'We were uprooted, and so was our history'

 To mark Jewish Refugee Day, Sandy Rashty of the Jewish Chronicle records the stories of several Jews who fled Arab countries.

A Syrian Jewish family at the turn of the century, smoking narghile

"Jews from Arab lands suffered - their story should be told. They weren't just uprooted; their history was uprooted."

So says Florette Hyman, who was born Florette Menir in Cairo, and who came to the UK in 1957 after her family was forced to leave Egypt.

"Everyone is talking about the Palestinian refugees. I feel that no one has asked the question: What about the Jews from Arab lands?" she said.

Until now, there has been no official date to mark the mass exodus of Jews who abandoned their homes and businesses in the face of increasing persecution in Arab countries after the state of Israel was established in 1948.

Over 870,000 Jewish refugees were driven out of Arab countries and sought sanctuary around the world, including in the UK where they make up just under five per cent of British Jewry.

This year, the Knesset in Israel passed a bill designating November 30 as the official day to commemorate the stories of Jews who fled Arab countries such as Iraq, Egypt, Syria, as well as Iran.

Some of the refugees have campaigned for restitution, hoping to regain the property or value of the capital lost at the time of displacement. Others just want to be heard.

Mrs Hyman, now 64, was eight-years-old when she left Egypt for Britain. Along with her parents and five siblings, she lived in one-room in a refugee camp near Leeds. Her father Abraham, grateful for the "haven", wrote a letter of thanks to the Queen and named his youngest daughter Elizabeth after her.

"I'm quite emotional talking about it now," Mrs Hyman said. "When Israel was created, it was dangerous for Jewish people to go out at night in Egypt; they would disappear.

"I remember a policeman coming into our house with papers on a Friday night, saying we had to leave. My father's family had been in Egypt since the 12th century.

"Everything we had was taken away from us - my father's packing company was taken away. They made roads out of the tombstones in Jewish cemeteries. I can't even go back and visit my grandfather's grave." In 1948, more than 80,000 Jews lived in Egypt - now, there are fewer than 15.

Roger Bilboul attended the Jewish Lycée de l'Union Juive school in Alexandria before leaving, aged 18, in 1959. He has backed an international campaign to regain access to Jewish archives left in Egypt.

"I left because of the situation, it wasn't good for Jews," recalled Mr Bilboul, who now lives in London.

"People were being put in prison all the time with no excuse. There was the nationalisation of Jewish businesses, a lot of stuff was confiscated and left behind. Some people are now going through the courts to try and get back their property.

"The contribution that Jews made has been largely forgotten; but it's something Egyptians themselves are now keen to put on the map."

Moshe Kahtan, whose father Saleh was a legal adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Finance, also regrets that the contribution made by Jews has been forgotten. He dismisses the prospect of restitution as "wishful thinking".

"Freedom," he said. "You better forget this word in that place - it didn't exist for Jews.

"At its peak, half of the population in Baghdad was Jewish. In the 1930s, they started relieving Jews of their positions… they were imitating what was happening in Nazi Germany. Jobs were taken over by Muslims. Jews had a yellow identity card - they confiscated my passport."

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Today: first remembrance day for Jewish refugees

This Sunday is the Israeli national day for commemorating the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Over 40 events are being planned all over the world to mark the day. Stephen Oryszczuk in the UK publication Jewish News finds out why the issue is a question of justice:
 
The Israeli government this year designated a new day, 30 November, to remember historic wrongs done to the Jewish people. The wrong in question was the uprooting of 850,000 Jews from ancient communities in Arab and Muslim lands, including Iran, after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Some call it a period of “systematic persecution” or “ethnic cleansing”.

Events will be held around the world on Sunday. There will be a Board of Deputies reception at the Jewish Museum in Camden. On Saturday at St John’s Wood Liberal Synagogue, historian Nathan Weinstock will explain “how a Belgian Ashkenazi Jew wrote the story of the eradication of Jews from Arab lands”.

Weinstock says the story “demands an understanding of the dhimma – Jewish social status under Islam – and an appreciation of the repercussions of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, leading to the great post-World War II Jewish exodus”.
 

Once-equal Jewish citizens were persecuted, Jewish stores and workshops were looted, Jewish workers were fired and Jews were restricted from entering universities. Expelled from Egypt, displaced in Iraq and held hostage in Syria (on the suspicion that they would “join the Zionist enemy” and attack their country of birth), most left when they could, leaving all possessions behind. The story is one of immense sadness.

