Lea Suissa, who left Morocco aged nine, has this timely response in the Jerusalem Post to IfnotNow and other US anti-Zionist groups who accuse Zionist initiatives like Birthright of rehashing IDF talking points. She asks why these groups consistently ignore the suffering of Jews in Arab countries, including forced conversions, and praises Birthright for exposing their young tourists to Druze and Bedouin culture. (Isn't it time Birthright also took them to meet Moroccan or Iraqi Jews?)
The grave of Solika Hachuel, who chose to die rather than convert to Islam
While Morocco did not expel its Jews like countries such as Egypt and
Iraq did, Moroccan Jews still suffered from an intense wave of
antisemitism from the moment French rule was declining, until the day my
family left the country. In the 1950s, a wave of terror attacks
targeted the Jewish community. It was just as bloody as the Second
Intifada. While there was a decrease in anti-Jewish terror attacks after
Morocco attained independence, Jews still feared for their future.
By
the 1960s, the bulk of our community had already departed the country,
and we were cut off from those dearest to us. At the same time, we
remained Jews in a Muslim-majority nation, which is a very difficult
situation. One of my relatives was abducted, raped and forcefully
converted to Islam. Non-Muslims frequently suffer such indignities in
the Arab world. In fact, when I recently traveled to Morocco, I visited
the grave of Suleika, a Jewish woman who was martyred because she
refused to leave the faith of her ancestors and marry a Muslim. To this
day, she serves as an inspiration for Moroccan Jewish women, with many
pilgrims from around the world visiting her grave. My relative spent her
entire life as a hostage, unable to join the rest of our family in
Israel. Many Moroccan Jewish girls got married young just so they would
not face a similar fate.
Given what my family suffered, it is highly disturbing that the
young Jewish American activists of IfNotNow demonstrate complete
ignorance of my Middle Eastern history. While the epicenter of their
mission is combating Palestinian suffering, they mention nothing on
their website about the injustices suffered by the Jews of the Arab
world except for a brief mention of the economic injustices we faced.
There is no mention of the horrors Arab countries inflicted upon Jews.
I
am an olive-skinned, marginalized Jewish woman from Morocco. When my
son participated in a Birthright tour as an Israeli, he represented our
voice and did everything he could to share Moroccan Jewish culture with
the Americans on the trip. On the same tour, Americans were exposed to
Druze and Bedouin culture as well as other aspects of Israel’s diverse
landscape – far more than rehashing IDF talking points, as IfNotNow
accuses Birthright of doing. Jews from the Arab world are invisible to
IfNotNow and other radical leftist groups in the US.
For
anti-Zionist Jews, the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entails
violent, white, “colonialist” Jewish settlers fighting against poor,
dark-skinned, oppressed Palestinians. Yet there are plenty of
impoverished Jews of color whose narrative they blatantly ignore.
Palestinian
teenager Ahed Tamimi – the blonde-haired, blue-eyed terror advocate and
media darling who participated in violent riots and smacked an IDF
soldier – lives like a celebrity, going on world tours to champion the
Palestinian cause.
Simultaneously, peaceful dark-skinned Middle
Eastern Jewish refugees, who want nothing more than to be compensated
for their suffering and to move on with their lives, can only dream of
garnering the public spotlight that Tamimi receives.
It is time for this charade to end. If not now, when?
Tonight begins the Jewish festival of Tu-Bshvat. Traditionally, it is a more important festival in the Sephardi tradition. Here are some recipes collected by Ronit Treatman in the Philadelphia Jewish Voice:
The following Sephardic recipes are adapted from The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden. These traditional Tu B’Shevat recipes are vegan, gluten-free, and diabetic friendly. They are very tactile, and require no cooking. North African Date-Walnut Balls
1 Lb. dried dates
2 ½ cups toasted, chopped walnuts
½ cup toasted, ground walnuts
Place the dates in a food processor. Grind them into a paste, adding a little cold water if necessary.
When the dates are transformed into a paste, mix in the chopped walnuts.
Rub a little olive oil into your hands. This will prevent the paste
from sticking to your fingers. Shape the paste into little balls.
Roll the date-nut balls in the ground walnuts to garnish.
Syrian Apricot-Pistachio Balls
1 Lb. dried apricots
½ cup toasted, chopped pistachios
½ cup toasted, ground pistachios
Prepare in the same manner as above for the Date – Walnut Balls.
The following recipe is from Jewish Spain. It is a celebration of
the almond, the first tree that blooms in Israel in the springtime.
Judeo-Spanish Dates Stuffed With Marzipan
Pitted dried dates
5 ½ cups toasted, ground almonds
½ lemon
3 drops of almond extract
2 cups of sugar
1-cup water
Bring to a boil the water, sugar, and juice of ½ lemon in a saucepan.
Allow to boil for about 10 minutes. Add the almond extract and ground
almonds. Stir well for about 3 minutes.
Lubricate your hands with a little olive oil, so the paste does not stick to your fingers.
Stuff the dates with the almond paste.
It has been said that Jewish Voice for Peace is neither representative of Jews, nor is it pro-Peace. Its voice on the far left edge of the US Jewish community has been rather shrill since the organisation was founded in 1996.
.
Now, however, with the publication of its Jews of the Middle East worksheet and its document Our approach to Middle East Peace, JVP is employing a new tactic: to co-opt Mizrahi Jews into its anti-Zionist struggle.
Drawing on the revisionism of the academics Zvi Ben-Dror Benite, Yehouda Shenhav and Ella Shohat, JVP begins by falsifying the history of Middle Eastern and North African Jews. We are not told that these Jews were settled in the region since Biblical times, predating Islam by 1,000 years, lest the impression be shattered that Jews are other than white 'colonial settlers'. JVP begins its history lesson with the Ottomans. Jews paid a poll tax so that the Ottoman empire might protect them, and violence against them was 'unusual'.
Two falsehoods in one sentence. The dhimmi system was a Mafia-style protection racket built on extortion and humiliation : Jews were granted few rights. Pre-1948 massacres against the Jews were not unusual.
If Zionism was a European movement, so was Arab nationalism. In fact the latter was predicated on a myth: that a common language was enough to glue disparate tribes together. Arab nationalism turned out to be a dismal failure - a recipe for tyranny and internecine conflict, while Israel, despite never knowing a minute of peace, has been an outstanding success.
