Year: 2017

Beauty contestants’ selfie sets off scandal

With thanks: Yoel

It was the selfie that should have said ‘peace’ between erstwhile enemies at a beauty contest in Las Vegas.

Instead, it led to death threats and the banishment of a family.

Little did Adar Gantlesman, Miss Israel, and Sarah Idan, Miss Iraq, predict that Sarah’s family would have to flee after a selfie showing the two of them posing together went viral.

Sarah Idan said that she had Israeli and Jewish friends. Some of those, she said, had been born in Iraq and themselves had had to flee. Miss Iraq, the first to represent her country in a beauty contest for 45 years, refused to take the selfie down.

According to this report on Israeli TV, the two beauty queens have remained friends via Skype.

Hummus wars take to Twitter

Another round in the ‘hummus wars’, this time on Twitter, where Arabs accuse Israelis of ‘cultural appropriation’ – or even ‘cultural genocide’. The truth, as readers of this blog will know, is the exact opposite. Seth Frantzman reports in the Jerusalem Post:

In a Twitter battle that raised eyebrows on both sides of
the Atlantic, James Zogby accused Israel of “cultural genocide” after
American celebrity cook Rachael Ray posted a photo of “Israeli nite,”
with hummus, stuffed grape leaves and other edibles.

Zogby, the founder of Arab American Institute, and managing director of
Zogby Research Services, took issue with Ray’s December 21 post:
“Holiday feast highlights – Israeli night, meze, stuffed grape leaves,
hummus, beet dip, eggplant and sun dried tomato dip, walnut and red
pepper dip, and tabouli,” she tweeted.

Wrote Zogby, “This is cultural genocide. It’s not Israeli food.
It’s Arab (Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian). First the
Israelis take the land and ethnically cleanse it of Arabs. Now they
take their food and culture and claim it’s theirs too! Shame.”

Bret Stephens, op-ed columnist at The New York Times and a
former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief, joined the battle on Tuesday.
“Please tell me this is a joke tweet,” he wrote. “Or is it ‘cultural
genocide’ when Arabs use Israeli technology? Do you use Instant
Messaging? Waze? If so, please stop.” Waze was invented in Israel.

Zogby
responded that the case would only be similar if he used Waze and then
claimed it was Lebanese. Zogby’s father was a Lebanese immigrant to
the US.

“This isn’t a joke. It’s about a history of cultural
appropriate and a systematic effort to erase Palestinian history and
culture,” he claimed. There was a ray of hope. “Peace is possible, but
not on those terms.”

Read article in full

Second synagogue is vandalised in Iran

Popular violence against Jews in Iran has been rare, but the 8,000-member community has been shaken by two incidents in the last week in the city of Shiraz.  A second synagogue has been reported vandalised, with attackers damaging Torah scrolls, prayer
books and ritual objects.
JTA and The Times of Israel have the story: (with thanks: Michelle)

The city’s Kashi Synagogue was attacked Sunday night, while the Hadash
synagogue was attacked Monday afternoon, according to Sam Kermanian,
senior adviser to the Iranian-American Jewish Federation, who has been
in touch with Jews from Shiraz. The local Jewish community believes the
attacks were committed by more than one person, but does not know who
perpetrated them.

An earlier report by a member of the Shiraz Jewish community on the
vandalism at the Hadash synagogue was broadcast by Israel’s Channel 10
on Wednesday. The community member said the damage was documented by a
pair of journalists and three local Jews.

Blurry footage aired by the television channel purported to show the damage in the synagogue.

“Obviously they are scared,” Kermanian told JTA. “They’re not comfortable speaking freely, but overall, life goes on.”

The vandals ripped Torah scrolls, which are written on parchment, as
well as some 100 prayer books, some of which were thrown in the toilet.
They damaged and “soiled” prayer shawls and tefillin, the leather
phylacteries traditionally worn by men during prayers. The attackers
also broke glass and stole silver ornaments that adorned the synagogues’
Torah scrolls.