Many Sephardi Jews had deep cultural ties to the land, and influenced it greatly. Jewish writers were the foundation of Iraqi literature, for example, and in mid-19th century Egypt, the man who invented the nationalist slogan ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ (known as ‘the Egyptian Molière’) was a Jew named Jacob Sanua. The repercussions of this huge and little-known upheaval shape today. “No understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict is complete without taking into account the fact that half of all Israeli Jews are descended from, or are themselves, Jewish refugees from Arab or Muslim lands,” says the Board of Deputies.

But why is the issue only now being recognised? “Successive Israeli governments didn’t really make much of it, contrary to what Arab countries did for Palestinian refugees,” says Baghdad-born Edwin Shuker, who now lives in London. “It was a huge mistake on many levels. There are fewer than 5,000 Jews left in Arab lands. I am part of a dying generation. We want this narrative incorporated into the Jewish people’s story.”

For Shuker, the 30 November commemoration “opens a new chapter” in that story, and Lyn Julius, co-founder of Harif, the UK association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, agrees that it is a “watershed” moment. But she says the refugees themselves partly explain the slow process of recognition. “When they came to Israel in the 1950s, they compared themselves to Europe’s Jewish refugees, to Holocaust survivors.

What happened to them was far worse, so they thought ‘let’s just get on with it, let’s not make a fuss’.” It was early in the state’s creation, and the country needed to build an Israeli identity, she explains. “Forget the past and move on, that was the only way to integrate Jews from 130 countries,” says Julius.

“Politically, it was disastrous, and the Palestinians made all the running, screaming that they were the only refugees, which the world bought.” Some are cynical about the timing of the Knesset law, which came in the middle of the peace negotiations with the Palestinians earlier this year. Arab- Israeli peace process analyst Dr Constanza Musu says Israel “conducted a very systematic campaign to have the issue of refugees addressed in the negotiations”.

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Iran projects 'moderate ' image

 Iranian Jews pray at the tomb of a rabbi in Yazd (photo: Iranian Media )

 This AP dispatch has gained wide coverage in the Israeli and western press. Timed to coincide with the Iran nuclear talks, it is designed to curry favour with the West, and the US in particular. Cloaked in a veneer of objectivity, it projects an image of an Iran tolerant of its minorities. Gone is the extremist Ahmadinejad - the regime under Ayatollah Rouhani is 'moderate'. Why are 1,000 Jews going on pilgrimage, and who is the  rabbi they are venerating? The article does not tell us.

YAZD, Iran (AP) — More than a thousand people trekked across Iran this past week to visit a shrine in this ancient Persian city, a pilgrimage like many others in the Islamic Republic — until you notice men there wearing yarmulkes.

Iran, a home for Jews for more than 3,000 years, has the Middle East’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel, a perennial foe of the country. But while Iran’s Jews in recent years had their faith continually criticized by the country’s previous governments, they’ve found new acceptance under moderate President Hassan Rouhani. 

“The government has listened to our grievances and requests. That we are being consulted is an important step forward,” said Homayoun Samiah, leader of the Tehran Jewish Association. “Under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, nobody was listening to us. Our requests fell on deaf ears.”

Most of Iran’s 77 million people are Shiite Muslims and its ruling establishment is led by hard-line clerics who preach a strict version of Islam. Many Jews fled the country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Jews linked to Israel afterward were targeted. Today, estimates suggest some 20,000 Jews remain in the country.

Tensions grew under Ahmadinejad, who repeatedly called the Holocaust “a myth” and even sponsored an international conference in 2006 to debate whether the World War II genocide of Jews took place. Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi once accused Jews as whole of being drug dealers.

But since Rouhani took office last year, Jews say they have been heartened by the support they’ve received. His government agreed to allow Jewish schools to be closed on Saturdays to mark Shabbat, the day of rest. Rouhani also allocated the equivalent of $400,000 to a Jewish charity hospital in Tehran and invited the country’s only Jewish lawmaker to accompany him to the United Nations General Assembly in New York last year.

“We were fearful in the ’80s. We were feeling the pressure. Now, we are not concerned anymore. We feel secure and enjoy freedoms,” said Mahvash Kohan, a female Jewish pilgrim who came to Yazd from Shiraz. “In the past, Israel and others were providing incentives such as housing that lured some Jews. Now, it’s not like that. And Iranian Jews have better living and working conditions in Iran. So, no one is willing to leave now.”