While Mizrahim were not, by and large, fans of the modern secular Zionist movement, fledgling Zionist groups were established in Arab countries. Jews in Iraq turned to underground Zionism in large numbers after the trauma of the 1941 Farhud massacre, although the Jewish leadership in Arab countries was anxious to disassociate itself from Zionism for reasons of self-preservation. Mizrahim had always been spiritual Zionists, and this explains the messianism that guided pious Jews fleeing Yemen and the Maghreb to Israel.
But JVP downplays the 'push' factors of persecution and violence which drove these ancient Jewish communities to extinction. 'It's complicated,' it implies. 'Jews left for a variety of reasons'. Yet barely 4,000 remain out of one million. No ethnic cleansing there, according to JVP. The real victims, it believes, were the Palestinians who still number over a million in Israel itself, after a war started by their own leadership.
Jews hanged in Baghdad in 1969: even non-Zionists were victimised in the end
What JVP does not grasp is that even non-Zionist Jews who refused to move to Israel were victimised in the end. This month we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the brutal hangings of nine Jews in Baghdad's liberation square on trumped-up spying charges, and the disappearance of scores more. These Jews had had no contact with Israel for 20 years.
JVP assumes that the relations between Jews and Muslims were cordial and brotherly, until colonialism imposed a stratification of whites at the top, Jews in the middle and Arabs at the bottom. In fact pre-colonial relations between dhimmi Jews and Muslims were unequal, often tense and fearful.
Muslims resented the European colonials for overturning the traditional hierarchy, which had Muslims at the top and women, non-Muslims and slaves at the bottom.
JVP abhors Jewish power. When JVP talks about 'peace' it means submission. JVP is proposing nothing less than a return to 'dhimmi' status in a majority-Arab state. It would do well to learn from the Mizrahi experience.
Gila Gamliel, minister of Social Equality, launched Seeing the Voices.
Some 30,000 people have downloaded a smartphone app for documenting the personal stories of Jewish immigrants to Israel from Arab states and Iran in the three weeks since the app first launched on the website Seeing the Voices. The app enables children or grandchildren to interview relatives born in Arab countries or Iran. The Seeing the Voices website already has 500 video testimonies. JIMENA is a partner with the project, and has donated funds for testimonies to be translated into English. (With thanks: Imre, Gina)
An initiative of the Social Equality Ministry, the Hebrew-language Seeing the Voices app is available for free and allows Israelis from Arab countries and Iran to record and upload videos of them telling their stories.
The app is one prong of the Seeing the Voices initiative to tell the story of immigrants from Arab countries and Iran, whose story has been marginalized in Israel. The government has invested 10 million shekels ($2.7 million) in the project to date.
Social Equality Minister Gila Gamliel says the application "makes the mission possible and accessible."
"I'm glad the younger generation has mobilized in support" of the project, Gamliel said.
Born in Morocco in 1941, internationally famous chanteuse Margalit Azran, better known as Maya Casabianca, passed away last week at age 78, after living during the last decades of her life in a small house in Haifa. Haaretz reports (with thanks Lily):
Her only daughter, Natalie Yishai, put a temporary sign on her mother’s grave bearing her well-known stage name, and decided to issue a statement about her
death to the media.
Yigal Bashan passed away not long ago, and then there was Amos Oz,” says Yishai. “And I thought – Maya Casabianca will pass away and no one will remember her. No one will know or say anything about it.”
But Yishai’s announcement did make a difference, at least a small one. Because of it, many people, like me, decided to look up this person – to understand just who this famous singer was, the one who hobnobbed with the rich and famous in France and had a secret, years-long affair with Farid al-Atrash, one of the great Arabic singers of all time.
Why has she been forgotten in Israel?
In the 1960s, Casabianca was a huge star who performed on the world’s biggest stages – at L’Olympia in Paris; in front of Soviet leaders at the Bolshoi in Moscow; with Syrian rulers in the audience in Damascus; before the shah in Iran. She lived in Paris and hung out with the likes of Georges Brassens, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and Sacha Distel.
All told Casabianca recorded more than 300 songs in Arabic, French, Turkish, Farsi and later in Hebrew, and topped the charts alongside Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour, back in the day. She made such a contribution to French culture that she received an entry in the encyclopedia of the most influential people in France.
Over 50 prominent Israeli Jews of Mizrahi origin have filed a petition to
the High Court of Justice demanding it strike down the Jewish Nation-State Law, saying it 'discriminates against both Palestinian citizens and Jewish Mizrahi citizens of Israel'. The signatories are a who's-who of radical leftists and activists. I have 'fisked' in italics this article from +972 by Orli Noy, one of the signatories. (With thanks: Daniel)
There is an assumption here that Arabs and Mizrahi Jews have common values - which is demonstrably untrue.
According to the petition, the law, which demotes Arabic
from an official language to one with “special status,” is
“anti-Jewish” for excluding the history and culture of Jews from Arab
and Muslim countries, “while strengthening the impression that
Jewish-Arab culture is inferior…and anchoring the identity of the State
of Israel as anti-Arab.”
Not all Jews from Arab countries speak Arabic, and when they do, it is a dialect often unintelligible to Muslims. What is Judeo-Arabic culture? You could define the mainstream trends in Israeli culture, music and food as Judeo-Arabic. It is absurd to claim that Israel discriminates against its dominant culture.
The petition, which was written and submitted by Attorney Netta
Amar-Shiff, also refers to a clause in the law that establishes Jewish
settlement “as a national value.” According to the petitioners, every
time Israel takes it upon itself to demographically “re-engineer” the
land, it harms Mizrahim by pushing them into the country’s underserved geographical periphery. This process hinders their access to highly-valued land through admissions committees, which allow communities across the country to reject housing applicants based on their “social suitability.”
There is a lot to be said against admissions committees but there is nothing in the nation-state law about them. Nor is there any force 'pushing Mizrahim to the periphery'.
Author Sami Michael
Among the signatories are renowned author Sami Michael, Professor
Yehuda Shenhav, Professor Henriette Dahan-Kalev, Israeli Black Panther
and social justice activist Reuven Abergil, among others. (Full
disclosure: the writer is one of the signatories of the petition).
According to the petitioners, Mizrahim were largely excluded from the
law’s formulation, despite the fact that it would affect their
community’s right to preserve its heritage, and that its blatant
anti-Arab bias would adversely affect Jews from Arab countries.
Professor Yehouda Shenhav These are all radical leftists. What proof is there that Mizrahim were excluded from the law's formulation ? The Knesset passed this law by a small majority and there is no evidence that Mizrahi MKs were excluded from the vote.
