only for Palestinians and foreigners.

Good for you, residents of Kfar Shalem, for making a stand against the leftist manipulation of your grievances to advance their own political agenda.

Crossposted at Cif Watch

Iraqi-Jewish philanthropist gets Chinese award

Nanjing university consultant professor Naim Dangoor

If more Chinese are able to learn about Jews and Judaism it will be thanks to an Iraqi-Jewish philanthropist whose late wife Renee was born in the Sephardi community in Shanghai. This week, Nanjing university demonstrated its gratitude by making Naim Dangoor, 97, a consultant professor – the Jewish Chronicle reports:

A delegation of professors from a leading foreign university flew to London last Friday to honour a British supporter of their country’s burgeoning programme of Jewish studies.

Philanthropist Naim Dangoor, who is 97, was made a consultant professor of China’s Nanjing University in an award ceremony held in his Kensington apartment.

“We are very proud that you are now one of us,” Nanjing vice-president Xue Hai Lin told Professor Dangoor, newly decorated in his black and red academic robes and sporting a black mortar board with red tassel.

Nanjing’s Institute of Jewish Studies opened in May 1992, just a few months after Israel and China established diplomatic relations. According to Professor Xu Xin, director of the Nanjing Institute and president of the China Judaic Studies Association, there are now around 10 Jewish studies centres in the country.

Nanjing’s 800-page Chinese translation of the Encyclopaedia Judaica is the standard reference work on Judaism in the country and its other works include a how-and-why of antisemitism as well as a translation of Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of Jewish History. Iraqi-born Prof Dangoor said that he was “greatly honoured” by his award, which he received along with a gold thread embroidered tapestry of a kirin, a mythical beast which signifies good luck, prosperity and a long life.

Read article in full

Iraqi exile gives £3 million for education of poor

Grandson of Baba Sali is murdered

Tomb of Baba Sali at Netivot, Israel

The scion of a great Moroccan rabbinical family has died in mysterious circumstances. The Jerusalem Post reports:

Rabbi Elazar Abuchatzeira, stabbed to death shortly after midnight on Friday morning, was scheduled be laid to rest at the Mount of Olives Cemetery in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon.

Killed at a Beersheba yeshiva, Rabbi Elazar Abuchatzeira was a well known religious figure and the grandson of Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira, known as the Baba Sali, whom his followers believed was able to work miracles.

The funeral procession was expected to set out from the Porat Yosef yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood around noon.

Several hundred police officers were deployed along the route of the funeral procession to direct traffic and maintain order.

Stunned followers told police Abuchatzeira was stabbed in the upper body by a man he had received as a visitor.

Read article in full

Full report at Israel Hayom (with thanks: Michelle)
Egyptians to challenge Abuhatzeira pilgrimage

Sorry Gideon Levy, Sephardim have their Zionism

Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy

The Sephardi victims of discrimination in Israel are being driven into the arms of ultra-orthodox Zionists and the religious nationalists in a coalition of zealots, claimed the far-leftist Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy lately. Aryeh Tepper’s dissection in Jewish Ideas Daily of Levy’s simplistic and contradictory piece gives a useful account of the history of authentic Sephardi Zionism:

In a recent Haaretz column, Gideon Levy, the radical leftist polemicist, sounded the warning that Israel’s religious Zionists—”the knitted skullcaps”—have joined hands with the ultra-Orthodox and the Sephardim to form “a united tribe of zealots.” Why have the ultra-Orthodox and the Sephardim formed this coalition? In Levy’s telling, both groups are responding to the history of discrimination they’ve suffered at the hands of the Zionist Left.

Like every piece of demagoguery, Levy’s is built on a kernel of truth: Sephardi and ultra-Orthodox Jews have, at various times and for various reasons, been discriminated against, both by the state and by what is conventionally called in Israel “the left-wing, Ashkenazi, secular elite.” This generalization is itself a little silly, but it’s a sufficient basis for Levy’s attack. The moral of Levy’s fanciful story is that as the Israeli Right is becoming “a united tribe of zealots” thanks to the discrimination of the Israeli Left, then across the board, from right to left, Israel has become—hold on to your hats—a racist, bigoted society!

