Month: August 2019

JIMENA launches Sephardic Studies school curriculum

JIMENA, the California-based organisation representing Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, has launched Journey to the Mizrah, a curriculum and website designed to educate middle and high school students in Sephardic Studies. 



To date,  JIMENA says, the study of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish heritage, Jewish multiculturalism, and the ethnic diversity of the Jewish people has not been integrated as a regular component of Jewish education in the USA. Despite the fact that over 50% of Israeli Jews and an estimated 20% of American Jews identify as Mizrahi and Sephardic, most North American Jewish educators are unprepared to teach  these subjects, it claims.

Anecdotally, JIMENA believes that one in four students at the Jewish Community High School of the San Francisco Bay identifies as Sephardic through a parent or grandparent. Sephardic students are becoming an increasing majority at Jewish Day Schools in Los Angeles and New York.

The curriculum was created for formal and informal Jewish education institutions using ‘traditional Sephardic pedagogy’. Designed and written for middle schools, but easily adapted for high schools, the Journey to the Mizrah curriculum includes twelve lesson plans that incorporate text study, discussion and immersive Sephardic and Mizrahi activities such as Mimouna, Piyutim, Henna, and storytelling.

Click here to access Journey to the Mizrah website

Israeli cities to mark 60th anniversary of Moroccan aliya

 Celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the great aliya (immigration) of Moroccan Jewry to Israel are being planned all over the country. The Jerusalem Post gives a useful overview of the events leading to the exodus: (with thanks: Michelle) 

The story of Moroccan Jewry’s immigration to Israel is not simple, beginning many years before the State of Israel was established.

To mark their difficult journey home, as well as the major contributions
Moroccan Jewry has made to Israeli society, the World Federation of
Moroccan Jewry has organized dozens of events in the forthcoming months
for the approximately one million Israeli Jews who are Moroccan or of
Moroccan descent.

Toward the end of the rule of the Ottoman
Empire, and prior to the signing of the Fez Treaty in 1912 that entailed
French protection of Moroccan Jews, there was a mass immigration of
Jews from large cities – including Fez, Rabat and Marrakech – to the
smaller towns and villages surrounding the cities.

However, the decline in the financial circumstances, overcrowding, and
the need to pray in secret to avoid persecution by locals caused some
young families to immigrate to Israel. Between 1908 and 1918, some 80
families moved to Tiberias and Jerusalem.

In the years prior to the Holocaust, Moroccan Jews were encouraged to
enroll their children in French schools. The community was also prompted
to receive a French education and integrate into French culture, as
French influence in Morocco began to grow in the early part of the 20th
century.

But as the Vichy regime came to power in 1940 andthe Holocaust began, the situation for Moroccan Jewry began to change.

The David Amar Moroccan Jewish Heritage Center, Jerusalem

Although King Mohammed V is credited with blocking efforts by Vichy
officials to impose anti-Jewish legislation upon Morocco and deport the
country’s 250,000 Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps in
Europe, partial Nazi race measures were put in place in Morocco despite
Mohammed’s objection.

Vichy officials also forced Mohammed to
sign two decrees, which barred Jews from entering certain schools or
obtaining certain positions.

Following the end of World War II
and the establishment of the State of Israel, Moroccan Jews were
encouraged to move to Israel by Zionist groups and organizations.

With
French rule remaining over Morocco, Jews were allowed to immigrate
legally, and many young Moroccan Jews left to help fight during the War
of Independence. Others left as they also felt mistreated by the French
government.

With the establishment of the State and the
country’s victory over several Arab nations, antisemitism skyrocketed.
The Moroccan Nationalist Movement incited hatred against the Jews, and
on June 7, 1948, 44 Jews were massacred in pogroms across the country.

This
encouraged further immigration to Israel – in the five years following
Israel’s independence, around 30,000 Jews made aliyah, and the numbers
increased in subsequent years.

By 1954, when it became clear that
France was advancing its plan to grant Morocco independence and pogroms
and sporadic attacks against Jews started to increase, there was a
massive wave of immigration to Israel.

As their situation
deteriorated, more and more Jews began to leave. Following Morocco’s
independence in 1956 and its joining the Arab League in 1958,
immigration to Israel and Zionism were banned.