Following Israel’s establishment, authorities did everything they could to suppress Arab identity and culture
among immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries through a forced
“melting pot” doctrine, leaving them both materially and culturally
disenfranchised. More than six decades ago, Israeli diplomat and Arabic
scholar Abba Eban said: “The goal must be to instill in them a Western
spirit, and not let them drag us into an unnatural Orient. One of the
biggest fears… is the danger that the large number of immigrants of
Mizrahi origin will force Israel to compare how cultured we are to our
neighbors.”
Mizrahim walk around the Mamila neighborhood in West Jerusalem, 1957. (GPO)
For 70 years, this worldview formed the basis for how Israel viewed
Mizrahim.
Not true. One can cherry-pick similar quotes by Israel's founding fathers till kingdom come. There are also positive statements.
The political establishment demanded Mizrahi Jews renounce
their Arab identity, while driving a wedge between them and their
cultural histories. And yet, despite the establishment’s attempts at
cultural erasure, expert opinions and affidavits attached to the
petition show that many Mizrahim — including younger generations —
continue to view Arabic as both culturally and linguistically relevant
to their personal lives.
One can equally argue in its drive to create a new Hebrew-speaking Israeli out of its citizens, the state discriminated against Yiddish and the culture of Eastern Europe.
The expert opinions also seek to lay out the complex histories of
Jews from Arab countries, in order to explain why the law, akin to a
constitutional amendment, would be both harmful to the cultural legacy
of Mizrahim and would continue to negatively affect them. According to
Professor Elitzur Bar-Asher, a linguist and expert on the Hebrew
language, the goal of the law is not to “strengthen Hebrew [at the
expense of Arabic], but to lower its Arabic counterpart.”
In his expert opinion, Dr. Moshe Behar demonstrated how Arabic was an
inseparable part the Jewish intellectual world in the Middle East
during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods, respectively. According
to Behar, Jewish intellectuals considered knowledge of Arabic as a
necessity for all Jews in the region.
Cultural researcher Shira Ohayon described the influence of the
Arabic language and its connection to the revival of the Hebrew
language, poetry and Jewish liturgy, while cultural scholar and film
director Eyal Sagui Bizawe noted how Jews living in Arab countries took
an active part in the creation of Arab culture, and how that very
culture became part of their own heritage.
The petition is an important, and perhaps revolutionary milestone in
the Mizrahi struggle in Israel. Among the signatories are women and men,
religious, secular and traditional, those who define themselves as
Zionists and others who do not. The petitioners seek to anchor
Mizrahi identity in its deepest sense by demanding our cultural and
historical rights, while using all legal, academic, and moral tools to
reject any attempt to isolate Mizrahi Jews from our natural environment —
all for the benefit of Israel’s “melting pot” ideology.
Lyn Julius, author the book UPROOTED and co-founder of Harif, presents J-TV's new eight-minute video, The Untold Exodus of Jews from Arab Lands.
In a week, the video has had over 80,000 views on Facebook and hundreds have seen it on Youtube.
Fascinating interview in Hamodia by Sara Lehmann with the protagonist of the film Shadow in Baghdad, Linda Menuhin, whose father was abducted in 1970s Iraq and never seen again. Linda will be showing the film at SOAS in London on 17 January 2019.
Yaakov Abdul Aziz, Linda's father, in dark suit and glasses with the last rabbi of Iraq (in turban and dark classes), Rabbi Sasson Khedouri.
How did the war affect your everyday life as a Jew?
They started to come after the Jews. They enacted many measures against the Jews. Jews were kicked out of social clubs, not admitted to university, not allowed to work anywhere. There was a kind of tightening of the rope around us. There was also incitement against Jews on the radio, in the newspapers. Even our Muslim friends and neighbors were scared to show any relationship with Jews. Just like in Germany.
What happened in Germany was the result of long-simmering anti-Semitism that gradually found expression in German laws against the Jews. But despite anti-Semitic allusions in the Koran, it seems as if this anti-Semitism had national and political origins.
Yes, you are absolutely right. Somehow those allusions didn’t float to the surface all these years. First of all, Jews pre-dated Islam in Iraq by 1300 years. So we were the indigenous people and we really didn’t feel anti-Semitism. Apart from the incident of the Farhud, anti-Semitic acts were exceptions to the rule.
When the Baath Party came to power, they tried to intimidate the whole country. The best way is to start with the Jews, the most vulnerable component of the population. And then they went after the Christians and afterwards the Muslims themselves. I always say, first Saturday people, then Sunday people, and then Friday people.
In the documentary you talk about the public executions of Jews at Fahrir Square. Can you describe that episode and how it affected you?
In 1969, following a fake trial, Iraqi authorities publicly hanged 14 people accused of spying for Israel, nine of whom were Jews. I remember there was a live transmission on the radio of the fake trials for months. It was a terrible period for the Jews.
During that time, we used to fast every Monday and Thursday and pray, as was customary in a time of trepidation for Jews. We prayed things would improve. In 1968, more and more people were arrested, interrogated, beaten in prisons, and never returned home. A 40-year-old relative of mine was taken to be questioned and came back in a body bag. Eventually they even stopped returning bodies and there was no burial. It was a cruel and violent regime that affected everybody.
Is that what drove you to leave Israel on your own in 1970?
Since childhood, my mother always told us stories about her family in Israel, and there was constant correspondence with our relatives there. So we grew up with the sense that we would eventually move there. But all these atrocities convinced me that we Jews will have the same fate in Iraq as those arrested and should move to Israel to join our brothers and sisters.
I left with my brother in December 1970, and my mother and younger sister left six months after us. Our escape route took us through Iran, in the bitter cold. We left on a Friday and on Sunday my father was arrested, which proves that they were following every move of the Jews. He was arrested, released and then arrested again after my mother’s departure. We believe he was arrested because he bailed out 132 Jews who were caught trying to leave Iraq. My father signed an affidavit of support and was held responsible for their commitment to stay in Iraq and not run away again.
He couldn’t do it for all of them because he had to pay a sum of money for each, so he had to find Muslim lawyers to do it. At that time, it wasn’t easy, because who would want to bail out a Jew? But he found some young Muslim lawyers trying to make a living who agreed to do it. Once these Jews started to leave again, my father didn’t have the capacity to pay all these amounts. I don’t know what happened to the other Muslim lawyers.
On the one hand the Iraqis didn’t want the Jews, and on the other they didn’t want them to leave?
It’s not that they didn’t want Jews to leave. That was a pretext. They were looking for ways to extort them. I was always trying to find a common denominator among those Jews who were arrested; the majority were rich people that the government would benefit from by arresting.
