Month: September 2017

‘El Nora Alila’ is sung as Yom Kippur ends

Yom Kippur the most solemn of Jewish festivals, begins tonight. Here’s a spirited rendition by the Mediterranean Andalusian Orchestra of the piyut which closes the Yom Kippur service, El Nora Alila. 

 

Wishing all those who are fasting Gmar Hatima Tova.

 

From Wikipedia:

 

Refrain: El nora alila, El nora alila,

Ha-m’tzi lanu m’chilah, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

M’tei mis’par k’ru’im, l’cha ayin nos’im,

u-m’sal’dim b’chila, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

Shof’chim l’cha naf’sham, m’cheh pish’am ve-chach’sham,

ve-ham’tzi’em m’chila, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

Heyeh lahem l’sit’ra, ve-hatzilem mi-m’era,

ve-chot’mem l’hod u-l’gila, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

Chon otam ve-rachem, ve-chol lochetz ve-lochem,

Oseh ba-hem p’lila, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

Z’chor tzid’kat avihem, ve-chadesh et y’meihem,

k’kedem u-t’chila, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

K’ra na sh’nat ratzon, ve-hashev sh’ar ha-tzon,

l’oholiva v’ohola, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

Tiz’ku l’shanim rabot, ha-banim ve-ha-avot,

b’ditza u-v’tzohola, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

Micha’el sar yis’rael, eliyahu ve-gav’ri’el,

Bas’ru na ha-g’ulah, bi-sh’at ha-ne’ilah.

Refrain: God of awe, God of might, God of awe, God of might,

Grant us pardon in this hour, As Thy gates are closed this night.

We who few have been from yore, Raise our eyes to heaven’s height,

Trembling, fearful in our prayer, As Thy gates are closed this night.

Pouring out our soul we pray That the sentence Thou will write

Shall be one of pardoned sin, As Thy gates are closed this night.

God, our refuge strong and sure, Rescue us from dreadful plight;

Seal our destiny for joy, As Thy gates are closed this night.

Grant us favor, show us grace; But of all who wrest the right

And oppress, be Thou the judge, As Thy gates are closed this night.

Generations of our sires Strong in faith walked in Thy light.

As of old, renew our days, As Thy gates are closed this night.

Gather Judah’s scattered flock Unto Zion’s rebuilt site.

Bless this year with grace divine, As Thy are closed this night.

May we all, both old and young, Look for gladness and delight

In the many years to come, As Thy gates are closed this night.

Michael, Prince of Israel, Gabriel, Thy angels bright,

With Elijah, come, redeem, As Thy gates are closed this night.

Traditional Moroccan ‘Kol Nidre’, the prayer which begins Yom Kippur (with thanks: Sylvia)

Leila Mourad sings ‘El Nora Alila’

Return archive to Israel, says MK Berko

An Israeli parliamentarian has called for the Iraqi-Jewish archives to be sent to the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center at Or Yehuda, Israel.

MK Anat Berko: her parents escaped Iraq

 

Knesset member  Dr. Anat Berko  sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, demanding that the Iraqi-Jewish archives not be returned to Iraq.

The move comes after the US State Department had confirmed that the Iraqi-Jewish archives would go back to Iraq about a year from now.  In 2003, the National Archives and Records administration had signed an agreement with the CPA, then Iraq’s government, promising that the waterlogged trove, seized from Jewish individuals and institutions and found in the basement of the Iraqi secret police headquarters, would go back to Iraq after restoration.

In her letter, MK Berko, who is playing an active part campaigning for Jewish refugees from Arab countries,  describes how her parents had to escape from Iraq as refugees, after they were stripped of their Iraqi citizenship and left destitute. She asks Netanyahu to put pressure on the American authorities to revoke their promise to return the Archives to Iraq.

 She demands that the archives be returned where they belong, to the Babylonian Museum in Israel.
A copy of the letter was also sent to the Ministry of Education and to the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

Have you signed the petition yet? 

