Jews of Baghdad
By Christopher Dickey and Sarah Sennott
Newsweek
Oct. 14, 2003
Jews have lived in Iraq for nearly 3,000 years. That era
is coming to an end
Memories as old as Babylon, hopes and fears as new as the
headlines out of Baghdad, all blend together in the living
history of Iraq’s Jews.
EILEEN KHALASTCHY, 70, remembers falling asleep on the roof
of her house near the Tigris River as a child in the 1950s,
listening to “the sound of music and of people clapping;
the sky was full of stars.” Now living in Britain,
she longs to go back to Iraq, she says. Edwin Shuker, 48,
member of the World Sephardic Congress, recalls living as
if “we were in a big, virtual concentration camp”
in Iraq in 1971. He was 16 when his family fled north through
the mountains to freedom. “We were willing to lose
everything,” he says. “You felt you were going
to die anyway.” Yet he, too, wanted to return, and
last month for a few days he did. “I was unable to
control the tears,” he says. As he saw Baghdad from
the air, he broke down. “I cried for our whole life,
for our community, now dispersed all over the world, for
all the people killed by Saddam Hussein.”
As the United States moved to oust the Iraqi dictatorship
earlier this year, many partisans of the war imagined it
would create a new Middle East where Israel could survive
in security, where borders would open, trade would flourish.
Even the road to peace among Israelis and Palestinians would
go through Baghdad, it was said, as the city would become
an example of prosperity, tolerance and coexistence. After
all, less than a century ago a quarter of the city’s
population was Jewish, and among their hundreds of thousands
of descendants, many dared imagine they could visit their
old homes, perhaps reclaim their birthrights, even build
new businesses.
But Emad Levy, 38, who was born and raised in Baghdad and
lives there still as the “acting rabbi” of a
community that has dwindled to 26 people, shares neither
the exiles’ nostalgia, nor any grand hopes for what’s
to come. “We have no future here, believe me,”
he says. Levy’s 82-year-old father was given the chance
to leave with five other aging Jews in July, aboard a secret
charter flight direct from Baghdad International to Ben-Gurion
Airport. “Later I will follow,” says Levy, after
he has sold off the house and other assets too difficult
to take with him.
In the harsh reality of today’s Iraq, those Jews who
remain are much freer than they were under Saddam, who watched
them all as potential spies. But they say the remnants of
their culture are in greater danger now, and so are their
lives. Baghdad’s last open synagogue, behind a high
wall in the district of Bataween, was locked and shuttered
about two weeks before the American invasion began, and
has not been used for regular services since. “We
cannot let anybody enter the synagogue,” Levy explains,
“because the neighbors see people and say, ‘They
are Zionists.’ And, then, it is so easy to throw a
bomb over the wall.”
The community has lived through millennia of persecutions
and prosperity, panic, hope and despair. “We have
been here for 2,600 years, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar,”
says Levy, when the Babylonian tyrant carried thousands
of Jews from Jerusalem into exile. (“By the rivers
of Babylon,” says the psalm, “there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”) But they
could not survive the frightening tumult of an Arab world
inflamed for more than 60 years by anger against modern
Zionism. And it’s that deeply cultivated hatred, now
stoked again by television images of Israeli-Palestinian
warfare, that makes high-minded plans to transform the region
seem so remote from the reality on the ground.
“The people here, they blame everything on the Jews,”
says Levy. He should know: his family persevered in Iraq
as virtually all other Jews left. His father was alive to
witness the atrocities committed against Iraq’s Jewish
community in 1941, when hundreds were killed in riots. After
1948, more than 100,000 Jews left everything they had and
fled to the new state of Israel. Perhaps 6,000 remained,
among them the wealthiest. But a series of mysterious bombings
persuaded most of those to leave as well in the early 1950s.
The rage that followed Israel’s lightning victory
in the 1967 war, then the rise of Saddam’s lethally
paranoid regime and the public hanging of alleged Zionist
spies, pared the community down to hundreds, then scores,
and now only those couple of dozen who are left. Most are
in their 70s or 80s. There’s not a single woman for
Levy to marry.
Many Jews in Israel, Europe and the United States want to
face down the hatred in Iraq. “There is a trend to
demonize the Jew, and it has to be confronted,” says
Shuker. “If we are fearful and we don’t do something
about it, then we are contributors, too.” Author Joseph
Braude, an American of Iraqi Jewish decent, argues that
“exiles serve as an important bridge of mentality
between their past country and their new country.”
But every report of Israeli business initiatives in Iraq,
often in partnership with Jordanian or Turkish companies,
feeds rumors on the street that the U.S. occupation is a
Zionist plot to take the country away from the Arabs. Stories
about a firm called the Iraqi International Law Group (IILG),
for instance, are an anti-American propagandist’s
dream: its president is Salem (Sam) Chalabi, nephew of Iraqi
Governing Council member, Ahmad Chalabi, a Pentagon favorite.
One of the partners of the company is Marc Zell, an American-born
Israeli and outspoken advocate of the settler movement in
the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
In July, Shiite cleric Ayatollah Kazem al-Husseini al-Haieri
issued a fatwa demanding death for Jews who bought property
in Iraq. Members of the so-called Army of Mohammed, one
of the guerrilla groups attacking Americans, told NEWSWEEK
they see their battle as one against Zionists as much as
the United States. The 25-member Iraqi Governing Council,
hand-picked by the United States, itself issued a statement
last week flatly condemning Israel for bombing “the
neighboring sister country Syria” in retaliation for
the suicide bombing in Haifa.
“The people here are very angry,” says Levy
one afternoon in the living room of the rambling house he’s
getting ready to leave behind. The perceived symmetry between
the U.S. occupation and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian
lands, he said, was a particular sore point: “They
do not like to be turned into Palestinians.” And what
of the Jews who dream of a land of promise, if not a promised
land, in Iraq? Jews of Iraqi descent ” think that
they would like to be in Iraq again,” says Levy. “They
think that it is life in the 1950s, not the life that it
is now.” Such dreams are easier to nurture, it seems,
far away from the reality of today’s Iraq.
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