Levana Zamir:’ my father tried to end his life’
Heart-rending testimonies from Jewish refugees from Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon were heard at Israel’s National Library on 30 November during a special evening marking of the exodus of almost a million Jews from Arab countries and Iran. Dana Ben-Shimon writes in The Jerusalem Report that the refugees experienced happy childhoods alongside trauma and loss:
Levana Zamir remembers a joyful childhood Egypt, which turned into a nightmare that forced her family to flee when she was 10 years old. (credit: Hannah Taib, Israel National Library)
Growing up in an aristocratic merchant family, Zamir remembers a joyful childhood by the shores of the country’s iconic Nile River.
“We lived at the spot where the Nile flows into the Mediterranean Sea. I remember the soft breeze, and silky sand, and the large villas built there,” Zamir recalled.
Zamir, now 87, was speaking recently at a special event at Israel’s National Library in Jerusalem marking the annual memorial day for Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran.
“But then, in May 1948, after the announcement of Israel’s establishment, our life changed,” she recounted.“At midnight, ten Egyptian officers raided our house. They knocked hard on the door, almost broke it, and searched everywhere. They tore mattresses, looked through every cupboard. They didn’t find anything, and so they took my uncle to prison, accusing him of being a Zionist.”
Zamir recalled asking her mother, “Is he a criminal? Did he do anything wrong?” Her mother replied that he was arrested only because he was a Jew.
“Overnight, being a Zionist became a crime,” Zamir said, adding, “I immediately thought, ‘Soon they will come and take me, too.’ I was terrified.”
Seeing her uncle imprisoned for more than a year and a half without trial, and watching her father, who ran one of the most important printing houses in Egypt, lose his business after authorities expropriated it, left a deep scar on Zamir.
Ultimately, the family had no choice but to abandon their comfortable life and flee the country.
Many decades have passed since Zamir and her family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews, were forced out of their homes in Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and elsewhere across the Arab world. Yet memories of persecution and fear remain. For many, the pain of leaving has never faded.
For Zamir, the escape from Cairo was dramatic.
Zamir’s parents insisted on secrecy, and one day she suddenly saw relatives standing with packed suitcases, ready to depart. Arriving in a refugee camp in France, she said they “lived in one narrow tent with three other families.“I would walk the dusty paths [of the camp] crying and saying to myself, ‘I wish I were dead,’” she said, recalling how the family felt utterly lost and how she later learned that her traumatized father had even attempted to end his life.
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