Still, human rights groups say Jews and other minorities in Iran face discrimination. Last year, officials in Iran’s presidency denied that Rouhani had a Twitter account after a tweet that appeared to be from the leader offered a greeting for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. Iranian state television also has aired anti-Semitic programming.

Those taking part in the recent Yazd pilgrimage to the tomb of a famed Jewish scholar, however, praised the Iranian government’s new outreach.

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 Jews from across Iran gather in Yazd (Press TV)

Ghosts of ethnic cleansing haunt us still

 Iraqi-Jewish refugee arrives in Israel, 1951. To hear Lyn Julius being interviewed on the Voice of Israel about Jewish refugees from Arab lands, click here.


Barely three years after the Nazi Holocaust came to light,  Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world. And the ghosts of Nazism haunt us still, argues Lyn Julius in  the Times of Israel:

On 30 November, schools, ministries and organisations in Israel and worldwide will be marking a new day in the calendar — a day to remember the flight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and the destruction of their ancient communities.

It is often said that these Jews paid the price for the creation of Israel. In revenge for the mass exodus of Palestinian Arab refugees, Arab mobs and governments turned on their defenceless Jewish citizens. But in truth, there is sound evidence that even before the establishment of Israel, and before the great mass of Arab refugees had fled, Arab governments were conspiring to victimise their Jews and dispossess them of their land and property. 

This week, 67 years ago, saw anti-Jewish tensions reach new highs in Palestine and the Arab world as Arab delegates ramped up their rhetoric at the UN, which was due to vote on the Partition of Palestine.

According to UN records the Egyptian delegate, Heykal Pasha, was already warning on 24 November 1947 about the consequences of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine:

“the United Nations…should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in Muslim countries…creating anti-Semitism in those countries even more difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which the Allies tried to eradicate in Germany…making the UN…responsible for very grave disorders and for the massacre of a large number of Jews.”

Heykal Pasha’s words were prefaced with talk of ‘massacre’ ‘riots’ and ‘war between two races’. According to Yaakov Meron, Pasha’ s threats were not confined to Egypt but repeatedly mentioned Jews in other Muslim countries. They were not uttered on the intiative of Egypt but were ‘the outcome of prior coordination between Arab states then represented at the UN and the Arab league.”

The Palestinian delegate, Jamal Al-Hussayni, said the Jews’ situation in the Arab world “will become very precarious. Governments in general have always been unable to prevent mob excitement and violence.”

Syrian UN representative Faris Al-Khuri is quoted in the New York Times as far back as 19 February 1947 stating that: “Unless the Palestinian problem is settled, we shall have difficulty in protecting the Jews in the Arab world.”

A Jewish publication reported: “With the entire Arabic press fulminating against the perfidy of Zionism, and with Arab politicians rousing their underfed and enervated masses to a dangerous pitch of hysteria, the threats were certainly not empty.”

In Iraq the threats were made publicly, and its Foreign Minister Fadel Jamali stated at the UN:

“The masses in the Arab world cannot be restrained. The Arab-Jewish relationship in the Arab world will greatly deteriorate. There are more Jews in the Arab world outside Palestine than there are in Palestine. In iraq alone we have about 150,000 jews who share with Muslims and Christians all the advantages of political and economic rights. But any injustice imposed on the Arabs of Palestine will disturb the harmony among Jews and non-Jews in iraq. it will breed interreligious prejudice and hatred.”

Just two days after the State of Israel was proclaimed, a New York Times headline on May 16, 1948 declared “”Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands, Nine hundred thousand in Africa and Asia face wrath of their foes.” An article, written by Mallory Browne, reported on a series of discriminatory measures taken by the Arab League against the Jewish residents of Arab League member states ( at that time, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen).

The article reported on a: “text of a law drafted by the Political Committee of the Arab League which was intended to govern the legal status of Jewish residents of Arab League countries. It provides that beginning on an unspecified date all Jews except citizens of non-Arab states, would be “considered ‘members of the Jewish minority state of Palestine.’ Their bank accounts would be frozen and used to finance resistance to ‘Zionist ambitions in Palestine.’ Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned and their assets confiscated.”

Text of draft law*

1. Beginning with (date), all Jewish citizens of (name of country) will be considered as members of the Jewish minority of Palestine and will have to register with the authorities of the region where they reside, giving their names, the exact number of members in their families , their addresses, the names of their banks and the amounts of their deposits in those banks. This formality is to be accomplished within seven days.

2. Beginning with (date), bank accounts of Jews will be frozen. These funds will be utilized in part or in full to finacne the movement of resistance to Zionist ambitions in Palestine.