Although Jews had
full rights as citizens following Morocco’s independence, they were
still treated with disdain and subjected to antisemitism.

Viewed
as one of the most tragic incidents to have happened to Moroccan Jews
trying to escape persecution is that of the Egoz, which was a ship
smuggling 43 Jewish Moroccans as well as an Israeli representative,
Chaim Tzarfati. During the night between January 10 and 11, it sank.

Between 1948 and 1955 around 70,000 Jews left Morocco, and another 60,000 Jews left Morocco from 1955 to 1961.

WITH
THE ascension of Hassan II to the throne in 1961, an agreement was made
that he would accept a large per-capita bounty from the international
Jewish community for each Jew who emigrated from Morocco, and under this
agreement Jews were allowed the freedom to leave. By the eve of the Six
Day War, some 120,000 emigrated during this six-year period alone.

According to the World Federation of Moroccan Jewry, over 300,000 Moroccan Jews have immigrated to Israel since the 1960s.

“Today, before the Federation’s figures, more than one million
immigrants [and their descendants] from Morocco live in Israel, making
them the second-largest community after immigration from the
Commonwealth,” it explained. “On Sunday, there will be a second salute
on the eve marking the first series of events, which commemorates the
60th anniversary of the mass immigration from Morocco.”

Read article in full

Morocco demolishes Holocaust memorial (updated)



Update (with thanks: Lily): According to MEMRI, Ahmed Wihmane, the President of the Moroccan Observatory against Normalization with Israel, said that he salutes the Moroccan authorities for destroying the shameful “so-called Holocaust memorial.” However, he criticized the government for, in its idleness, having allowed the building to be erected in the first place, particularly since, according to Wihmane, the owner of the project is a homosexual Freemason with Zionist ideologies. Wihmane compared the Moroccan government’s inaction to previous inaction he claimed took place regarding firearms training camps in Morocco that had been under the supervision of “generals and rabbis from the Israeli War Forces” and that had the purpose of establishing a “second Israel” in Morocco.



It seems that Moroccco is not ready for a Shoah memorial, despite its strategy to memorialise its Jewish heritage.  Moroccan Authorities demolished a Holocaust memorial on Monday that was being built by German NGO PixelHelper in Ait Faska, southeast of Marrakesh on the grounds that it did not have the necessary building permits. This comes less than a week after The Jerusalem Post revealed that the Holocaust memorial was in the works. (With thanks: Lily; Imre)


Bulldozers had moved in to destroy the Memorial (Photo: O Bienkowski)

“We thought that there was acceptance of Jewish society in Morocco but it’s not [the case],”  (Oliver Bienkowski, founder of PixelHelper)  told the Post. “We get a lot of antisemitic and anti LGBTQ+ messages.”



Late on Monday, Moroccan Authorities denied in a press statement that the memorial was being built, adding that such claims were “unfounded.”

Read article in full

 

Huffpost Maroc had reported:



 For the first time in North Africa, a Holocaust memorial (Shoah) honoring the millions of Jews killed during the Second World War will be built by the German non-profit organization PixelHelper.

After the one in South Africa, this second memorial on the continental level will be built 26 kilometers from the city of Marrakech, on the road that leads to Ouarzazate, in the small town of Aït Faska.

Interviewed by The Jerusalem Post, Oliver Bienkowski, founder of PixelHelper and manager of the memorial in Morocco, said the project aims to “show Moroccans, especially students, and Jews in Israel the horror of the Holocaust”, adding that the memorial will be composed of more than 10,000 blocks of stone that visitors can browse. A call for donations was launched to fund part of the project.

The monument will also dedicate a portion to homosexual victims of the Holocaust. “In the middle of the monument, there will be rainbow-colored blocks for LGBTQ + people who have died in concentration camps,” Oliver Bienkowski said, adding that the project will be completed at the festival of Hanukkah in late December.

The Memorial was to include coloured blocks to remember the homosexuals who perished in the Nazi camps



Moroccan king acknowledges the Holocaust

Debunking the myth of the ‘ Arab Jew’

Anyone who keeps abreast of the growing academic field of Mizrahi/Sephardic studies cannot help noticing that the vast majority of papers focus on the purported “discrimination” or “racism” of the Ashkenazi establishment. The expression ‘Arab Jew’ is widely used too, but is rejected by Jews born in Arab countries themselves, argues Lyn Julius in JNS News:


The 650,000 Jews who overwhelmed Israel in its early years were sent to languish in tent camps or deliberately consigned to the country’s periphery – development towns in the far north or south of the country with little employment and prospects, their culture disparaged as ‘primitive’.