Berko to Greenblatt: give us compensation 

Djerba Jews face uncertain future

In this lavishly-illustrated piece, JTA takes a realistic look at the Jewish community of Djerba, one of the few surviving bastions of Jewish life in the Arab world. Antisemitism is a threat, but the tipping point comes when a Jew cannot find a partner or make a living. (In other news, the announcement that Tunisian women are legally allowed to marry non-Muslims (without them needing to convert to Islam) is a major positive development for minority rights). (With thanks: Imre, Lily)

A Lag Ba’Omer pilgrim at the al-Ghriba synagogue in Djerba (Photo: Reuters/Anis Mili)

Belonging to one of the Arab world’s few active Jewish congregations,
their patience reflects a determination to preserve their ancient
tradition in a tight-knit community of 1,000. Many members feel
duty-bound to remain on the island even though they can envisage no
future here for their children.

“Everybody’s
thought about leaving, myself included,” says Ben Zion Dee’ie, a
30-year-old yeshiva teacher who walked four miles to the El Ghriba
Synagogue from his parents’ home in Hara Kebira, where nearly all Djerba
Jews live. “The economy’s bad, the currency’s plummeting, tourism’s
suffering because of terrorism and jobs are scarce and not well paying.
It’s not perfect.”

But leaving “would be very
difficult,” adds Dee’ie, who comes each year with other congregants to
make sure El Ghriba has a minyan. “It feels wrong to leave where my
ancestors lived for so many years.”

Nonetheless,
various factors, including state-tolerated violence against Jews
following Israel’s victory over its neighbors in the 1967 Six-Day War,
have gradually almost emptied Tunisia of the 110,000 Jews who lived here
before 1970. A few dozen families left following the 2011 revolution
that briefly installed an Islamist and anti-Israel party in power.

That
bout of instability was the latest chapter in the story that led to the
near-total disappearance of centuries-long Jewish life from the Arab
world amid hostility and poverty.

Jews on
Djerba have also experienced these problems, not least in the explosion
that al-Qaida terrorists set off outside the El Ghriba Synagogue in 2002
in which 20 people died, including 14 German tourists.

The
explosion occurred three weeks before the Jewish holiday of Lag b’Omer,
when hundreds of tourists, including some from Israel, gather at the El
Ghriba for a pilgrimage that is particularly popular among Jews of
Tunisian descent.

“It’s
the only time of the year that we can count on having a minyan,” Dee’ie
said at the synagogue, where the sounds of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah
blended with the Muslim call to prayer and the chiming of church bells.(…)

“It’s a very good thing
the police are here, they protect us, just like they protect you in
Israel,” Dee’ie, who studied at a religious seminary in Israel in 2007.
He returned to Hara Kebira but moved away last year to Zarzis, where his
wife was born and he teaches a classroom of 15 children from that
city’s Jewish community of 130 members.(…)

But in Tunisia, expressions of anti-Semitism, often featuring
anti-Israel vitriol, continue to occur, reminding the country’s
remaining 1,700 Jews “that the Arab, he is very easy to incite,” Dee’ie
said.

A recent example came when Tunisia joined
several other countries in banning the film “Wonder Woman,” apparently
because its lead character is portrayed by the Israeli film star Gal
Gadot. The Jewish-French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who is not
Israeli, was greeted during a 2014 visit to Tunisia by dozens of
Islamists carrying signs calling on “Levy the Zionist” to leave.

The
invitation to a Tunisian festival in July of the Jewish comedian Michel Boujenah provoked protests in Tunisia that local anti-racism activists
said were anti-Semitic. Tunisia has several pending bills, introduced by
Islamist and secular nationalists, proposing a blanket boycott on
Israel and a ban on any Israelis from entering the country.

Notwithstanding,
Tunisia’s government is showcasing its Jewish heritage sites, including
Djerba, whose ancient synagogue is on Tunis’ list this year for locales
put forth for recognition as world heritage sites by the United Nations. The government has made several statements about the positive
role of its Jewish citizens, invested considerable resources in
renovating sites of worship and is considering allocating two seats in
parliament for representatives of the Jewish community.

But
in parallel, authorities in Tunisia are “quietly confiscating” Jewish
antiques, including a 15th-century Torah scrollwhose whereabouts the
government is refusing to disclose, according to an expose published
last month by the French news site Dreuz.