3. Beginning with (date) only Jews who are subjects of foreign countries will be considered as ‘neutrals’. These will be compelled either to return to their countries with a minimum of delay, or to be considered as Arabs and obliged to accept active service with the Arab army.

4. Jews who accept active service in Arab armies or place themselves at the disposal of these armies, will be considered as ‘Arabs’.

5. Every Jew whose activities reveal that he is an active Zionist will be considered as a political prisoner and will be interned in places speficially designated for that purpose by police authorities or by the Government. His financial resources, instead of being frozen, will be confiscated.

6. Any Jew who will be able to prove that his activities are anti-Zionist will be free to act as he likes, provided that he declares his readiness to join the Arab armies.

7. The foregoing (para 6) does not mean that those Jews will not be submitted to paragraphs 1 and 2 of this law.

*Source : JJAC

In brief, the Draft Law was a prediction of what was to happen to almost a million Jews in the Arab countries. It became a blueprint, in country after country, for the laws that were eventually to be enacted in these countries against Jews, for the actions that devastated the Jewish communities in Arab lands; and for the forced exodus that was to follow.

On 19 January 1948, the World Jewish Congress sent a memorandum appended to the Arab League draft law to the United Nations Economic and Social Council to protest against it and the anti-Jewish unrest it had generated in the Arab world. Unfortunately, the fate of this memorandum rested in the hands of the President of the Council, Dr. Charles H. Malik, the representative of Lebanon to the United Nations, designated by Arab states to be their Council representative. Lebanon was one of the founding members of the Arab League, one of the states which had deliberated upon the anti-Semitic draft law. Mr. Malik used a procedural maneuver to ensure that nothing was done in response to the World Jewish Congress memorandum.

Years later, in 1984, sitting in the garden of his house with other Arab Affairs journalists, the Israeli columnist Dr Guy Bechor challenged Charles Malik. Why did he do nothing to block an anti-Zionist, nay antisemitic plan?

” Lebanon had no choice but to toe the Arab line,”replied Malik. As a Christian he had to prove loyalty to the Arab/Palestinian cause, and was even required to be more anti-Israel than the Muslims.

What is shocking is that 856, 000 Jews were driven from their homes by Nuremberg-style laws just three years after after the full horror of the Nazi Holocaust of six million European Jews had come to light. Nazism had a great following in the Arab world and influenced reactionary movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Arab collaborators with the Nazis, such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, were never tried for war crimes in 1945. Instead, antisemitism in Arab states, much of it using Nazi tropes and memes, has soared to stratospheric heights.

The ghosts of Nazi-inspired genocide and ethnic cleansing are still with us. The victims are still the same victims: the Jews and their state, heretical Muslims, Kurds, non-Muslim minorities. We can begin to exorcise these ghosts by learning about past wrongs – beginning on 30 November.

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'Benayoun distracts from real racism'

 A ma'abara or transit camp, home for Jewish refugees driven from their homes in the 1950s

 Sadly, the 'Benayoun affair' is overshadowing the first ever commemorative Day for Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Shimon Oyahon MK, the driving force behind the Law designating 30 November as the Day, says the singer's latest controversial release is a distraction from the real racism that caused the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab world. Read his Times of Israel blog (with thanks: Jonah) :

The controversy surrounding Amir Benayoun and whether his recent song “Ahmed Loves Israel“ should lead to cancelation of his invitation from the president’s residence has sadly become a major distraction from a far greater injustice predicated on racism and discrimination. Few people who have followed this front-page story are aware that the event at which Benayoun was supposed to appear was the first ever official state ceremony in commemoration of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

The real issue of racism here is the expulsion and forcing out of 850,000 people from their ancestral homes because they were Jews and no one is talking about that, or has talked about it for 66 years. Suddenly a song that some consider offensive is gaining attention and once again people are forgetting about the historic injustice done to so many people that has still not been rectified. 

Unfortunately, most are not aware of the history of the Jews and their eventual ethnic cleansing from the Middle East and North Africa during the Twentieth Century. While the Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish People, for thousands of years Jews developed their unique and indigenous civilization around the Middle East. Jews and Jewish communities have existed in the Middle East, North Africa, Babylon, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf region for millennia.