“In light of these clearly anti-Semitic incidents we call upon the
authorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran to ensure the protection of
all places of worship as well as all members of our community, and to
bring the perpetrators of these criminal acts to justice,” read a
statement by leaders of the Iranian-American Jewish Federation.

Read article in full

Baghdad bombs:Iraqi author blames Istiqlal

With thanks: Kheder

An Iraqi author has for the first time written about the role of the Istiqual independence party in setting off bombs to scare the Baghdad Jewish community in 1950. The assertion may now put an end to decades of speculation regarding who was behind the bombings.

In a book in Arabic about the history of Zionism in Iraq, Abdul Kader mentions that the nationalist Istiqlal party was responsible for the bombs. Hitherto controversy has surrounded the incidents. Some Iraqi Jews themselves have pointed the finger of blame at the Zionist underground. Mordechai Ben Porat, the leading Mossad operative, has always protested his innocence and in the 1960s even sued an Israeli magazine for libel. He won his case, but a cloud of uncertainly has always hovered over him.

The only fatal bombing took place at the Messouda Shemtob synagogue in January 1951. It was being used as a registration centre for Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel.

The page in the book by Abdul Qader blaming the Istiqal party for the bombings. 

Muslims threw 1951 Iraq synagogue bomb

Levana Zamir gets award for outstanding achievement

Levana Zamir,  the president of the umbrella organisation of Associations of Jews from Arab countries in Israel, was one of 12 Mizrahi figures given the Ministry of Education
Award for their contribution to Israeli society and to the State of Israel.

Mrs Zamir received her award along with 11 other Mizrahim, including Shlomo Hillel and Erez Biton. The award was inaugurated by the ministry to honour Mizrahim who have made an outstanding contribution to the state of Israel, and promote their achievements to a wider public.

The award ceremony on 19  December at Binyanei Ha’Uma in
Jerusalem was attended by 3,000 guests and officials. Guests were given a hand-out listing the biographies of sixty prominent Mizrahim. This will apparently be distributed to schools.

Being well-versed
in Egyptian as well as in Israeli culture, Mrs Zamir, then president of the Israel-Egypt Friendship Association,  was invited to
accompany the Israel president Ezer Weizman and his wife Reuma on their official visit to President
Mubarak in Cairo. ” We created the easy atmosphere needed for a
successful visit. We need to get know the Other, for to know him, is to love him,” she said in a pre-recorded interview.

 Mrs Zamir, whose working career began at 16, also recalled her role as PR director of the French Aeronautics Industries in Israel, OFEMA. “Following the Six Day War, we were furious that General de
Gaulle had declared an embargo against Israel,
stopping the delivery of the 50 Mirages-5 that Israel
had bought from France. It had already paid for them, and our Israeli
Airforce pilots had just completed their training in
France.”

Together with Marcel-Dassault Aviation and the Israel military attache in France Moka Limon, OFEMA in Israel embarked on a clandestine mission to smuggle the 50 Mirage-5 fighter planes to Haifa from the French port of Rochefort. Thereafter, Israel began developing its own fighter aircraft, the Nesher, modelled on the Mirage 5.

Embargo or not,  in Israel we never
give up. 
It was a huge responsibility but we did it,’ Mrs Zamir said.

During the late 1970s, Mrs Zamir headed ALSAM, the Anti-Drug Abuse Association in Israel. She established a hostel for the rehabilitation of addicts, as well as programmes in schools to teach children to say no to peer group pressure.

In the 1990s, Mrs Zamir  chaired the Women Entrepreneurs’ organisation in Israel to help women break the glass career ceiling. “Thirty years ago,  women were asked,’what does your husband do? Today, they are asked: what do YOU do?” she commented.” There is much still to do, but  I am very proud of the achievements of this generation of young women.”

Her elation at receiving the award was tempered, however, by regret that there were four women only among the 12 successful winners, just reaching the 30 percent threshold required by law for any Israeli public forum.  