But in the end my father didn’t have the capacity to pay all the amounts he obligated himself to. Also, it was easier to pick him up because he was alone and didn’t have family left to inquire about him.
What prompted you to start searching for your father after so many years?
In 1991, during the Gulf War in Iraq, I was working as an Israeli television commentator and began having a very tough time. I started to have nightmares about Saddam Hussein and my position as an Iraqi working for Israelis. All of a sudden, I began to hate the Arabic language, which was my mother tongue. I eventually had to quit my job as a Middle East correspondent and editor with the IBA (Israeli Broadcast Authority) in Arabic and went to work for the Israeli police in intelligence.
By 2003, the Iraq War put Iraq in the news again on a daily basis. But now things were different. Before then, there was an iron curtain which prevented me from even asking questions; now there was internet access to the Iraqi press. I approached the American embassy and then the Israeli Defense but nothing came out of it. Next, I went to London, because many Iraqis fled there from the Baath regime, primarily non-Jews. I met people who knew my father, but got no concrete information.
I followed the news coming out from Iraq about the Baath regime’s mistreatment of Iraqis. I felt sympathy for all those who suffered. It wasn’t only me. I also saw sympathy expressed for the Jews. So I started to write and publish again in Arabic in a more personal way, and I started to get feedback.
Through such feedback you describe meeting an Iraqi journalist who tried to help you solve the mystery of your father’s disappearance. Were you surprised to get help from an Iraqi?
Yes. And I was very proud that I was able to penetrate the Arabic world. It used to be taboo. Who would ever publish something in Arabic by a Jew? Or an Israeli? But there were many people who wanted to help me who are not in the film.
The Iraqi journalist spoke of his grandmother who remembered the “peace-loving Jewish neighbors who were forced to flee” and asks, “Why do we talk about the Christians and other minorities but not about the Jewish community? The community was here for over 2000 years.”
Do you think he is an anomaly?
No. These days, on the contrary. I wrote many pieces about the earthquake that is shifting public opinion about the Jews. First of all, the Iraqi population was a collective victim of its rulers and I think the violence had touched everyone. And there was fear, so no one would stand up for a Jew. They wouldn’t stand up for their brother.
Now Hebrew and English books about Iraqi Jews are being translated into Arabic. I even have a picture of an Iraqi minister buying books about Jews. I think this is because it’s an issue of Iraqi identity, not just a minority identity. Now that everything is ruined, they are trying to rebuild that identity.
The Bush Doctrine that guided the Iraq War was intended to create democracy in Iraq but failed because of corruption and an ideological entrenchment of anti-democratic forces. Would you agree that it’s an uphill battle to change this mindset?
Yes, there was a culture of violence with political upheaval and indoctrination of entrenched violence. Bush came and wanted to change it, and it doesn’t change.
But in relation to the Jews, it’s different. They look at the Jews as always having been part and parcel of the Iraqi fabric of society. Not only that, but the Iraqi Jews had contributed so much to the Iraqi society and economy. So dreaming of the Jews coming back is not just idealistic. They keep asking for their return. Looking for the Jews is not just a whim; it’s a practical goal. There’s a strong belief that since the Jews left, there’s no brachah in Iraq.
There’s also a change of attitude towards Israel. The Iraqis see that Israel has done so much for the Palestinian cause and they think that the Palestinians have exempted themselves from the burden of responsibility. They feel that the Palestinians should focus on taking care of themselves.
Do they contrast the Palestinian refugee problem with the successful Israeli absorption of close to a million Jewish refugees from Arab countries?
Yes, but this population swap wasn’t highlighted enough. The story of the Jewish refugees was cut off from the narrative, both in Israel and abroad. And that’s what made me start advocating for this case. I have been active with the Justice for Jews from Arab Countries initiative.
I also helped to achieve the Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from Arab Countries, which was instituted in 2014. This day, celebrated on November 30, is commemorated in Israeli schools too, where it needs to be taught. There are two types of populations in Israel: Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. 50 percent of Jews don’t know about their own history, which is not fair.
Edwin Shuker is the lead in a potential lawsuit that could be brought against Iraq, should it insist that the Iraqi-Jewish archive, which contains Shuker's own school certificate, must be returned. Since the deadline expired in September 2018, however, the Iraqis have not formally asked for the archive to go back, although Shuker says that an unofficial extension has been agreed. He goes on to warn of the danger that Arab countries might lay claim to Jewish items even outside their countries if the US keeps signing bilateral agreements. Long feature in the Jewish Chronicle:
Fast
forward to 2013; Mr Shuker was in Washington, speaking to a group, when
he found out that the National Archive was due to exhibit items from
the Iraqi Jewish community. He went to the archive and persuaded the
curator of the exhibition and the president of the museum to give him a
preview.
“We started working through the exhibit. ‘This is the oldest Torah — 16th century. This is the oldest Talmud.’
They were exhibiting 24 items — out of 27,000.
US researchers with some of the Iraqi-Jewish documents (Photo: www.ija.archives.gov)
“And
then they said ‘these are personal items’ — divorce documents, marriage
documents, very personal — and they said ‘We also have an example of
the Iraqi Jewish school called Frank Iny School, and these are the
school reports of children.’
“I said, ‘that’s where I went’.
“There were two school reports, one for a boy and one for a girl. And the boy was me. I swear to God. The boy was me.
“I
thought, ‘This cannot be’. I was looking for a candid camera around. I
asked, ‘Excuse me, why did you choose this boy and this girl out of all
the thousands?’
“She said, ‘We are experts in preserving letters,
but not pictures. These reports had pictures — almost all of them were
underwater and we cannot recover them, except this little boy, whose
picture was just perfect.’
“I said, ‘Well, that little boy is me’. And she looked up, and you can imagine the emotion. We hugged each other.”
This,
however, was far from the end of the story — and this was where Mr
Shuker asked his Limmud audience to consider some issues with
potentially very far-reaching consequences for Jewish communities.
“Recently
the West has become very conscious and sensitive about things they have
taken from the East — antiquities and all sorts of things,” he said.
He
described how, “on a recent visit to the Foreign Office here, as part
of the Board of Deputies relationship with the British government, they
told us, in a great announcement, that they had managed to convince the
British Museum to send back to Iraq some surplus material… as a gesture
saying, ‘This belongs to you, please have it back’.
“And the great news that they wanted to share with us is that most of these are Jewish heirlooms.