The
effects of anti-Semitism in Tunisia may be “unpleasant at times, but
they are not a threat to the survival of this community,” said Dee’ie,
who was ready to immigrate to Israel last year with his wife because
they could not find an affordable apartment to their liking in Zarzis.

“Practical
things matter: Whether Jews can find a Jewish partner, make a living
and live a comfortable life,” he added. “I grew up here, but I don’t
know if this is the place where my children will grow up.”

Read article in full

Testimonies of last Iraqi Jews to be filmed

A new project to capture urgently on film the testimonies of Iraqi Jews recorded in the book Iraq’s Last Jews has been launched in the US: the Iraqi Jewish Voices Project aims to counter the Eurocentrism of modern Jewish history. Report in the Times of Israel (with thanks: Lily):

NEW YORK — Although Oded Halahmy left Iraq in 1951, Iraq has never left him.

“Every aspect of my life has been influenced by my first home,
the ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ I remember from my childhood. Palm and
pomegranate trees dance in the wind,” said Halahmy, 79. “I can visualize
the narrow alleyways, the houses built of ancient stones with
beautifully sculpted doors, circular windows of exquisitely colored
glass. My memories of Iraq are real and alive, and my attachment to Iraq
is very strong. My Baghdad is the most beautiful place on earth, the
Garden of Eden.”

Halahmy
was 13 when he, his parents, his siblings as well as hundreds of other
relatives left for Israel. Now, as his generation ages, first-person
stories like Halahmy’s are slipping into the shadows of history.

“These are the very last years to capture firsthand accounts of
Jewish life in Iraq. There will be no witnesses left and so there is an
urgency to get the stories. It’s a last grasp. Mizrahi Jews account for
half the world’s Jewry, yet their stories remain virtually untold,” said
Tamar Morad, a writer and editor living in Israel.

That’s where The Iraqi Jewish Voices Project, IJVP, comes in. Using
black and white portraits, interviews, and scanned historical documents,
the multi-media project records the stories of the last Jews of Iraq
and what it was like for them to immigrate to Israel, France, the United
States and beyond.

Oded Halahmy for the Iraqi Jewish Voices Project. (Liam Sharp)

The project aims to shift the meta-narrative of world Jewry in the
20th Century, which has almost always revolved around the history of
European Jewry. The bold initiative might just be the thread that
stitches the Jews of the Mideast’s past to the future.

Morad, who grew up in Boston, is of Ashkenazi descent. Her husband’s
family came from Iraq. In no time she realized the more she asked her
father-in-law, as well as her husband’s 105-year-old grandfather, about
what life was like in Iraq before they left, the more she wanted to
know.

She found others wanted to share their stories as well. “You see the
eagerness of people to tell their stories. It’s the first time some of
them have told their stories in full,” Morad said. “It’s time the world
should know it. To progress we need to be educated about the past.”

Morad co-manages the project with Henry Green, executive director of
the NGO Sephardi Voices, and professor of Judaic and Religious Studies
at the University of Miami.

Morad is basing the project on the book, “Iraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon
— an oral history collection co-edited by Morad with Dennis and Robert
Shasha — and plans to revisit and expand on some of the people and
places featured in it.

The Iraqi Jewish Voices Project comes under the auspices of the
nonprofit Sephardi Voices (SV), which aims to collect thousands of
interviews of Jews who lived in Arab and Muslim lands. It wants to do
for the Jews of Arab lands what the Shoah Foundation did for Holocaust
survivors in collecting and preserving their testimony about life
before, during and after World War II, Green said.

Read article in full

Israel is only state to support Kurdish independence

 Kurds wave an Israeli flag at a pro-independence demonstration in Erbil (Photo: Ivor Pricket, New York Times)



Today, Iraqi Kurds vote in a non-binding referendum on whether the region should declare independence from Iraq. Saladin, who employed Maimonides as his physician, would have been proud, declares David Halbfinger in Haaretz. To-date, Israel is the only state to have come out in support of independence, in recognition of Kurdish help to evacuate Jews from Iraq and a military alliance that goes back to the 1960s. (With thanks: Lily)

In the modern era, Kurdish Jews departed en masse for Israel when the Jewish state was created in 1948, leaving Kurdish civil society so bereft that some recall its leaders still lamenting the Jewish exodus decades later.