Six-minute video showing the award ceremony and video clip (Hebrew) 

Christians return to northern Iraq for Xmas

Assyrian and Chaldean Christians have returned to their heartlands to celebrate Christmas in parts of northern Iraq for the first time since the routing of Islamic State, Reuters reports. 

Like every other resident of Teleskof, this was Daoud’s first
Christmas back home in three years, since Islamic State militants
overran her town and forcibly displaced its 12,000-strong Chaldean
Christian community.

“It’s
so special to be back in my church, the church where I got married, the
church I raised my children in,” the school headmistress said, tears in
her eyes.

Faced with a choice to convert, pay a tax or die,
Daoud, like many other Christians in the Nineveh Plains, chose to flee.
Most sought refuge in nearby towns and cities, but many sought permanent
asylum abroad. Though the militants were only in Teleskof for a few
days, residents only began returning home earlier this year.

On
Sunday, they celebrated their first Christmas together again at the
town’s main church, which was overflowing. Hundreds of congregants,
dressed in their finest, poured in to pray and receive communion from
Father Salar Bodagh, who later lit the traditional bonfire in the
church’s courtyard, a symbol of renewal he said.

Despite
the obvious joys of being able to celebrate openly once again, it was a
bittersweet Christmas for most across the Nineveh Plains, the epicentre
of Iraq’s ancient Christian communities which can trace their history
in the country back two millennia.

Read article in full

Why N.African Jews are missing from Shoah story

Why is the Mizrahi Holocaust experience missing from Israeli media and art? Very simply, because the deaths of hundreds pale into insignificance compared to the enormity of the genocidal murder of half of European Jewry. Yet Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan, interviewed by Eness Elias, blames ‘racism’, ‘stereotyping’, the inablility of European interviewers to probe a culture of silence or understand the Mizrahi shame-honour mentality. Of course, all these factors play a part. (With thanks: Lily, Imre, Edward)


Libyan Jews returning from Bergen Belsen after the war

 

My grandfather was a very proud person. He uttered not a word about the Holocaust he endured in Libya; only once did I hear him talk about the renta, the reparations from Germany, which, by a cruel irony, began arriving a month after his mother died. I heard that his mother’s back had been broken in the camp and that from then on she was completely hunched over. So I also understood that there had been Nazis there.

At first, my family’s involvement in that incomprehensible event seemed to me improbable, and later negligible. At some point I started to explore the subject more deeply, and heard about the Giado camp, closed in by a barbed-wire fence, with wooden huts holding more than 300 people each. About 2,600 Libyan Jews were transported to the camp and subjected to forced labor. They suffered from hunger and disease, and were the victims of daily abuse. Many were murdered – 562 Jews died there – and dozens more were sent to death camps, notably Bergen-Belsen.

To this day, it remains unclear whether Giado was a ghetto, a forced-labor camp or a concentration camp. What can be said for certain is that there were many camps like Giado across North Africa. The echoes of war also reverberated in other Arab countries, such as Iraq, where pogroms and other violent incidents took place.

All this is part of the unknown story of the Jews of the Middle East during World War II – a story that is not part of the construct of the Holocaust experience in Israel. In a new book, Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan, who specializes in film history and teaches at the University of Haifa, seeks to understand why the Holocaust experience of these Jews is absent from Israeli media and art, and what this obliviousness signifies.

The idea for the book, “Forgotten from the Frame: The Absence of the Holocaust Experience of Mizrahim from the Visual Arts and Media in Israel” (published by Resling, in Hebrew), Dr. Kozlovsky Golan relates in an interview with Haaretz, arose when she realized that the Mizrahi (referring to Jews of North African or Middle Eastern origin) students she taught some years ago at Sapir Academic College in Sderot had no knowledge of the history of their communities, or even of their families, during the Holocaust period.