Typical is this paper by one Sarah Louden, Israeli Nationalism: the Constructs of Zionism and its Effect on Inter-Jewish Racism, Politics, and Radical Discourse. It has 455 views, more than any other paper of its genre. It pulls no punches in attacking the ‘racism’ of Zionism. But its sources are drawn almost entirely from Mizrahi anti-Zionists like Ella Shohat.

Shohat, a professor at New York university, made her name by applying Edward Said’s theory of ‘Orientalism’ to Israel,  claiming that both the Mizrahim and the Arabs are victims of the West (Ashkenazim). Mizrahi Jews and Arabs are assumed to have more in common with each other that Jews from the East have with Jews from the West. The former, they contend,  were ‘torn away’ from their comfortable ‘Arab’ environment by Zionism and colonialism.

 These academics widely assume that the
Mizrahim support the Likud and rightwing parties  to
‘get their own back’ on the Labour-dominated Ashkenazi establishment. According to Sarah Louden, “Mizrahim support the rightwing in Israeli politics as a means of affection and maltreatment by the ruling left-wing Ashkenazi elite, and then set out to promote their own cultural and ideological thoughts.”

 But Louden  and those like her hardly mention, or downplay, the  elephant in the room – the subliminal memory  of Arab and Muslim persecution experienced by parents and grandparents driven  from the Arab world. Is is not plausible that   Mizrahi Jews view the rocket  attacks and bombings afflicting Israel as just the latest chapter in a long history of Arab and Muslim antisemitism?  Do they vote Likud  because  they believe that only the right can deliver the necessary tough response?

Western academics almost invariably use the expression ‘Arab Jew’. The term  figures in the title of a book by Professor Sasson Somekh – The Last Arab Jew.

Professor Sasson Somekh died last week. Far left media sites like +972 proceeded to mourn him as an ‘Arab Jew’.

Born in Baghdad in 1933, Somekh (pictured) published two autobiographies, the first “Baghdad, Yesterday: The
Making of an Arab Jew,
” about his life in Iraq and the second, “Life
After Baghdad: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel.”

Somekh was the guru of Arabic Literature studies at Tel Aviv University and spent two years in Cairo where he became a close a friend of the Egyptian Nobel prizewinning author Naguib Mahfouz, whose work he claims to have introduced to a wider audience.

Some of Somekh’s disciples in the  Arabic Literature department of Tel Aviv university were anti-Zionists in the Shohat mould. But Somekh never thought of himself as an Arab Jew in their terms.

He told Almog Behar, one of his former students: ” The tendency among leading Mizrahi intellectuals of the younger
generation to speak of themselves as Arab Jews is first and foremost a
political position, that is, their desire to protest sharply against the
sense of discrimination that they feel has been directed at Mizrahim.
They are, in fact, seeking to highlight their reluctance to be part of
the Zionist existence of the state. I do not have a problem with these
positions, but for me this is not how the Arab-Jewish identity is
defined.”

 For Somekh, Arab Jew is a “cultural definition of a Jew who speaks
Arabic and grew up in a Muslim environment.” He wanted to
emphasize that “his identity stemmed from his point of view as a person who
grew up in an Arab culture and continues to engage with that culture.”

Iraq was one of the few Arab countries where Jews took a leading role in the Arabic cultural and literary renaissance of the 1920s and 30s.  “I am the last Arab Jew,” Somekh said. “That is why I wrote Baghdad, Yesterday: to
document the life of a Jewish Arab child. Anyone who defines himself as
an Arab Jew to attack others but who does not speak Arabic… does not
count as such. While I do not define myself as a Zionist, if being
Zionist means all Jews should come here, I am an Israeli patriot.”

In other words, Somekh saw himself as being an Israeli Jew of Arab culture,  not of Arab ethnicity. Another professor of Iraqi origin, Reuven Snir of Haifa University, concurred: Jews who wrote literary works in Arabic in the early twentieth century felt no need to declare themselves as Arabs.