Alas, collectively smearing Israeli society isn’t Levy’s only game. By reducing the nationalism of Israeli Sephardim to a kind of “false consciousness” attributable to leftist discrimination, Levy (a German Jew) high-handedly dismisses the authentic, historically-rooted Jewish nationalism of the Sephardim—thus embodying the paternalistic racism he claims to deplore. He also misses the tensions that, at present, characterize relations between the Sephardi and ultra-Orthodox sectors of Israeli society. Ultimately, reality is far richer and more interesting than Levy’s simplistic anti-Zionist polemic.

The roots of that reality go back to the Sephardi Jews who helped pioneer the Zionist idea, such as poet Emma Lazarus, Rabbi Henry Mendes, and Sarajevo-born Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai (1798–1878), a proto-Zionist whose book, Minhat Yehuda (The Offering of Judah) interpreted the traditional vision of redemption in earthly terms. Decidedly ahead of his time, Alkalai called for reviving Hebrew as a spoken language and for the election of a Jewish constituent assembly in the land of Israel, where he himself moved at the end of his life.

While there’s no denying that European and Russian Jews constituted the early engine of the modern Zionist movement, equally undeniable is the tremendous appeal that Zionism held to masses of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East.

Consider the case of Yemenite Jewry. We know from documents in the Cairo Genizah that Yemenite Jews had ties with the Jews in the land of Israel during the medieval period, while Rabbi Ovadia Bartinoro, a leading 15th-century jurist, also mentioned the aliyah of Yemenite Jewry. These waves of immigration to Israel continued up through the 20th century. Between the two world wars, approximately 15,000 Yemenite Jews arrived in Israel—a remarkable figure, as the Zionist movement was only beginning to set up shop in Yemen at that time.

The independent character of Yemenite Zionism was vigorously articulated by the Yemenite scholar, jurist, and translator, Rabbi Joseph Kapach, in a 1982 speech he gave before the Knesset. The occasion was a Knesset-sponsored celebration of 100 years of Yemenite immigration to Israel, but Kapach began by making it clear that Yemenite aliyah was much more than a century old. He even noted that the term “Zionism” was unknown in Yemen, because “the Zionist movement was created as a remedy against the hostility [among European Jews] to aliyah, but without a sickness there’s no need for a remedy.”

As Kapach’s autarchic spirit makes clear, no left-wing discrimination was or is necessary to fuel the Zionist desires of Yemenite Jews.

Kapach’s forceful reclamation of this deeply-rooted Zionist identity has recently been echoed in the attack launched by rebel Shas MK Rabbi Haim Amsalem against the ultra-Orthodox leadership of the Shas party. According to Amsalem, Shas, by aping Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox norms, is turning Israeli Sephardim, natural nationalists, into anti-Zionists. So much for Levy’s “united tribe of zealots.”

Read article in full

Flag-waving belly dancer gets death threats

A Lebanese belly dancer is facing death threats and cannot return to her homeland after embracing an Israeli musician at an international festival in France, blogger Elder of Ziyon reports.

On June 19, Israeli heavy metal band Orphaned Land performed alongside Lebanese belly dancer Johanna Fakhri at the Hellfest music festival in the western French town of Clisson. At the end of their performance, the Lebanese dancer held up her country’s flag while Orphaned Land’s singer, Kobi Fahri, held up an Israeli flag. The two then hugged and clasped each other’s hands.

Israel and Lebanon are technically at war and it is illegal under Lebanese law for any citizen to have public interactions with an Israeli. Media outlets around the world carried the image of Fakhri and Fahri brandishing their national flags, prompting a seething Hezbollah to declare Fakhri a traitor and issue a death warrant for her. The dancer has since been hiding out in France, fearing for her life if she returns to her homeland.

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Israel-Kurd magazine defies Iranian closure threat

Blog exclusive!