Read article in full:

Amir Benayoun banned from Rivlin event 

Arab ethnic cleansing is the real racism here (Arutz Sheva)

Mizrahi tragedy emerges from shadows

 Ben Cohen


For years,  the Holocaust has overshadowed the tragedy of Mizrahi dispossession. The new remembrance day being marked in Israel and around the world on 30 November will go some way to remedying this historical and moral distortion, argues Ben Cohen in JNS News. But the injustice done to these refugees remains unaddressed:

In that environment, it has been difficult for Jews of Mizrahi descent—those, like my family, who originate from communities in the Middle East and North Africa—to get the State of Israel to properly recognize the tragedy of their dispossession. The point wasn’t so much competition with the Holocaust, but the bald fact that the Holocaust was a civilizational convulsion without peer. And in any case, how many times each year can a nation pause and weep?

Another factor was politics. Israeli leaders for many decades were reluctant to acknowledge that the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries, following the creation of the Jewish state, meant that there were not one, but at least two, refugee populations in the Middle East. Only in the last few years have prominent Israeli politicians emphasized that focusing solely on the Arab refugees from British Palestine in 1948 is a distortion of both history and morality.

It’s interesting, perhaps, that the further we get from those torrid years of Mizrahi Jewish suffering, the more Israel has embraced the memory of what happened. Maybe we’ve gotten to a point where there’s space to remember more than one Jewish tragedy, and without the raw emotion that inevitably marked commemorations during the latter half of the 20th century.

Whatever the explanation, this Sunday, Nov. 30, will mark the first instance of an annual remembrance day in which Israel will commemorate, thanks to a Knesset bill passed in June, the “Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran.”

Remembrance ceremonies will be held, special classes will be conducted in schools, and Israeli diplomats will raise the issue with their interlocutors. (In tandem, incidentally, the Mizrahi Jewish advocacy organization JIMENA is holding special events in North America and around the world, which you can learn about by visiting them on the web.)

Commenting on the Knesset bill after it was passed, MK Shimon Ohayon noted that “we have finally corrected a historic injustice and placed the issue of Jews who were expelled or pushed out of the Arab world in the last century, on the national and international agenda.”

Elaborating, he added, “In Israel, the history of the Jews who originally came from the Middle East or North Africa, who make up around half of the population, was ignored for too long. This is a vital part of our fight against those internally and externally who delegitimize our presence here and claim we are somehow foreign to the region.”

He’s right. The theme of “indigeneity”—that those deemed to be native to a particular territory have supreme rights over it—has been a core element of the Palestinian and Arab campaign to portray Israel as a colonial interloper, and an alien presence in a Muslim-Arab region. But Jews lived in the Islamic world for thousands of years, just as they did in the land that is now Israel.

In that sense, there is a political goal behind the commemoration day, and it’s nothing to apologize for. Almost 70 years after Jews were stripped of their citizenship and property by avowedly anti-Semitic regimes, their fate remains largely hidden from the gaze of historians and journalists. In part, that’s because these refugees didn’t stay refugees for very long. The majority were absorbed in Israel, still others went to Europe and the Americas, all of them got on with their lives. But fundamentally, the injustice remains unaddressed.

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King's philosemitism a legend

 With thanks: Ahuva

It's the great legend peddled by the Jews about the King of Morocco: His Majesty saved them from the Nazis. In remarks at the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem on 21 October 2014, historian Georges Bensoussan sets the record straight:

"It's the great legend peddled by the Jews of the Morocco: the King of the Morocco loved Jews and  protected them under Vichy. Actually, it's a thorny issue. I would say to you in two words... Mohammed V was no self-declared philosemite ... his vizier (Mokrane) was a self-confessed, hard-line anti-Semite who had said to Paul Baudouin, the Foreign Minister of Vichy: "We put Jews under pressure every 30 years... at the end of 30 years, when they have made a fortune, we take it all; "it's been 28 years since you French have been (in Morocco),  in two years it will be 30..."

 Bensoussan claims : "Mohammed V opposed not a single Vichy decree - he signed them all. It is true that  he was forced to do so by the French protectorate. It is true that the Bey of Tunis did the same, but with more reluctance. It is true that the resident-general in Morocco, Nogués, was an anti-Semite and could have been egging the Sultan on.

"To say that he  protected the Jews and put off deadlines for signing Vichy decrees,  is false. On the contrary - he took advantage of the arrival of the Vichy regime in France to make an ancient Muslim demand, a demand that the French did not want to meet as long as they were a Republic..." First,  the Jews  must be relocated to the Medina (from the European city) and secondly, that the Jews might only employ Muslim maids under 45. These two demands were made in much of the Arab and Muslim world, in defiance of the French Republic. The Sultan gets his way. Note that the demand concerning domestic servants under 45 is part of the Nazi Nuremberg laws of 1935..."