A conference held some 10 years ago among Iraqi Jews resoundingly rejected the expression ‘Arab Jew’ as a badge of identity. The vast majority of Jews from the Arab world have not historically  identified as Arabs – in fact many would be offended to be so labelled.

But post- and anti- Zionists academics continue to turn a deaf ear to what most Jews raised Arab countries themselves say and feel,  as long as ‘discrimination’ against Mizrahim can serve as a useful stick to bash Zionism.

Read article in full

Egyptian spy worked for Mossad ‘for world peace’

This is the little-known story of Heba Selim, an Egyptian woman who spied for Israel. Heba was recruited into the Mossad while a financially-strapped student in Paris. Later she passed on military secrets through her husband Farouk Abdul Hamid el-Feki, which enabled Israel to bomb targets in Egypt with pinpoint accuracy at the outbreak of the Six-Day War. Both Heba and Farouk were later executed. A film was made in 1978 about her. Egyptian Streets has the story: 

If one were to list the most influential and important scenes in the history of Egyptian cinema, a strong contender would have to be the ending of the 1978 movie Climbing to the Bottom (El Soud Ela Al Hawia). Actress Madiha Kamel plays the character of Egyptian spy Heba Selim, or ‘Abla’ in the film, who was on a plane approaching Cairo airport after her arrest. Next to her was an intelligence officer, who pointed at the pyramids and the Nile and said the famous line, “and this is Egypt, Abla.”


Heba (Abla) Selim and her husbank Farouk el-Feki

 At a time when Egyptian President Sadat was planning his next step for peace with Israel as part of the Camp David Accords, young Heba Selim was in the shadows working with the Mossad to seduce an Egyptian army officer and gather confidential information to help Israel defeat Egypt during the Yom Kippur War.

In her own words, she reckoned that she was also working for peace, telling General Rifaat Osman Gabriel in her last days, “I am not a spy, but I work in order to preserve the human race from destruction.”

Read article in full

Yolande Harmor

Shula Cohen

Last known Hebron massacre survivor tells his story

In the week in which the 90th anniversary of the Hebron massacre is being marked, the last survivor, Avraham Kiryati, 98,  recalls the horrific events of that day in the Jerusalem Post:


Time has not dimmed the powerful memories that 98-yearold Avraham Kiryati has of the moment his grandfather Eliyahu Capilouto was stabbed during the Hebron massacre of 1929.



“My grandfather was dressed just like the Arabs,” said Kiryati.
He went out to see what was going on. They [the rioters] pushed him inside and stabbed him on the side of his body.

Kiryati was then a boy of eight.

He and his 18-year-old uncle Moshe Capilouto were in their grandparents’ home as Arabs made their way through the Hebron streets calling for Jews to be slaughtered.
The two boys escaped out the back door of their grandparents’ home, safely making their way to the family chicken coup where they hid until it was safe.

When they came out of hiding, they found Eliyahu lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

He is a descendant of Jews who escaped the Spanish inquisition, settling first in Safed and then in Hebron.



His grandfather Eliyahu was a well-known carpenter and electrician, so well respected that he was even hired to work in the Tomb of the Patriarchs at the time when Jews were not allowed into the building – for 700 years, they could only pray up to the seventh step on the outside of what was then a mosque.

Eliyahu built a home a slight distance away from what Kiryati called the Jewish “ghetto,” on a road that led to Gaza.

Kiryati’s parents had moved to Jerusalem, but had sent him to spend some of his summer vacation with his grandparents, a decision that placed him in the wrong place at the wrong time.

>
In a separate interview, Kiryati’s nephew, Yossi Saness, also described how in that moment Eliyahu and his wife, Rivka, a gold dealer, had initially stood outside their house to try and dissuade the rioters from entering. After her husband was stabbed, she was able to bribe the rioters to leave by offering them gold she had stashed in the house, Saness said.

“All the survivors were taken first to the police station and then to Jerusalem,” Kiryati said.

In the following months, his grandfather died of his wounds.

When he thinks about it now, he said, the events of that day “is more or less what happened in the Holocaust.”
In the early 1930s, his grandmother Rivka was among a small number of families who returned to the city and attempted to resurrect the Jewish community in the biblical city. Their efforts came to naught, as the British insisted that they leave in 1936.