Dawoud Baghestani with the first issue of the Israel-Kurd magazine

The Israel-Kurd magazine is defying an Iranian move to persuade the Kurdish regional government to close it down.

The magazine’s publisher and head of the Israel-Kurd Institute, Dawoud Baghestani, affirmed that he would continue producing the magazine.

According to ‘confidential’ information, which several media disclosed, the Iranian government asked the Kurdish regional government to suspend and close down the magazine, described as a threat to Iranian-Kurdish relations.

In an official statement, Baghestani says that the magazine (founded in 2008) has a legal permit to publish from the Kurdish government and would continue to operate within the law.

The magazine was trying to bring together Kurds and Israel, ‘their oldest friends in history, in order to save Kurds from surrounding threats’.

Several bombings in Kurdistan are thought to have been instigated by the Iranian army. “This is another subject between Iran and Kurdistan…we know what the main cause of this problem is”, the statement says, tongue-in-cheek.

Israel-Kurd magazine ‘a cultural bridge’

Libyan Berbers cherish shared history with Jews

Omar Aboud, a Berber, stands inside one of Yafran’s abandoned synagogues

No Jews have lived in the Berber areas of Libya since 1950, but the news agency AFP has just discovered the shared, repressed history of Berbers and Jews. Berbers have campaigned to preserve Jewish buildings, and a pair of Berber twins even amassed documentary evidence of Jewish history until the regime confiscated their collection: (with thanks: Eliyahu)

For centuries, Jews lived among the Berbers of Yafran, observing the Sabbath at the synagogue of Ghriba, but they suddenly left 63 years ago, and their land in Libya remains untouched.

Every hamlet around Yafran bears the mark of the Libyan Jews, who arrived in the country 2,300 years ago and, until their departure soon after Israel’s creation in 1948, constituted half the city’s population.

Everywhere, the ruins of their homes still cling to the mountainside. Some were lived in, others subsumed by the Berber population. Time has taken its toll, but the houses remain untouched and uninhabited.

“It’s just as it was before,” says Tarek Ayad, a 58-year-old retiree.

Numerous abandoned synagogues remain intact, silent witnesses to the co-existence of the two peoples. Amid the coloured mosaics of Ghriba synagogue, Hebrew inscriptions overlap those in Amazigh, the language of the Berbers.

Moulded Stars of David have been unharmed in one synagogue, despite it having been converted to a mosque after the Arab conquest of the 7th century, while the Jewish cemetery, with its many ancient tombs — some of which are dug into the rock — borders a Berber graveyard.

Some in Yafran remember the names of prominent Jewish families: Aaron, Mguelish, Guetta. For generations, fathers and sons alike were rabbis.

Others recall how the Jews were mainly traders, and how they shared common rituals with the Berbers, some of whom even converted to Judaism.

Today, however, there are no witnesses left of this bygone era. The last Jews left in 1950, and those old enough to remember that exodus left when the fighting started.

“All I know is that we used to live together and that there were no problems. My father told me they were good people,” says Ahmed Siguk, an 46-year-old engineer.

Although more than 100 Jews died in Libyan pogroms in 1945, they are still considered to be part of the city, despite decades of anti-semitic propaganda since World War II.

“They are part of our population, they have lived here a long time. They are from this land, and spoke Amazigh,” Ayad says.

A pair of twins are passionate about this history.

Researching their Berber background — itself a tale of repression under Moamer Kadhafi — they found the story of the Jews to be remarkably similar to their own, so close were lives of the two communities.

For 10 years, they secretly recorded witness testimony, archived marriage certificates and land deeds, and took photographs.

Yet nothing remains of this historical material, which was all confiscated in December last year when the twins were arrested for Berber activism and accused of spying for Israel.

But they remember a little of what the elders told them about their day-to-day life together.

“An old man told me that on holidays, Berber children would go to the synagogue in Ghriba, where they would sometimes listen to readings from the Jewish holy books,” says 29-year-old Madghis Buzukhar.

But one day in 1948, the Jews left.