Ties between the two have only grown warmer and more vital since the 1960s, as Israel and the Kurds — both minorities in an inhospitable region and ever in need of international allies — have repeatedly come to each other’s aid. The Kurds have long patterned their lobbying efforts in Washington on those of Israel’s supporters.

And while Kurdish leaders have not publicly embraced Israel in the run-up to the referendum, for fear of antagonizing the Arab world, the Israeli flag can routinely be seen at Kurdish rallies in Erbil and across Europe.

The Kurds in turn have friends and supporters all across Israel, including some 200,000 Kurdish Jews. But 83-year-old Tzuri Sagi, a retired brigadier general, has more reason than most Israelis to root for Kurdish independence.

“I became a patriotic Kurd,” says Mr. Sagi, now 83 and a retired brigadier general, who worked as an Israeli military adviser to Kurdish fighters.

In the winter of 1966, Mr. Sagi’s commanders sent him on a secret mission, via Israel’s then-ally, Iran, to aid Mullah Mustafa Barzani and his pesh merga rebels in Iraqi Kurdistan. Six Iraqi army brigades were standing by to overwhelm the Kurds when the snow melted. Mr. Sagi, a lieutenant colonel, drew up defenses for Barzani’s lightly armed fighters. When those collapsed, Mr. Sagi advised the Kurds to allow the best of the Iraqi brigades to break out — right into an ambush.

The 5,000-man Iraqi brigade was wiped out, and the battle, on Mount Handrin, became a landmark in Kurdish history. Mr. Sagi recalls Iraqi officers driving up in two jeeps waving white flags.

“They said to the Kurds, ‘What do you want?’” he recalled.

Over the years, Israeli doctors set up a field hospital for the Kurds, its soldiers trained the pesh merga fighters and the Mossad helped arm them.

After Israel’s defeat of its Arab neighbors in 1967 and the Baathist coup in Iraq a year later, Iraq became inhospitable to its dwindling Jewish population. Then it was the Barzanis’ turn to help.

After nine Jews were hanged in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square in 1969, Iraqi Jews were desperate to flee. The Kurds helped some 1,000 of them escape, over land to Iran and then by plane to Israel.

“They were going on donkeys, through the mountains,” said Ofra Bengio, a pre-eminent historian of the Kurds and professor emerita at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center.

One of the escapees was Zamir Shemtov, 63, now a dentist in Herzliya, who was a teenager in 1970 when his parents and extended family made their first attempt to flee Iraq. Arrested and locked up for a month, they tried again, but this time they were blackmailed, robbed, caught by the army and sent back to Baghdad, where his father was brutally interrogated, Mr. Shemtov said. Released two months later, they tried to get out a third time. This time, a Kurdish taxi driver ushered them to a safe meeting point where a young uniformed Kurdish fighter loaded them in his jeep and ferried them across the border into Iran.

Mr. Shemtov said that near the end of the drive, his father offered the fighter his gold watch in gratitude.

“The young man answered, ‘I am Masoud Barzani, son of Mullah Barzani, and if Mullah would hear that I took a watch, he would hang me!’” Mr. Shemtov recalled. “‘Instead, all I ask as thanks is that you remember us well in the future.’”

Read article in full

Joe Shemtob’s escape from Baghdad 

Shmuel Moreh, guardian of Iraq’s Jewish memory, dies

Iraqi Jews in Israel and abroad are mourning the death, on the second day of the Jewish New Year, of Professor Shmuel Moreh, 85, emeritus professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Lyn Julius writes in The Times of Israel:


Born Sami Muallem in 1932 in Baghdad’s upmarket district of Bataween, Professor Moreh was a well-respected academic (as chairman of the Association of Academics from Iraq in Israel, he presided over the publication of countless books), who excelled in his command of the Arabic language.

