Jewish owners sue France for $20 + million in unpaid rent

The descendants of two Jewish brothers, Ezra and Khedouri Lawee, are suing the French government whose embassy in Baghdad was originally their family home. Interviewed in the Globe and Mail, Philip Khazzam, grandson of Ezra, claims that France stopped paying rent on the building to the Lawee family at the behest of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and owes the Lawees more than  $20 million.  It appears that the embassy is paying the Iraqi Treasury instead. All Jewish property was nationalised by the Iraqi government and no compensation has ever been paid. (With thanks: Stan)

In the shaded garden of their Baghdad home, the Lawee family ate fresh dates straight off the palm trees. They fished in the Tigris River and strolled to the country club with tennis rackets under their arms. Brothers Ezra and Khedouri owned the General Motors concession for a section of the Middle East and the house they built together was suitably palatial, with columns and fountains and a swimming pool, a cook and a driver, and enough bedrooms to sleep 12.

The Lawees counted themselves, at the beginning of the 1940s, among Iraq’s roughly 150,000 Jews. They lived in one of the great centres of Jewish life, rivalling Krakow and Odesa and Vienna; a community with roots dating back 2,700 years to ancient Babylon, in a city where one in three residents shared their religion.

Then, in the fateful year of 1951, it virtually all disappeared. More than 100,000 Jews were airlifted out of the country amidst rising antisemitic repression in the once relatively tolerant Arab society. Most of the Lawees’ contemporaries ended up in Israel, like nearly one million more Middle Eastern Jews from Morocco to Iran whose flourishing worlds collapsed in a spasm of recrimination spawned by the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 and the corresponding displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The Lawee brothers instead brought their families to another great Jewish city thousands of kilometres away: Montreal. They became proud Canadians in their new home and built a thriving real estate business. But they never forgot Baghdad and Beit Lawee, or Lawee House – the charmed, palm-shaded world that had been stolen from them.

Now, more than 70 years later, their grandchildren are seeking justice. Philip Khazzam, grandson of Ezra, is suing the government not of Iraq but of France, which started using the house as its embassy in the 1960s, and then in the 1970s, abruptly stopped paying the family rent at the behest of Saddam Hussein’s new regime. Mr. Khazzam and his lawyers reckon the French owe more than $20-million and counting, given that France continues to occupy the Lawee House and pay rent to the Iraqi Treasury.

Because of the involvement of a Western, democratic government, it is a rare chance to achieve redress for the billions of dollars in property confiscated from Middle Eastern Jews in the 1940s and 50s, Mr. Khazzam believes. Few would expect the undemocratic regimes of Egypt or Jordan to make good on such claims, but the birthplace of the Enlightenment is perhaps another story.
“You have France sitting in a house for 55 years, not paying rent to the family that owns it,” said Mr. Khazzam. “This is a world leader in human rights and this is what they do?”
Apart from the legal and monetary questions, the family has a desire to stake a moral claim to the vanished world they still hold dear. Beit Lawee, improbably still standing after decades of dictatorship and war, remains a potent symbol of all they have lost.

“It’s not just a house,” said Mr. Khazzam. “All of us are so proud of our Iraqi heritage. For a long time, it was a magical place for our families to live.”

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