“Similarly,
the State Department is now making bilateral agreements with all these
countries, saying, ‘We will not allow any of your items, especially the
failed states of Libya, Syria and Iraq — we will not allow stolen and
looted things from your museums to be traded here. We will seize it as
stolen property and return it.’
“Wonderful. But then it actually
states in the agreement, ‘including all the Jewish items and Jewish
archives that are there’ — which is a huge market, by the way, Sifrei
Torah.
“That agreement would mean that anything that Jews from Arab countries have left behind now has to go back.
“There
are synagogues in the United States thinking, ‘We are going to have to
justify why we have a Sefer Torah from Baghdad, which has to be
returned’. It could be interpreted like that, if somebody wanted to.”
The
idea that Jewish items, which were seized by Middle Eastern countries
from Jews, are now to be returned to the governments of those countries
by the UK and US is a painful one to many Jews, especially those from
Arab lands.
The Iraqi archive is a case in point,with ramifications and implications far beyond this collection.
“When
the Americans took the items, they were very sensitive that the Iraqis
should not think that they [the Americans] were taking their culture
away from them,” Mr Shuker said.
“So the State Department signed
an agreement in black and white that the United States are borrowing
this archive for the purpose of preservation, and it will be returned to
Iraq as soon as that is done.
“As soon as this 2013 exhibit came
along, the Iraqi embassy and the Iraqi government said, ‘Thank you very
much, you’ve done a fantastic job, now we want it back.’
“They
made a temporary agreement which ended in September 2018, which said ‘in
September 2018, the entire collection goes back’.”
However, Mr
Shuker has, as he has described, been “the lead in a Class A lawsuit” on
this issue. After all, one of the documents in question is demonstrably
his.
He believes that the school report would have been placed
with the other archival material because of what would have happened
when his family fled the country.
“There is a racist, antisemitic
law in Iraq, which is still there today, started in 1951, law number
five, which states that any Jew who leaves Iraq for more than three
months automatically is considered to have renounced his Iraqi
nationality and has no right to get it back. Even today.
“When we
escaped from Baghdad in 1971, there was an announcement in the
newspaper: ‘These are the runaways, you have three months to report
back, otherwise your nationality will be taken away and your assets’,
meaning they would go back to our home and strip it.”
Mr Shuker on a visit returning to Baghdad (Photo: Courtesy of Edwin Shuker)
Much
of the rest of the archival material was taken directly from the Iraqi
Jewish community by Saddam Hussein’s officials, Mr Shuker said.
“We
went to people — still, 50 years on, people who worked in the Iraqi
Jewish community at the time — they would not give their names in court.
Most of these files were at the offices of the Iraqi Jewish community.
“In
the early 80s, people came to them and said, ‘Saddam Hussein would like
to have a museum for his Iraqi Jewish community. We want all your
papers, all your archives.’
“The leaders said, ‘Of course, we would love to — please take everything.’ What else would you say to Saddam Hussein?”
There
are understandable fears that the archive will be mistreated if it is
returned to the country, with concern centred on how Jewish shrines in
the country have been treated — in particular, the shrine of the prophet
Ezekiel — since 2003.
“Nouri al-Maliki [Prime Minister of Iraq
from 2006-2014] gave a tender to an Iranian company,” Mr Shuker
explained. “They took over a huge area and constructed a very large
mosque, which completely incorporated the shrine of Ezekiel. The graves
were desecrated, the bones thrown out.”
Despite the agreement
being that the archived items would be returned in September 2018, Mr
Shuker told the audience, “We have been managing to delay the sending
back by telling the US State Department, ‘We will hold you responsible
if these archives go back to the same sewage waste that they came out
of. What guarantee have we got that they are actually going to be
treasured?’”
He confirmed that there had been a “three-year
extension, which is not yet formal, you will not see it on the
internet... to allow the Iraqis to come up with a proposal as to where
are they going to keep it, how are they going to make it accessible —
especially to the owners of those things, so that Edwin Shuker can take
his son and say, ‘This is my certificate, this is the place they took
from me’ — is that going to be open for us?”
However, Mr Shuker suggested that there were grounds for hope.
He
described how “the new Culture Minister of Iraq, appointed last
Tuesday, is a wise, kind man who loves our culture — many of us can call
him a friend.”
He also cited an upcoming deal in Egypt which
might provide a road map for other Arab countries in dealing with this
issue. “In the next few weeks, the Egyptian government will announce
that it is going to take over responsibility for the upkeep of certain
synagogues,” adding there will also be a new board which will include
members of Egypt’s tiny remaining Jewish community as well as
experienced former members of Egypt’s Jewish community who now live in
the diaspora.
Whether other countries will follow suit remains to be seen, but in Iraq, certainly, such an initiative seems needed.
“There are fifty-four synagogue properties in Baghdad alone,” Mr Shuker said.
“And in the basement of the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad, there are 400 Sifrei Torah”.
After three investigative commissions, the Yemenite children Affair refuses to die. Families whose children mysteriously disappeared in the early years of the state are preparing to sue the government and Jewish Agency. Moving report in Ynet News (with thanks: Boruch)
The last time Shoshana Nahshon saw her son, he was sound asleep.
The next day he disappeared, as did the next baby she gave birth to.
Salma Ozeri was able to save one son out of two. Riki Avivi Hindi, Rami
Hukayma and Havatzelet Asmi never got to meet their older siblings. They
only knew the pain of their disappearance. Now, Yemenite families whose
children disappeared are suing the State of Israel for reparations and
fighting to get their tragedy acknowledged, with the hope it might shed
some light on the mystery they have had to live with for their entire
lives.
Shoshana Nahshon: her 'healthy' son Salem was taken away
Despite years of denial, the tragedy of the Yemenite children refuses
to die. The stories that the families have been telling for decades
have started to come to life with the chilling revelations about how the
state acted. What really happened to the young children of Yemenite
Jews who arrived in Israel in the first years of the state? How many
children vanished? Where did they go?
Three investigative committees over the years have already looked
into the abductions of the Yemenite children. But none delivered
conclusive statements and all were heavily criticized for accepting
evidence that the children had died without further questions. It was
later discovered that many documents were either destroyed or never made
their way to court.
The 2001 report from the Kedmi Commission, set up in 1995 by late
prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, did make some progress: It determined
that, “69 children out of 800 are surely not deceased, and their fate is
unknown. These babies were given by their parents to hospitals or
children’s facilities and never returned. Some were taken by official
representatives in order to receive medical treatments or be
hospitalized and also never returned.” This is almost a confession when
coming from the state, whose official position was that nothing ever
happened.