“The same man recounted to me how everything was normal, people were working, conversing. But the next day at dawn, he saw a convoy of trucks leaving, carrying most of the city’s Jewish families,” says Buzukhar.

Most of Libya’s Jews left for Israel or Italy — the North African country’s former colonial ruler — whereupon the shared history fizzles out, unlike the attachment to the neighbours who disappeared.

Two years ago, the residents of Yafran raised a petition against the planned demolition of most of the Jewish monuments in the town, says Buzukhar.

Read article in full

BBC marks fifty years since Operation Mural

David Littman (pictured with his wife Giselle and their first child ) spent several months in Morocco in 1961 planning Operation Mural

One anniversary has not gone unmarked by the BBC, of all broadcasters – the fiftieth anniversary of the smuggling of over 500 Jewish children from Morocco to Israel in Operation Mural. Last week, it was the subject of a 10-minute World Service Radio programme – Witness.

Mural was Mossad’s code-name for David Littman, whose cover was a public-school-educated Anglican gentleman, on tennis-playing terms with the British consul, and with excellent security contacts in Casablanca. His mission was to defy the Moroccan ban on Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel.

Yossi Shahar was one of the children smuggled out to what the Moroccan authorities thought was a holiday camp in Switzerland. In fact Switzerland was a way-station to Israel – and the children, although separated from their parents, had no intention of coming back home.

Alan Johnston – the BBC journalist who spent several months as an Army of Islam captive in Gaza – narrates the programme. All credit to producer Helena Selby who managed to surmount many obstacles in order to get this programme out on air.

BBC Witness programme (podcast)
Rescuer of 533 Moroccan children recognised at last

Palestinians have more restitution rights than Jews


Aerial photo of Jerusalem taken in the early 20th century shows that much of ‘Arab East Jerusalem’ was then empty fields (via Yakov Lozowick)

The Los Angeles Times recently gave a platform to Hagit Borer, an Israeli-American participant in the Gaza flotilla. In its rebuttal of Borer’s distortions, the media watchdog CAMERA demonstrates that Palestinians are still more likely to get compensation and restitution from Israel than Jews who lost property in Arab countries.

She (Hagit Borer) bemoans the fact that today’s Jerusalem is “different” than the city she grew up in before 1967, charging that now “It is not [the Palestinians’] Jerusalem, for it has been taken from them.” Nevermind that the city is now more Arab and less Jewish than it was on the eve of the Six Day War. Nevermind that Arab building has outpaced Jewish building in the city since 1967. Nevermind that no part of Jerusalem was ever ruled by Palestinians.

About Sheik Jarrah, she selectively reports:

In Sheik Jarrah, a neighborhood built by Jordan in the 1950s to house refugees, Palestinian families recently have been evicted from their homes at gunpoint based on court-sanctioned documents purporting to show Jewish land ownership in the area dating back some 100 years.

Contrary to Borer’s historical inversion (she writes of “the Jewish neighborhood of Shimon Hatzadik, as Sheik Jarrah has been renamed”), the Jewish presence at the site long preceded the 1950s arrival of Palestinian refugees. As reported by Nadav Shragai for the JCPA:

For hundreds of years the Jewish presence in the area centered around the tomb of Shimon HaTzadik (Simon the Righteous), one of the last members of the Great Assembly (HaKnesset HaGedolah), the governing body of the Jewish people during the Second Jewish Commonwealth, after the Babylonian Exile . . . .

For years Jews have made pilgrimages to his grave to light candles and pray, as documented in many reports by pilgrims and travelers. While the property was owned by Arabs for many years, in 1876 the cave and the nearby field were purchased by Jews, involving a plot of 18 dunams (about 4.5 acres) that included 80 ancient olive trees.10 The property was purchased for 15,000 francs and was transferred to the owner through the Majlis al-Idara, the seat of the Turkish Pasha and the chief justice. According to the contract, the buyers (the committee of the Sephardic community and the Ashkenazi Assembly of Israel) divided the area between them equally, including the cave on the edge of the plot.

