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Bent on destroying Israel, and gripped by vicious anti-Semitism, Baghdad ‘pauperized’ its Jews and forced them to leave for the nascent Jewish state in 1951-2. It believed Israel would collapse under the strain. But the immigrants ultimately helped Israel thrive, and it was Iraq that suffered After Adolf Hitler’s defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world. Egypt was a...

n 2003, I served as the U.S. Coalition official responsible for “administering” the province of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. At the time, I was struck by how the different communities intermarried, spoke each other’s languages, and loved each other’s cultures. In an attempt to defuse tensions emerging from the struggle for power after the overthrow of Saddam’s regime, I organized a cultural event at the Kirkuk museum. For one evening, many of the artifacts that had been looted from the museum and that were being kept in people’s homes were put back on display. Groups put on traditional performances. The...

Some 60 years later, in Baghdad the Jews are a ghostly memory. A FEW hours in the Shorja open market in Baghdad can teach you a lot – about the Middle East’s past, its present and its apparent future. What’s to be found there is informative. What is absent – equally so. My fixer Yusuf hadn’t wanted to take me to Shorja. I was in Baghdad for a reporting project on the Shi’ite militias. Between heading for Anbar with Kata’ib Hezbollah and up to Baiji with the Badr Corps, we had a few hours of down time in Baghdad, so...

Farhud: a slaughter in Iraq By Lyn Julius, May 31, 2011 There was a frenzied banging on the front door. When my mother answered it, she recognised her aunt's Jewish cook, ashen-faced, pleading to be let in: "I was on a bus, and the Muslims were pulling the Jewish passengers out and killing them. I said I was a Christian." A month earlier, pro-Nazi officers led by Rashid Ali al-Ghailani, had staged a successful coup in Iraq. The German-backed Rashid Ali and his men were soon routed by British troops - but not before they had incited murder and mayhem...

Iraq's Last Jews - Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval and Escape from Modern Babylon Edited by Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha and Robert Shasha Introduction by Prof. Shmuel Moreh Palgrave-Macmillan 211 pp., $75.99 (hardcover) How does one explain the reason why a prosperous community of 140,000 people, with a history and heritage of 2,600 years, uproots itself en masse, and leaves Iraq, the country which it helped modernize in all areas - government and politics, economy, medicine, education, literature, poetry and music? An explanation for this extraordinary historical phenomenon is found in Iraq's Last Jews. This book includes testimonies of 19...

Eight Baghdad Jews who represent the remnants of that city's Jewish community are facing security threats so grave that they need to flee the country, the community's caretaker, Canon Andrew White, told The Jerusalem Post from London on Tuesday. Locals try to move wreckage from the scene of a massive car bomb attack in the Sadr City area of Baghdad. Photo: AP [file] According to White, who himself has fled from Baghdad due to terrorist threats, the situation has become dire for the 2,600-year-old community, which only 100 years ago made up a third of Baghdad's population. Ever since sectarian...

In his worn sandals and gray spotted shirt 82-year-old Brahim -- one of the last Jews in Baghdad, perhaps the last -- seems tired but undaunted by the violence raging around him. "They came to take me away three years ago and wanted me to leave," said Brahim, explaining that well-wishers had wanted to evacuate him to safety in the chaos following the fall of Saddam Hussein. Old, but wiry and alert, Brahim remains determined to stay put. "Why should I leave? Why change? I always lived here. I do not want to shift," said Brahim, running a hand through...

1 June 2006 65th Anniversary of the Baghdad anti-Jewish Pogrom Judeoscope Grand Mufti of Jerusalem inspecting Muslim Nazi trained troops 65 years ago on this day, Iraqi Arabs launched a Nazi-inspired two-day pogrom, the Farhud, which would anticipate the end of some 2,600 years of Jewish life in Iraq. In remembrance of this tragic event, Judeoscope presents “The forgotten Holocaust Pogrom” a short film produced by the International Sephardic Leadership Council documenting the Farhud and its exclusion from Holocaust scholarship and commemoration, as well as other relevant online articles and resources. The Farhud: The forgotten Holocaust Pogrom (Produced by the...

A Jewish storyteller from Mosul plays the rababa, an ancient Bedouin instrument. "On the Tigris River: A Trip to North Iraq," read the large pink sign at the entrance to the sixth annual academic conference of the Mosul Jewry Heritage Center in Haifa. Indeed, Iraqi-Israeli Jews who were born in the now violence-plagued city of Mosul will make a trip to Iraq to "return to their roots" this spring. This trip, promises the sign, will include visits to the grave of Jonah the Prophet, in Mosul, the grave of Rabbi Nahum al-Kushi of Mt. Sinai, the cave of Abraham, and...

In two communiqués issued today al-Qaeda in Iraq claims responsibility for the murder of eighteen Jewish people in al-Mosul, when a suicide bombed detonated his car in the city’s agricultural section on an intelligence convoy, and announces the “harvest” revenge attacks for the Sunnis in Tal Afar between Wednesday, September 14, and yesterday, in areas south of Baghdad and in Abu Ghraib. The attacks include multiple explosives, suicide bombings, and firing of rockets on American and Iraqi targets.