Read article in full

Israel talks with Yemen families over vanished children

The Israeli government is conducting direct negotiations with family
representatives of children who went missing in the Yemenite Children
Affair, according to a report by the Israeli Kan broadcaster.
The Jerusalem Post reports (with thanks: Lily):

The
negotiations, led by chief of staff of the Prime Minister’s Bureau Yoav
Horowitz, concern the state’s recognition of the injustice done to the
families and its responsibility in the affair.

Yemeni Jews being airlifted from Aden to Israel

The affair concerns the mysterious disappearance of hundreds of
babies and toddlers of Mizrahi descent, mainly from Yemen, during the
early days after the establishment of the state, between 1948 and 1954.

In
the vast majority of cases, parents were told in the hospital that
their newborn baby had died, though they never received any official
confirmation.

Over the years, families have claimed that their
children were in fact systematically kidnapped and given away or sold
off to Ashkenazi families without the consent of the biological
families.

According to the Kan report, the negotiations are in an
advanced stage but a stumbling block is the issue of compensation, a
demand of the families which has not been met by the state.

Read article in full

More about the Yemenite children affair

Libyan Jew: ‘my grandma’s head was chopped off’

As part of the Memorial Day events for Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the Houston Jewish community put on a programme in conjunction with the Israeli consulate-general. The Jewish Herald-Voice interviewed Libyan-born Eli Sasson: 

 

Libyan-Jewish family (Photo: JIMENA)

 

For Houstonian Eli Sasson, the deportation is personal. Sasson and his
family lived in Tripoli. They were among the nearly 40,000 Jews who
lived in Libya in 1948. Today, no Jews live in Libya.

“From what
I learned from my family history, my ancestors came to Libya from
Spain,” Sasson told the JHV during an interview in his flood-damaged
Willowbend home.

“My father owned a building that had a wine
factory on the first floor. We lived above the factory. My uncles ran a
hardware store and dealt in real estate. My grandfather from my mother’s
side owned a granite factory. They cut granite for tabletops and other
things. They imported the stone from Italy. It was a prosperous family.

“We had a good relationship with the Arabs for years until 1945.”

Then,
following rumors that Jews had killed Arabs praying at the al-Aqsa
Mosque in Jerusalem, Arab mobs attacked the Jews in Tripoli. Some 140
Jews were killed. Rioters looted nearly all of Tripoli’s 44 synagogues,
along with hundreds of homes and businesses.

“My grandmother
from my father’s side had 10 boys,” said Sasson. “All of them were able
to run out from the riots. My grandmother didn’t leave her home. When
her boys came back, they saw her head had been chopped off.”

Years
later, Sasson’s mother told him that during the pogroms, her mother and
she were hiding under a table in their house, hoping the mob would not
break their door down. She related the only reason why the mob didn’t
burst through the door was one of the rioters worked for her father. She
heard the man through the window tell the mob, ‘Leave them! This is the
Sasson house.’ The mob continued on to the next house.

“Before
the pogroms, life in Libya was good,” said Sasson. “At home, our family
spoke a Jewish Arabic. I can speak my parents’ Arabic. but I cannot
communicate with Palestinians who speak Arabic. It’s not the same
Arabic. My father would write letters in Jewish Arabic. using Hebrew
writing. I think the language has disappeared.

“After 1945, my
father continued living in Tripoli. He believed the worst had passed and
nobody knew that Israel would become a state. Even if they had wanted
to leave, they had no place to go.

“In 1948, the Jewish Agency
sent representatives to Libya. They called the heads of the community to
the synagogues and told them: ‘Now you can go and send your kids to
Israel.’ The Jewish Agency sent a ship and told the community that
whoever wanted a one-way ticket to Israel, passage was free. Many of the
parents were afraid to send their kids. But, two or three of the older
boys in my family ran away to the ship without their parents’
permission.”

As a boy, Sasson witnessed the Arab mobs in the street from the balcony of his house. They were chanting “Kill the Jews.”