Read article in full

More about the 1929 Hebron massacre

Agreement with Algeria will ‘legalise theft of Jewish heritage’

 A Memorandum of Understanding signed earlier this weekby the US State Department with Algeria is causing consternation among organisations representing Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. They argue that it is simply an instrument for legitimising the seizure of Jewish heritage in that country.

 The cultural property agreement negotiated by the State Department under the U.S. law implements the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.

The United States has similar bilateral agreements with 19 countries around the world, and has imposed emergency import restrictions on cultural property from Iraq and Syria as well.

 The primary aim of the agreement is to place U.S. import restrictions on categories of Algerian archaeological material dating from 2.4 million years ago to approximately 1750 A.D., including some of the earliest human remains found at Ain Boucherit and cultural objects from many of Algeria’s World Heritage sites, including the spectacular Roman ruins of Tipasa, Timgad, and Djémila.

 

The new MOU is intended to protect the prehistoric sites and Roman sruins at Tipasa, Timgad and Djemila(above) from looting. 

  In the past JIMENA, the US organisation representing Jews from the MENA, has clearly stated its objections to such MOUs: “These MOUs claim to be about looting, but their broad scope and limited evidence of success suggests their real impact is providing a legal vehicle to legitimize foreign confiscations and wrongful ownership claims. Legitimate efforts to curb looting are essential, but they must be targeted to preserve archaeological resources, and not to disguise the brazen property confiscations of tyrants.”

 The Jewish community of Algeria, once numbering 130,000, no longer exists. Synagogues, cemeteries, sifre torah and other Judaica were abandoned at the time of the great exodus of 1962, when Algeria acquired its independence.

In April 2019,Rep. Lee Zeldin (R, NY-1) introduced the Protecting US Heritage Abroad Act. With North African Jews in mind who are now US citizens, the bipartisan legislation, cosponsored by Rep. Michael McCaul (R, TX-10) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D, FL-23) would extend the current mandate of the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad to include the Middle East and North Africa, and would provide access to protected cemeteries, monuments and buildings.

More about the campaign against MOUs

How did the Arabs help the Nazi war effort?

In this important 9-part series in Israel National News, historian Dr Alex Grobman examines the influence of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini on Arab opinion, and the Arab contribution to the Nazi war effort.  Here is an extract from Part 3, ‘Enlisting Arabs for the Nazi cause’:

Dr Alex Grobman

From 1941-1945, historian Antonio J. Muñoz estimated that about 5,000
Arab and Indian Muslims volunteered to serve in the German armed
forces, hardly sufficient to constitute an army of liberation. Their
worth as a military force was negligible compared with units created
with Muslims in the Balkans and the USSR. Though the Germans failed to
conquer the region, the units did have propaganda value which the Nazis
exploited.

Joseph Schechtman credited the mufti in helping
establish espionage networks to provide information about British troop
movements. His news transmissions to the Middle East reported acts of
sabotage that would normally have been censored. His agents, who
infiltrated the Middle East by land or by air, cut pipe and telephone
lines in Palestine and Transjordan and destroyed bridges and railways in
Iraq.


His
agents, who infiltrated the Middle East by land or by air, cut pipe and
telephone lines in Palestine and Transjordan and destroyed bridges and
railways in Iraq.

The Mufti’s famous meeting with Hitler in November 1941



 He
also organized an Axis-Arab Legion known as the Arabisches
Freiheitskorps that wore German uniforms with “Free Arabia” patches
Schechtman said. As part of the German Army, the unit guarded
communications facilities in Macedonia and hunted down American and
British paratroopers who jumped into Yugoslavia and were hiding among
the local population. The legion also fought on the Russian front.
Another major success was el-Husseini’s recruitment of tens of thousands
of Balkan Muslims into the Wehrmacht.  Moshe Shertok (Sharett), chief
of the political department of the Jewish Agency, reported that on a
visit to Bosnia in 1943, the mufti appealed to local Muslims to join the
Moslem Waffen-SS Units and met with the units that were already
operational.

In addition, Middle East expert Robert Satloff said
Haj Amin used his contacts with Muslim leaders in North Africa to urge
them to obstruct the Allied advance in every way possible. After Allied
troops invaded North Africa in November 1942, Vichy officers in Tunisia
established the Phalange Africaine, also called the Légion des
Volontaires Française de Tunisie. There were 400 men in the unit,
approximately one-third Arab and the rest a mélange of European
pro-Fascists. The German Army assumed command of the Phalange in
February 1943, fighting the British and the Free French for most of
1944. In 1944, a French military court convicted the unit’s commander,
Pierre Simon Cristofini, of treason and executed him.