Dozens of Jewish families built homes on the property. On the eve of the Arab Revolt in 1936 there were hundreds of Jews living there. When the disturbances began they fled, but returned a few months later and lived there until 1948. When the Jordanians captured the area, the Jews were evacuated and for nineteen years were barred from visiting either their former homes or the cave of Shimon HaTzadik.

Borer then goes on to falsely claim:

But no Palestinian proof of ownership within West Jerusalem has ever prevailed in Israeli courts. Talbieh, Katamon, Baca, until 1948 affluent Palestinian neighborhoods, are today almost exclusively Jewish, with no legal recourse for the Palestinians who recently raised families and lived their lives there.

In fact, Palestinian Arabs who in 1948 lost their homes within Israel, including in West Jerusalem, do have legal recourse. Indeed, some have opted to take advantage of the Absentee Property Law, which entitles them to compensation. According to the Israel Lands Administration, as of 1993, 14,692 Arabs claimed compensation under the Absentee Property Law and the Validation and Compensation Law. Claims were settled with respect to 200,905 dunams of land, a total of NIS 9,956,828 had been paid as compensation, and 54,481 dunams of land had been given in compensation (Israel Lands Administration Report for 1993).

Borer (pictured) fails to explain that the Palestinian refugees residing in Jewish-owned homes in Sheik Jarrah/Shimon Hatzadik were evicted by the courts because for decades they failed to pay rent to the Jewish owners. Shragai reported:

After 1967, control over Jewish-owned property in the Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood that had been seized by Arabs was transferred from the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property to the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property. In 1972 the Israeli Custodian released the land back to its owners (the Committee of the Sephardic Community and the Ashkenazi Assembly of Israel). In 1988 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the 28 Arab families living on the premises enjoy the status of “Protected Residents,” but that the ownership of the land belongs to the two Jewish organizations.

Ten years later, in 1998, Jews entered deserted houses in the neighborhood. At the same time, a slow process of evicting Arab families who apparently refused to pay rent to the two Jewish organizations was begun. The Jewish groups involved in the area presented a power of attorney from former Knesset Member Yehezkel Zackay (Labor) and from the heads of the Sephardic Committee permitting them to remain on the site and to rebuild it. Zackay explained that the Arabs there had treated the premises as if it were their own private property, building without authorization, entering houses which were not theirs, and had even tried to destroy the abandoned synagogue located in the middle of the neighborhood.

Similarly, the New York Times reported:

In the 1950s, Jordan and the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees gave 28 refugee families homes there. The families say that Jordan promised them full ownership, but the houses were never formally registered in their names.

In the early 1970s, the Israeli courts awarded two Jewish associations ownership of the compound based on land deeds that were a century old. The Palestinian residents were allowed to stay on as protected tenants on the condition that they paid rent to the Jewish groups.

Rejecting the court ruling, many of the Palestinian families refused to pay rent, making them eligible for eviction.

True, those Palestinians who lost their homes in Talbieh and Katamon cannot return, while Jews have successfully reclaimed Jewish property inhabited by Arabs who failed to pay their rent. (It is worth noting that just a couple of weeks ago the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court rejected a Jewish bid to evict an Arab family from a Sheikh Jarrah home because the judge ruled that it could not be proven that the family did not pay rent to the Jewish owners.) If Borer were truly interested in comparing the two situations — restitution to Jewish refugees versus restitution to Arab refugees — she would ask: Have any of the hundreds of thousands Jews evicted from their homes in Arab countries, where, in her words, they “recently raised families and lived their lives,” received compensation, as have some 15,000 Palestinian Arabs received compensation from Israel? What legal recourse is available to Jewish refugees from Arab lands who lost their properties when they were expelled or fled from their homes? Of course, even this situation is not a true parallel, since the Jewish refugees from Arab countries did not instigate any war aimed at destroying a state.

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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.

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Jewish Refugees from Arab and Muslim Countries

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forgotten Jewish refugees - updated daily.