But the committee’s final remark says it all: “This committee is sorry for the families’ loss.”
Lawyers who represent the families in their lawsuit against the state
and the Jewish Agency (which operated some of the immigration
facilities and process) said that this is the first time the families
have demanded answers, acknowledgment of what happened and reparations.
“These children were under the establishment’s care, and it was
determined (by the committee) that they were simply lost,” said one of
the lawyers. “An advanced country would voluntarily pay reparations,
instead of forcing them to sue. As is usual in such cases, the families
aren’t suing for a specific sum but will leave it to the courts. We
expect millions of shekels to be distributed among the families whose
children disappeared.”
The State Prosecutor's Office said the lawsuit has not yet been filed and they therefore cannot comment at this stage.
“We were a part of the last wave of Yemenites to arrive. There was
already a rumour going around the transit camp that children were being
taken away, but we had just arrived so we didn’t know about it. Salem
was my eldest and I was pregnant for the second time when we arrived,
and my husband held him when we got off the plane so I wouldn’t have to
carry him. We were brought to the camp and were given a tent, and I fell
asleep.”
“When I got up in the morning Salem wasn’t there. I started screaming
‘where’s the boy? Where’s the boy?’ and my husband said he was sick.
‘Go to the hospital, you’ll see him there,’ he said, and I told him
‘What hospital? The boy is healthy!’
As head of the umbrella group representing Jews from Arab and Muslim states, Meir Kahlon presided over the first 30 November commemorative day of the exodus of Jews from Arab countries in 2014. Before that, he fought to get Israel to recognise the suffering of Libyan Jewry during the Holocaust. He died last week. Obituary by Ofer Aderet in Haaretz (wth thanks: Lily, Itzik):
“Arab nations didn’t accept the UN’s partition plan, and launched riots against the Jews. Today we want to remember this as a Jewish nakba day in Arab countries,” Kahlon told Haaretz at the time, employing the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that Palestinians use for their mass exile and loss of their homeland in the 1948 war.
“It wasn’t only the Palestinians who had a nakba, it was also our nakba, the Jews of Arab lands who were expelled and massacred,” he said.
His uncle, Bachar Kahlon, was born in 1938 in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, where the Jewish community numbered 40,000.
His father, Shalom Kahlon, had arrived there from El-Khoms in northern Libya and married Margalit Gita of the Fadlun clan. An uncle on his father’s side had been head of the Jewish community in Zuwarah on the Tunisian border. One of his ancestors had been Rabbi Hacham Binyamin Kahlon.
“We studied Hebrew. Zionism was in our blood, in a community of 2,500 years,” he said. When he was eight, his big sister taught him the words to a children’s song called “A dunam here and a dunam there.”
Kahlon’s mother was killed in the Holocaust of Libyan Jews in 1942.
“They came and took my father to a labor camp. My mother didn’t want to open the door. The Germans and Italian Fascists gave the door a bang, my mother fell down and a day later she died,” he said.
He saw how Israel had shunted aside the history of his and many other families from Arab countries. “We were always second in importance. The education system never asked me to tell the story of my mother and father. They didn’t concern themselves with my learning about it. It hurt me. I was angry at how they only spoke about the riots, suffering and Holocaust of European Jews, and not about our holocaust,” he told Haaretz.
“True the numbers of Jews killed among us was smaller than in Poland – but it isn’t right that we learned about the Kishinev riots for our matriculation exams while the pogroms against Arab Jews weren’t mentioned. In Libya people were also put in camps. Libyan Jews also hid and suffered.”
Kahlon went to school in the Ben Shemen Youth Village. After his military service he went into teaching and counseling youths. Later he got involved in public and economic work in the moshavim and the Histadrut. Alongside this he dealt with memorializing Libyan Jewry, was among the founders of the Libyan Jewish Museum in Or Yehuda, and helped Libyan Jews persecuted during the Holocaust.
Kahlon is survived by his wife, Malcha, five children, 13 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
A thoughtful take by Jonathan Tobin in Haaretz following the announcement by minister of social equality, Gila Gamliel, that Israel would be seeking $250 billion compensation for Jewish refugees driven from Arab countries: the Palestinians could strengthen their negotiating position if they agreed that both sides should be compensated. However, maximalist demands have not hitherto dented support for the Palestinians; and this video shows that the issue is land, not money.
Whatever failings one might attribute to Israeli
decision-makers, Palestinians Arabs have been cursed by shortsighted
leaders over the last century. They have not only been allergic to
compromises that might have given them a state long ago, but all too
often remained trapped by rhetoric that treated their Jewish antagonists as lacking any legitimate claims.
Though
Palestinians may regard Israel’s bringing up compensation claims for
Jews as irrelevant to the peace process, it actually provides them with
an opportunity. This is exactly the moment when they might score some
points in international forums by actually embracing them.
It’s true that the
eight countries named by Israel as liable for up to a quarter of
trillion dollars in lost property have no intention of paying
dispossessed Jews a single cent.
But why should the
Palestinians, who have spent the last 70 years being used and abused by
the Arab and Muslim world, care about that? That’s especially true now
since many Sunni Arab governments have embraced Israel as a tacit ally
against Iran, and are no longer willing to pay anything more than
minimal lip service to the Palestinian cause.
If instead of
ignoring the Jewish claims as a ploy by the Netanyahu government to
cause the world to think less about Palestinian refugees, if the Palestinian Authority were to say they agreed that both sides should be compensated, it would strengthen their current shaky negotiating position.
Palestinian
children walk past paintings depicting the 1948 'Naqba' or catastrophe,
and the UNRWA site in the Fawwar Palestinian refugee camp, near Hebron,
on September 2, 2018 (AFP)
At the very least it
would make their continuing demands for a "right of return" for their
refugees - a term that is synonymous with the elimination of Israel as a
Jewish state - seem less intransigent, and make it easier for European
countries to pressure Israel about conditions in Gaza.
In an unprecedented series of visits, three delegations of local leaders from Iraq have reportedly made trips to Israel in recent months, and held meetings with Israeli officials. The Times of Israel has the story: (with thanks: Lily, Sandra)
The delegations, totaling 15 Iraqis, held meetings with Israeli academics, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, and, most significantly, met with Israeli government officials, Hadashot TV news reported on Sunday night.
Iraq is at war with Israel and is a firm supporter of the Arab League boycott of Israel. Its passports are not valid for travel to Israel.