Exclusive: Iraqi Jews to demand compensation for billions in lost assets The Iraqi community was among the largest in the Arab world.

Baghdad, 27 July (AKI) - The first draft of the new Iraqi constitution will prevent Iraqi Jews, stripped of their nationality in the 1940s and 1950s, from re-obtaining it, Mundhir al-Fadl, an Iraqi MP and member of the constituent assembly's constitution commisssion, has told Adnkronos International (AKI). Al-Fadl, one of the commision members responsible for drafting the constitution's chapter on "rights and duties" explained that one paragraph of the draft says that "the Iraqi nationality is a right acquired by every Iraqi, which cannot be withheld for any reason and is the basis of his citizenship." "All those who have...

WASHINGTON - A damaged Torah, a centuries-old Bible and other rare documents important to Iraq's few remaining Jews were rescued from a flooded cellar in Baghdad, only to remain in limbo here. Their restoration, like so much else these days, awaits the emergence of a new Iraq. Historians at the National Archives, which preserves such priceless artifacts as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, are examining the treasure trove of materials found in the basement of the headquarters for Saddam Hussein's secret police. The materials are in moderate to poor condition - they remained wet for several weeks after being...

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraqis are complaining about their first weekend break, and some high schoolers even went to class Saturday to protest a decision introducing a second weekly day off that coincides with the Jewish Sabbath. It's not that the Iraqis do not want time off -- they just want the extra day moved to Thursday. ''We don't want Saturday! It's a Jewish holiday!'' students chanted as they marched in protest last week to the governor's office in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. A high schooler pulled out a hand grenade and started waving it, and police fired into...

It was a long trip from Tel-Aviv to the Iraqi elections polling station in Amman. But Jacky Khugi, 37, was not deterred. He made it twice last week. "It was a real pain," he said. "I had to go once to register and again to vote." Khugi, an Israeli journalist working at Ma'ariv newspaper was born in Petach Tikvah to Iraqi-born parents. By Iraqi law that gave him the right to participate in the Iraqi elections and he had three reasons to take advantage of that. Not only did he want to write the one-of-a-kind story for his paper and...

Baghdad, June 22, 2004. Just days before the Coalition Provisional Authority is scheduled to return power to Iraqi control, four Iraqi Jews--two in their forties, two elderly--inconspicuously board a Royal Jordanian airplane to Amman. Their travel documents and $800 airline tickets suggest nothing out of the ordinary. But their journey is being closely monitored by HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), which for more than a century has been rescuing beleaguered Jews throughout the world. In Amman, two of the refugees transit directly to Israel where their families eagerly await them; the other two travel to an undisclosed country while...

Rachel Zelon, above, comforts fever-stricken Sasson in his 12 x 12-foot room in an Iraqi shelter. Below left, a recovered, happier Sasson on the plane to Israel. HIAS PHOTOs / JEFF LUTERBACH "I'm like you. I'm Jewish. I'm here to take you home." With those few, simple words, New Jersey resident Rachel Zelon came almost full circle on an arduous journey that had begun over three years before. In the sweltering June of 2003, and then again in July and November of that year, Zelon, blonde, petite and probably weighing no more than 100 pounds soaking wet, traveled to war-torn...

Kurdish leader says Israelis free to visit Baghdad, Iraq Press, April 20, 2004 – Iraqi Kurdish Jews who migrated to Israel are free to visit relatives in northern Iraq, a Kurdish leader said. In remarks published in Azzaman newspaper the leader said even Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would be welcome “in the streets of Iraqi Kurdistan” if he was of Kurdish origin. “Muslims and Jews in Iraq were connected through marriage … and those who visit Iraq are not Israeli only but Iraqi Jews,” Azzaman, Iraq’s most influential newspaper, quoted the Kurdish official as saying. The newspaper did not...

The Ash-Sharq newspaper of Qatar carried a report earlier this month of a Zionist settlement project - in northern Iraq. This follows a paranoid obsession fomented by the Iraqi press with alleged land purchases by Jews in the newly liberated Iraq, particularly by expelled Kurdish Jews. According to an Islamic fundamentalist website, the newspaper quoted "Turkoman sources" in northern Iraq who claimed that Israel has begun to take control of a 200 sq. km. area along the Syrian border and stretching to Iran. This objective, the newspaper's sources say, is to settle more than 150,000 Jews in the area that...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 27 — For several weeks, members of the Iraqi Governing Council have been trying to decide whether they should allow tens of thousands of Iraqi Jews who fled the country in the 1950's and in later years to return. So far, the answer appears to be no. Late last year, the council approved proposed legislation that would have allowed thousands of Iraqis who fled or were expelled from the country to reclaim their Iraqi citizenship — unless they were Jewish, council members said. The proposal did not specifically mention Jews, they said, but it contained language that...