Immigrating to Israel with his family in 1951, he received his B.A. and M.A. from The Hebrew University in Arabic literature and Islamic Studies and his Ph.D. in modern Arabic poetry (SOAS,London University) in 1965. He was a poet and a prolific author of over 20 publications in English, Hebrew and Arabic. His memoirs were serialised in the online Arabic medium Elaph in 2009 -10 and awakened huge interest among Iraqis in their lost Jewish community. The series was later published in Arabic as Baghdad Mon Amour.

At the same time as he served as a bridge between Israelis and Arabs, Professor Moreh made sure not to sugarcoat the persecutions suffered by Iraq’s Jews. Moreh was a survivor of the Farhud pogrom, in which at least 179 Jews were killed, and wrote vividly of his experiences. In 2010 he published in English, with Zvi Yehuda, a ground-breaking collection of essays about the Farhud,and was in the forefront of the campaign to have the pogrom recognised as a Holocaust event.

Among his lesser-known talents was boxing, a skill he refined at his primary school when confronted with taunting and bullying from the other boys. The tensions in the lead-up to the Farhud led him, aged eight, into fights with Faisal, the son of the pro-Nazi prime minister of Iraq, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. When the boy threatened to knock his eye out with a stick, Shmuel punched Faisal and the boy went running to their Christian headmistress.

He was a proud Israeli, and yet confessed to not feeling entirely at home until he received the Israel Prize for Middle Eastern Studies in 1999.

In his latter years he was an advocate for therights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and devoted his energies to using his contactsto call for the preservation of Iraq’s Jewish cultural heritage, deploring, for instance, the transformation of Ezekiel’s shrine into a mosque.

Read article in full

Crossposted at Spero News

Profile in the Manchester Jewish Telegraph by Doreen Wachmann

Al-Jazeera: Israel’s racism towards ‘Arab Jews’

Apologies for starting off the new Jewish year with this dose of poison from Al-Jazeera. The writer Susan Abulhawa has a track record for being one of the most virulent purveyors of anti-Israel extremism.The article features a number of textbook tropes: Israel  is a ‘colonial settler’ enterprise. It needed Jews from Arab countries to populate the state (insert here the familiar ‘Zionists bombed Iraq’ allegation), but preserved an orientalist contempt for their inferior culture (insert here cherry-picked quote by Zionist leader, in this case Jabotinsky). The article condemns Israel for collapsing these cartoonish keffiyeh-wearing, hummus-munching Jews into a single invented ‘Mizrahi’ identity, but this is exactly what Abulhawa does when she calls them ‘Arab Jews’.  (Yet she contradicts herself by claiming there were differences between Tunisian, Moroccan and other Jews. Persian Jews, she claims, spoke Arabic!) Ashkenazi Zionists are uniquely evil because they kidnap Mizrahi babies (insert obligatory link to article by Jonathan Cook). (With thanks: Hadar)



Yemenite Jews reading the Bible

Although it was a project conceived by Europeans and for European Jews, they lacked sufficient numbers to build a population large enough to conquer the indigenous Palestinian population. Thus, recruitment of Jews from the surrounding Arab world was a necessary inconvenience. They did so through propaganda and by creating false flag terror incidents (bombing of synagogues or Jewish centres) in order provoke an exodus of Arab Jews.

A prime example of this happened in Iraq where the oldest Jewish community in the world had lived for millennia as contributing members of Iraqi society, and who prospered, contributed to the arts and the economy, and participated in government.

But these Jews were not embraced as brethren by European Zionists. Zionism was decidedly colonial, and that meant that Jews of the Arab world were seen as incomplete, barbaric, dirty, uncivilised. Za’ev Jabotinsky, one of the forefathers of Zionism said, “We Jews have nothing in common with what is called the Orient, thank God. To the extent that our uneducated masses [Arab Jews] have ancient spiritual traditions and laws that call the Orient, they must be weaned away from them, and this is in fact what we are doing in every decent school, what life itself is doing with great success. We are going in Palestine, first for our national convenience, [second] to sweep out thoroughly all traces of Oriental soul.