Between
1948-’51, some three-quarters of the 40,000 Libyan Jewish community
left the country. Sasson, then age 6, and part of his family got out.

The
period saw an explosion of Arab nationalism. By Dec. 24, 1951, when
King Idris I proclaimed the independence of the United Kingdom of Libya
as a sovereign state, Arab nationalism exercised a powerful influence,
particularly among the younger generation. The brand of pan-Arab
nationalism propounded by Egypt›s Gamal Abdul Nasser after 1952, was
based on the goals of bringing down Western-backed governments and the
liberation of Palestine. Nasser argued Israel was not founded to provide
a homeland for Jews but for the creation and maintenance of a colonial
structure in the heart of the Middle East.

In Libya, as
nationalism increased, so did intolerance of the remaining Jewish
community. The government closed Jewish schools. In 1953, Jews became
victims of economic boycotts. The Maccabi sports club was forcibly
opened to Arab members in 1954.

In 1957, a law was passed
requiring Libyans, with relatives in Israel, to register at the Libyan
boycott office. In 1958, Tripoli’s Jewish community ceased to be an
independent entity. The community now was to be administered by a
state-appointed commissioner.

Legal exclusion increased. In
1960, Jews were prohibited from acquiring new possessions, to vote, to
hold public office or to serve in the army or the police.

And,
things worsened after 1967. Libyan Jews were accused of being
responsible, along with Israel, for the war that the Arab states lost.

“As
a result of the Six-Day War, the Arabs felt humiliated by the enormity
of the Israeli victory,” said Sasson. “After the pogroms that took 18
lives, the Libyan Jewish community was ordered to leave the country. All
you could bring out with you was one suitcase and 25 pounds in
currency. The community left everything.

“My father owned the
building where the factory was located and where we lived. He owned
rental properties. I don’t hear people talking about all the property
that my father and other Libyan Jews were forced to give up.

“Most
people don’t know about this history. Jews were forced out of countries
all over the Arab world. I tell stories to my grandkids who are 10, 7
and 5. They need to appreciate every moment they can live in a free
society. Here, they can go to school. They can have protection. This is
not given to every child in the world. But, I don’t think I can relate
to them the background of my grandfathers. It’s so different.”

Sasson
often encounters Palestinians in Houston. When they talk politics, he
explains that he is a refugee from Libya. The difference is that he
doesn’t let the past totally define his future.

“My attitude is
instead of crying that you took something from me, let’s create
something new,” said Sasson. “Let’s get out of the history of hate. I
tell this to all the Palestinians I speak with here in the States.”

Read article in full

Iranian Jews protest antisemitic singer

Controversy has been rocking Los Angeles, when Jews threatened to boycott a visiting Iranian singer, Mohsen Yeganeh. But the official Iranian news agency Farshas been drooling that concert halls have been packed to capacity for Yeganeh’s performances. 

Karmel Melamed reports for Jewish Journal:

When news spread light wildfire in Southern California’s Iranian Jewish community late last week that Mohsen Yeganeh,
an anti-Semitic Iranian Muslim singer from Iran was going to perform a
concert at downtown L.A.’s Microsoft Theater, the community’s activists
quickly mobilized using e-mails and social media to calls for a boycott
the concert. Hundreds of community members unaware of Yeganeh’s
anti-Israel and anti-Semitic song “Flock of Vultures”,
cancelled their plans to attend the concert or demanded refunds from
the theater.

The Farsi language song’s lyrics call Jews vultures, blamed
Israeli soldiers  for killing Palestinian children and demand violence
against Jews. (More information about this controversy can be read here).

Yet the Iranian Jewish community in Los Angeles which is very firmly
pro-Israel and vocal against Iranian Muslim anti-Semitism, did not stop
with a mere call to boycott Yeganeh. No… 150 vocal and very proud
Iranian Jewish activists peacefully protested, held signs and marched
against Yeganeh on December 16th outside the theater.  Here is some short footage of their protest outside the theater…

Read article in full

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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.