The groups made the trips, which were firmly designated as unofficial visits, under conditions of great secrecy, the TV report noted, in part in order to avoid antagonizing Iraq’s Iranian neighbors.
The local Iraqi leaders were not from Iraqi Kurdistan, the TV report stressed, but rather from “Iraq proper — that is, Baghdad.” The three delegations comprised both Sunni and Shi’ite members — “influential figures in Iraq.”
The trips were mainly of a “social-cultural nature,” the TV report said, and also featured meetings with organizations that deal with the Iraqi Jewish heritage. The goal, the report added, was “to build the infrastructure for future ties” between Iraq and Israel, with these delegates going back to Iraq as “kinds of future ambassadors” for Israel there.
* Iraqi Jews reminisce about the post-1958 commemoration parade to honour Abdul Karim Kassem (with thanks: Lisette, Aida):
A memory of the Kassem parade. To see full video (Arabic) click here.
A group of Iraq-born Jews now living in Israel have made a film recording their memories of parades to commemorate the 14 July 1958 revolution led by Abdul Karim Kassem and a group of army officers. The parades were held every year for four years until the Kassem regime was overthrown.
The Jews, teenagers or children as young as eight, were chosen to represent the Jewish community. They had to gather on their float at midnight in order to be ready for the start of the parade at 7 am.
They recall how General Kassem stood to salute the kids when the Jewish float approached. The float had a golden statue of the general.
One year, the leg broke and one of the participants had to sit on the statue for three hours to hide the break. Another recalls presenting Kassem with flowers and asking him to autograph his photo.
In spite of its bloody beginning - in 1958the young king and members of the government were murdered and their bodies dragged through the Baghdad streets - the Kassem era is remembered as a brief 'golden age' for the remaining few thousand Jews. Their rights were restored and they were treated as equal citizens. But that era ended with the assassination of Kassem in 1962.
This survey for Ynet News by Beit Hatefutsot (Israel's Museum of the Diaspora) does not reach any earth-shattering conclusions, but it does recognise that Jews did leave Arab countries for destinations other than Israel - and in some cases well before Israel was established. (With thanks: Gina, Imre)
Jews began leaving Arab countries even before the
establishment of Israel, and more left as the conflict between the Arab
countries and the nascent Jewish state intensified.
Yemenite Jews (Photo: Reuters)
From some countries, the process was quick and most of their Jewish
population left within a few short years. But in others, it was a drawn-out process in which the Jews left in various waves.
The bottom line is that of the million or so Jews who lived in Arab
countries in 1947, only a few thousand are left today. Hundreds of years
of history disappeared, almost instantaneously.
As opposed to most Moroccan Jews who left quietly, Jews of other
countries did not have such an option. In Yemen and Iraq, most Jews left
in operations organized by the State of Israel, often with the
assistance of local Zionist movements. Many of those who
did not join the mass exodus were left behind until this very day.
For most Jews, Israel was the natural and preferred destination. The
excitement stemming from the very establishment of an independent Jewish
state in the land of Israel was immense and was articulated the
realization of generations of longing and prayers for
the return to Zion, out of a desire to be part of the Zionist
enterprise.
There were other factors as well, often personal. Those who had family
members who were already settled in other countries and were capable of
financially supporting their relatives, often joined them instead of
immigrating to Israel.
In addition, wealthy or well-educated families, such as those who
mastered English or French or had professions that would enable them to
easily integrate into western countries, often preferred to immigrate to
countries other than Israel, at least initially.
The 6,000 or so Jews who lived in Libya in 1967 were transported to
Italy due to the dangers they faced following the 1967 Six-Day War. Most
of them then immigrated to Israel.
Some Jewish communities from Arab lands left and settled in other
countries long before the State of Israel was established. Jews from
Morocco settled in the Amazon in northern Brazil and Peru during the
19th century rubber boom.
The Sephardic community in the Canadian province of Quebec numbers some
25,000 today, mostly in Montreal. Many Jews left Morocco in the late
1950s and as French speakers found a home in the French-Canadian
province.
Jews from Syria settled in various communities in Latin America, such as
Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Panama, around the turn of the
20th century.
Sephardic synagogue in Guatemala City (Photo: Beit Hatfutsot)
There were also communities of Jews from Iraq who settled in India and
the Far East, or in England, where Yemenite Jews from Aden settled.
In most of the places where the Jews settled they established a
traditional synagogue and made an effort to preserve the religious and
cultural customs from their land of origin. Their customs served as an
anchor to preserve their identity among the subsequent
generations.
As for language, many Jews spoke a unique Jewish-Arabic dialect which
was different from that of Jews from other locations. The Baghdad
dialect was different from that of the Jews of Tunis or Yemen.
In countries that were colonized by France, many Jews adopted the French
language. Many of those locations had Jewish schools founded by the
Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Paris-based international Jewish
organization founded the French statesman Adolphe
Crémieux to safeguard the human rights of Jews around the world.
Most first-generation emigrants continued speaking their native
language, at least at home. In Israel however, there was immense
pressure to learn and adopt Hebrew. Arabic speakers were also viewed
with suspicion, as it was this language of the enemy. Consequently,
most first generation immigrants abandoned their mother tongue, aside
from a few words and expressions, and failed to pass it on to the next
generation.
Israeli TV news has announced that Israel is to seek $250 billion compensation for Jews dispossessed in seven Arab countries and Iran (not including Algeria and Lebanon). An accountancy firm has been evaluating lost property and assets over the last 18 months. The announcement, by the Ministry of Social Equality and reported in the Times of Israel, is timed to influence the long-awaited Trump peace deal. The money would be distributed by the Israeli state via a special fund. It is not clear if this is the International Fund, first mooted by President Clinton in 2000. (With thanks: Shimon, Sandra, Sheila and others who flagged this article)
The Bonan family before their expulsion from Egypt
Israel is preparing to demand compensation totaling a reported $250 billion from seven Arab countries and Iran for property and assets left behind by Jews who were forced to flee those countries following the establishment of the State of Israel.
“The time has come to correct the historic injustice of the pogroms (against Jews) in seven Arab countries and Iran, and to restore, to hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their property, what is rightfully theirs,” Israel’s Minister for Social Equality, Gila Gamliel, who is coordinating the Israeli government’s handling of the issue, said Saturday.
According to figures cited Saturday night by Israel’s Hadashot TV news, compensation demands are now being finalized with regards to the first two of the eight countries involved, with Israel set to seek $35 billion dollars in compensation for lost Jewish assets from Tunisia, and $15 billion dollars from Libya.