Before Israel, Jews of Iraq identified as Iraqi, as Egyptian, and of Palestine as Palestinian. They spoke Arabic, ate the same foods as their Christian and Muslim compatriots, celebrated and partook in the same national events and traditions, lived by the same social protocols, and moved through their respective cultures as other natives did. And despite the similarities of their cultures, Tunisians were distinct from Egyptians, who were both distinct from Iraqis, who were distinct from Moroccans, etc. But Israel collapsed them all under a single identity, which was to be distinguished only from Ashkenazis, European Jews, who were higher up on the social order, and, of course, from non-Jewish Palestinians and Arabs, who were to be despised. The level of their resulting self-hate can be measured in the heightened cruelty they practise against Palestinians.

Read article in full

Rachel Shabi’s Mizrahi post Zionism: a critique

The Jewish New Year begins tonight

Wishing all readers of Point of No Return  Shana tova – Tisku leshanim rabot!

Tonight is the start of the two-day holiday celebrating Rosh Hashana – the Jewish New Year. At the beginning of the meal, Sephardim and Mizrahim have a special custom of reciting the Yehi Ratzones. Ty Alhadeff on the UW Stroum Jewish Studies site explains (with thanks: Michelle):

The Jewish people celebrate Rosh Hashana (pronounced Rosh Ashana among
Sepharadim) every year starting the evening of the first day of the
Hebrew month of Tishri. The Jewish New Year is celebrated in synagogues
by hearing the shofar (ram’s horn) blasts and at home with a festive
meal featuring symbolic foods, like apples dipped in honey for a sweet
new year.

At the beginning of the holiday dinner, Sephardic Jews from the lands
of the former Ottoman Empire have a special custom called the yehi ratzones,
a series of symbolic appetizers including not only apples, but also
dates, leeks, spinach, squash, black-eyed peas, and cheek meat of a cow
or a fish head (the foods may differ between communities and be prepared
in any number of ways). The symbolic foods represent, based on word
play with Aramaic or Hebrew, a hope for the coming year, yehi ratzon
meaning “may it be[God’s] will.”

For instance, dates symbolize the hope for the end
of enmity against the Jews, as the Aramaic word for “date” is similar to
a Hebrew word for “end.” The fish head or cheek meat symbolizes our
hope that we may be the head, and not the tail. (See the order of the yehi ratzones in English, Hebrew and Ladino [in Latin script] according to the Sephardic customs as practiced in Seattle in Isaac Azose’s Mahzor Tefilah Le-David Le-Rosh Ashana.)

It is not entirely clear where the custom of the yehi ratzones originates, but food symbolism dates back to Talmudic times. In addition to the yehi ratzones,
instead of dipping their bread in salt as is customary throughout the
year, Jews dip their bread in honey or sugar on Rosh Ashana. In Rhodes,
that sugar was kept throughout the year for various folk remedies. In
her memoir I Remember Rhodes, Rebecca Amato Levy relates another interesting custom followed by this community in which they avoided wearing anything new on their feet including shoes, stockings, and slippers on Rosh Ashana.

Sepharadim greet each other with the Ladino expression Anyada Buena, Dulse i Alegre (“May you have a good, sweet and happy New Year”) or a Hebrew greeting, Tizku leshanim rabot (“May you merit many years”), to which one answers, Tizkeh vetihyeh ve-ta’arich yamim (“May you merit and live and increase your days”).

Read article in full

Bahrain king denounces anti-Israel boycott

We are now seeing the concrete dividends, as reported in the Jerusalem Post,  of Israel’s rapprochement with the pro-US Gulf states and Saudi Arabia in the face of the common Iranian nuclear threat: it is groundbreaking that Bahrain’s king Hamad has denounced the Arab boycott and declared that Bahrainis are free to visit Israel. However, the king may be out of synch with his Shi’a population, and  a new Museum of Tolerance may be not enough to dispel the very real hostility that some might feel towards Jews. (With thanks: Lily)

King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa

 

LOS ANGELES – Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa
has denounced the Arab boycott of Israel and said his subjects are free
to visit the Jewish state. The statement by the head of the Persian
Gulf country, which does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, was
revealed at a multi-national event last week in Los Angeles, hosted by
the city’s Simon Wiesenthal Center.