A
second all-Arab unit under German command, known as the Brigade Nord
Africaine, Satloff noted was established by Mohamed el-Maadi, a former
French officer and antisemite whose nickname was “SS Mohamed.” They
fought the partisans, a group of resistance fighters, in the Dordogne
region in South-West France.

In March 1944, Schechtman said the
mufti urged the Arabs to “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This
pleases God, history and religion.” In keeping with this religious
imperative, historian Raul Hilberg said the mufti asked the German
Foreign Minister on May 13, 1943 “to do his utmost” to prohibit further
departures of Jews from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to Palestine.

Read article in full

The Arabs who fought with the Jews against the Nazis: 

Spain throws up hurdles to citizenship for Sephardim

As the deadline approaches,  Sephardi Jews applying for Spanish citizenship have been frustrated by bureaucratic hurdles and exams to demonstrate linguistic and historical knowledge. Fewer than 10,000 Jews are supposed to have been successful, Soeren Kern argues in The Gatestone Institute. The process to apply for Portuguese citizenship is much easier:

A piece of much-heralded legislation to grant Spanish citizenship to up to 3.5 million descendants of Jews expelled from the country in 1492 is about to end in failure: fewer than 10,000 Jews have been awarded Spanish passports ahead of an October 1, 2019 deadline.

 Spanish leaders promised that the law — which entered into force on October 1, 2015 for a period of three years and was extended for one additional year — would “right a historic wrong” and demonstrate that more than 500 years after the Inquisition began, Jews are once again welcome in Spain.

The legislation, however, introduced so many cumbersome bureaucratic hurdles to obtain Spanish citizenship that most prospective hopefuls appear to have been deterred from even initiating the application process.

 Also known as the “Right of Return” for Sephardic Jews (Sepharad means “Spain” in Hebrew), the law purported to grant Spanish citizenship to anyone able to meet two seemingly straightforward requirements: prove Sephardic heritage and demonstrate a “special connection” to Spain.

In practice, however, the process has been far more complicated.

 The legislation’s main barriers to Spanish citizenship have been obligatory exams on Spanish language and socio-cultural history, the need to travel to Spain and exorbitant fees and costs.

Although prospective applicants do not need to be practicing Jews, they must prove their Sephardic background through a combination of factors, including ancestry, surnames and spoken language (either Ladino, a Jewish language that evolved from medieval Spanish, or Haketia, a mixture of Hebrew, Spanish and Judeo-Moroccan Arabic).

According to the law, even if applicants speak Ladino or Haketia — essentially dying languages that are spoken mostly by the elderly in some parts of Latin America, Morocco and Turkey — they are still required to pass a Spanish-language proficiency exam.


Congregants at the synagogue in Porto, Portugal

 In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, the director of the Sephardic Center in Istanbul, Karen Gerson Şarhon, noted the paradox that even though Sephardic Jews have preserved Ladino or Haketia for hundreds of years, proficiency in those languages in and of itself does not qualify them for Spanish citizenship. “A Sephardic Jew who speaks Ladino perfectly understands spoken Spanish,” she said, “but fails the exam because the differences in the written and the oral are very great.”

Read article in full

Melanie Lidman article (Times of Israel)

Talkshow host Maher talks of Jewish ethnic cleansing


With thanks: Lily, Michelle


 By now, everyone has heard that  the two Democratic Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar were banned from visiting Israel on account of their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The debate has been raging in the press and media  – should they have been let in? Should they have not? – and was the subject of a recent discussion on  TV host Bill Maher’s popular HBO talkshow.

While the panellists lamented the ahistorical nature of the discussion, Bill Maher wades in at 2:30 minutes in with a point not often heard on mainstream TV: Saudi Arabia won’t let Jews in, and the Jewish population of Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt and Iran has declined dramatically. Maher cited figures which today are out of date (see table below), but the point was well made. ‘ It’s not a one-way street,” he said.

Hillel Neuer at the UN Human Rights Council: Algeria, Where are your Jews?

About

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.