In total, the TV report said Israel will seek over $250 billion from those two countries plus Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Iran.
Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), an international umbrella group of Jewish community organizations, has estimated that some 856,000 Jews from 10 Arab countries — the other two were Algeria and Lebanon — fled or were expelled in 1948 and after, while violent Arab riots left many Jews dead or injured.
For the past 18 months, utilizing the services of an international accountancy firm, the Israeli government has quietly been researching the value of property and assets that these Jews were forced to leave behind, the TV report said.
It is now moving toward finalizing claims as the Trump Administration prepares for the possible unveiling of its much-anticipated Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal.
A 2010 Israeli law provides that any peace deal must provide for compensation for assets of Jewish communities and individual Jews forced out of Arab countries and Iran.
“One cannot talk about the Middle East without taking into consideration the rights of the Jews who were forced to leave their thriving communities amid violence,” said Gamliel, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
“All the crimes that were carried out against those Jewish communities must be recognized.”
The Palestinian Authority has sought over $100 billion in compensation from Israel for assets left behind by Arab residents of what is today Israel who fled or were forced to leave at the time of the establishment of the Jewish state, and presented documentation to that effect to the United States a decade ago, the TV report said.(...)
Monies obtained from the eight countries would not be allocated to
individual families, the TV report said, but would rather be distributed
by the state via a special fund. Gamliel is coordinating the process,
together with Israel’s National Security Council, which works out of the
Prime Minister’s Office.
The Yaqin Institute has Islamist links and an interest in revising history in order to whitewash the less savoury aspects of Islamic history - such as forced conversions. This article downplays the impact of the Orphans' Decree in Yemen reintroduced by Imam Yahya in the 1920s. Turning a blind eye to Jews escaping Yemen to avoid conversion, is portrayed as a virtue. (Hitler, too, allowed Jews to escape persecution in the 1930s. This does not make Hitler any less of an tyrant.) (With thanks: Lily)
Yemenite Jewish Children in 1901 (Hermann Burchardt)
Another case of forced conversion in
Islamic history is that of the Orphans’ Decree issued by Imam Yahya
al-Mutawakkil (d. 1948) in the early 20th century. After the First World War,
the crumbling Ottoman Empire recognized Yahya as its successor in Yemen. Yahya
then laid claim to “Greater Yemen,” parts of which were ruled by the British or
Yahya’s political rivals. As a leader of the Zaydī community, Yahya also
re-introduced Zaydī law, part of which contained the “Orphans’
Decree” requiring his government to forcibly convert orphaned Jewish children
to Islam.
[41]However, a closer look at the case of
the Orphans’ Decree reveals that though Imam Yahya himself introduced the
decree, he turned a blind eye to the smuggling of Jewish orphans out of Yemen
to avoid conversion, and on some occasions even facilitated this process.[42] The Jews who fled from Yemen exaggerated the
number of children forced to convert in an attempt to earn sympathy for the
cause of helping more Jewish children escape.[43] However, the guardians of many Jewish
children helped them to escape to Imam Yahya’s jurisdiction
rather than from it, and they found refuge with the very
regime that was ostensibly bent on forcing them to convert to Islam.[44]
Imam Yahya, for his part, implemented
the decree selectively, and in doing so he revealed his reason for introducing
it in the first place: it had little to do with a desire to forcibly convert
his Jewish subjects to Islam, and more to do with asserting his authority in an
unstable political environment in post-WWI Yemen.[45] Though a reductionist narrative of the
Orphans’ Decree may immediately present it as a case of Islam being “spread by
the sword” among Yemen’s Jews, it is noteworthy that Jewish sources describe
Imam Yahya in very favorable terms.[46] At the same time, “Yemeni Jewish writings
discuss the forced conversion of Jewish orphans explicitly but are reluctant to
mention voluntary conversions.”
Tudor
Parfitt compares the Orphans' Decree to "draconian measures
introducing the forced conscription of Jewish children into the Czarist's
army" in Russia.[4]
Concerning the reintroduction of the Orphans' Decree in Yemen in 1921, after
the end of Ottoman rule, Parfitt says that "in the first ten years"
it "was implemented with great rigour."[4] Once again the decree was not implemented equally in every part of Yemen. In
some places the authorities turned "a blind eye" to escaped and
hidden children, but, in the places the Decree was implemented, troops were
sent to search for escaped children, and the leaders of Jewish communities that
were suspected of hiding the children were "imprisoned and tortured".[4][2] In 1923 the Jewish community of Al
Hudaydah suffered the abduction of 42 orphaned children, some of whom
managed to escape.[4] A witness account from Sana'a recalls an abduction of two fatherless siblings, a
brother and a sister. The children were forcibly taken from their mother's arms
and beaten to make them convert to Islam. The Jewish community offered to pay
for the children's release to their family, but Islamic law prohibits accepting
money to avert such a conversion. The witness compares the ceremony of the
conversion of the siblings to a "funeral procession".[4] After getting out of the orphanage, converted Jewish boys were often
enlisted as soldiers. The girls made a valuable asset as brides because there
were no relatives who needed to be paid a bride
price in order to marry them.[4] Jewish communities responded by acting quickly when children were orphaned,
sometimes taking children and placing them with Jewish families living in dense
Jewish settlements, especially Sana, large enough that a Jewish family might lack Muslim
neighbors who would notice the addition of a child to a family.[2]
However, because "hidden" children might be discovered and forcibly
converted, relatives or the Jewish community sometimes arranged to take them
out of the Yemen; cases are recorded of Jews making the arduous journey to
settle in the Land of Israel with orphaned relatives or unrelated
children they had adopted in order to escape the threat that the children might
be taken for conversion.[2]
In the first-half of the twentieth-century, the Chief Rabbi of Yemen, Yihya Yitzhak Halevi, worked tirelessly to
save Jewish orphans from falling into the hands of Muslims.[5]
From about 1920, British imperial control of Aden provided a safe
haven to which orphaned children could be taken; clandestine caravans carrying
orphans and traveling by night are known to have gone from various parts of
Yemen to take orphaned children to the sanctuary of the British Empire.[2] An orphaned boy or boy or girl could also be very quickly married, since
married people had the legal status of adults and could not be taken for forcible
conversion.[2]
In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people. This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation. (Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)
by Claudia Roden. These traditional Tu B’Shevat recipes are vegan, gluten-free, and diabetic friendly. They are very tactile, and require no cooking. 
Syrian Apricot-Pistachio Balls