At the event, Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, who head the
Wiesenthal Center, revealed the king’s pronouncements made to them
during their visit to Manama, Bahrain’s capital city, in early 2017.

A walk through the city, at that time was an eye-opener, Cooper said.
There was a church, with a huge cross, next to a Hindu temple, and 90
meters on an impressive mosque. Even a small synagogue, the only one in
the Persian Gulf region, still stands in an older part of the city.

When Hier and Cooper met withKing Hamad, they also discussed the ruler’s plan to establish a Museum of Religious Tolerance in the capital city by the end of this year.

At the Los Angeles event last week, delegations of Buddhists in saffron
robes, Sikhs in turbans, and Muslims with keffiyehs and hijabs [Muslim
head-covers for men and veils for women], mingled with Jews with kippot
[skullcaps] and Christians in business suits.

Read article in full

The demand to return the archive to Iraq is pathetic

It is a question of justice that the Iraq-Jewish archive must not go back to Iraq, Dr Edy Cohen argues in Israel Hayom (with thanks: Imre):

(Have you signed the petition?)

In May 2013, American forces in Baghdad
discovered an archive of thousands of photos, documents and books
pertaining to Iraqi Jewry in a basement of the Iraqi security services’
building. The archive comprised dozens of boxes, most of which had
become mildewed after getting wet in the waterlogged basement. The
collection included many rare books and papers, including 500-year-old
volumes of Torah commentary. To save the archive, the U.S. military
secured the permission of the Iraqi government to send the boxes to the
National Archives in Washington, where, bit by bit, workers managed to
restore most of the documents.

The oldest item in the collection is this Venice Bible from 1568

Before removing the documents, the American
government agreed to the Iraqis’ stipulation that the documents be
returned once they were restored.

As part of the restoration process, the
National Archives digitized the collection. Congressional
representatives and the American administration faced heavy pressure,
mainly from Jewish groups, not to return the archive to Iraq, but last
week, a final decision was taken to hand the collection back to Iraq about a year from now.

This decision is both absurd and pathetic,
like giving a thief back what he stole. The question being asked in
Jewish circles is whether the U.S. is trying to make up for invading
Iraq and its failure to find chemical weapons there. Why should the U.S.
return the collection to a place that is no longer home to Jews?
Returning the archive to the Iraqis is like returning the belongings of
European Jews to the Nazis; it’s stolen Jewish property.

Even though the Jews of Iraq lived in
Babylon before the advent of Islam and before the Prophet Muhammad came
along, there are no Jews there today. More than 150,000 Iraqi Jews left
the country over the course of the 20th century, some motivated by
Zionism, and others by fear for their lives. Iraq didn’t know how to
protect its Jews, and as early as 1941, hundreds of Iraqis were
slaughtering Jews in the Farhud (pogrom).

When Israel was founded in 1948, and hatred
toward Jews continued to mount, the Iraqi government permanently
revoked the citizenships of Jews and expelled them from the country,
freezing their bank accounts and confiscating their property, which
today is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Iraqis murdered Jews and
inherited their property. There are no other words that can describe
this absurdity and this crime – “Have you killed and also taken
possession?” (1 Kings 21:19)

Today, Iraq is a failed nation and will
soon be divided into three countries: a Kurdish state, a Sunni state and
a Shiite state. We all witnessed the Islamic State group destroying
Iraq’s antiquities, demolishing museums and wrecking churches,
synagogues and even the graves of holy figures. The cowardly Iraqi army
didn’t dare take on the 1,500 Islamic State fighters, opting to give in
and surrender its weapons. If the heroic Peshmerga fighters hadn’t
stepped in, Islamic State would have conquered all of Iraq.

Therefore, it is upon the Israeli
government to pressure the Trump administration to ensure that the
archive of Iraqi Jewry isn’t returned to Iraq. It isn’t a question of
heritage; it’s a question of historic justice.

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.

Point of No Return

Jewish Refugees from Arab and Muslim Countries

One-stop blog on the Middle East's
forgotten Jewish refugees - updated daily.