 
Recording of George Bensoussan's talk at the Ben Zvi Institute (French)


 "On the other hand,  it's true that the Sultan agreed to an audience with the Jews, but one realizes two things when studying the chronology finely: he received them prior to the Anglo-American landings. He told them: "you are as much my subjects as Muslims are". After the Allied landings, however, he shows himself much more  of a judeophile for simply political reasons.

He understood after his Casablanca meeting in January 1943 with Roosevelt, that to obtain the independence of the Morocco, he should lean on the US for its backing. Otherwise,  France would not let go of Morocco. As the  good anti-Semite that he was, he had to show support of the Jews to  lean on the Americans because Washington is (in the pocket of) the Jews. "So if we want to get closer to Roosevelt, we need to placate the Jewish community of Morocco, and therefore the Jews of the USA, who, in turn, will influence Roosevelt's decisions".

Amir Benayoun banned from Rivlin event

With thanks: Michelle, Sylvia, and My Right Word blog

 

One of Amir Benayoun's previous hits 

 A prestige event at the Israeli President's Jerusalem residence to mark  the first national day to commemorate Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran  threatened to degenerate into chaos today when President Rivlin banned one of the performers.

The office of the President of Israel  announced that following the release of his song this week, it would not be possible for Israeli singer Amir Benayoun to perform as planned this coming Sunday 30 November.

 Benayoun, who is of Algerian origin,  has just  released a controversial song called 'Ahmed'  whose lyrics could be considered disparaging of Arabs generally. Some have even called his words inciteful.

In a letter to the event organizers, the President's office said that in spite of   Amir Benayoun's talents, his statements are '  inconsistent with the responsibility required of the President's Residence, and of all institutions with influence over the public discourse, to work to alleviate tensions, and promote cooperation rather than division in Israeli society."

Adding fuel to the fire, however, the event organiser, Minister for Senior Citizens Uri Orbach, said that he would cancel his own appearance at the upcoming event out of deference for Benayoun's rights.

"The cancellation of singer Amir Benayoun's concert at the President's house, marking the expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands and Iran, contradicts our position," Orbach stated. Orbach added that while he respects Rivlin, he views the cancellation as an infringement on freedom of expression.

Some 48 progammes  have been arranged across the world to mark the first Day to remember Jewish refugees from Arab lands.

Refugee remembrance is personal

As JIMENA embarks on a full programme  to mark Mizrahi Remembrance Month, two Jews from Arab countries tell their stories to Dan Pine of the Jewish Journal:

Daniel Khazzoom remembers long-ago family gatherings around the sopa (kerosene space heater), roasting chestnuts and enjoying chilly winter nights in Baghdad.



Those are the only happy memories he has of the land of his birth. In the span of a few years, through a steady campaign of violence and expulsion, Iraq rid itself of a Jewish community that had thrived for two millennia.

Khazzoom fled as a teen in 1951, vowing never to return to the country that perpetrated unrelenting oppression against his family and his fellow Jews.

Now a retired economics professor living in Sacra-mento, Khazzoom, 82, once served on the board of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa), a San Francisco–based organization that advocates for Mizrachi Jews and helps preserve their history.

Khazzoom is one of the 850,000 Mizrachi Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were forced out of their homelands after World War II and the establishment of Israel, and for whom justice has been denied. By and large they built new lives in Israel, the United States and elsewhere, choosing not to dwell on their misfortune.

But because the world ignored them, and because their countries of origin refused to consider any compensation, organizations such as JIMENA came into being.

Like other Jews from Arab lands, Khazzoom noted recent recognitions by Israel’s Knesset, which in June passed a law mandating that Israeli schools teach Mizrachi history, and which designated Nov. 30 as the country’s first Day of Com-memoration.

And JIMENA has named November as International Mizrachi Remembrance Month, with events taking place in Chicago, Portland, New York and Ottawa, as well as the Bay Area.

A group of Jewish tailors from Algeria, 1901 photo/courtesy jimena

For Khazzoom, the new law and the celebrations may constitute a dose of too little, too late.

“I have mixed feelings,” he said. “In general we should not dwell on the misery. There are too many miseries in Jewish history.”

Nevertheless, JIMENA has helped organize several Bay Area commemorations on behalf of the Jewish refugees displaced from Muslim countries in the 20th century, among them Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Turkey.

One event, held Oct. 30 at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom, featured speeches from Iraqi-born JIMENA co-founder Semha Alwaya and Israeli Consul General Andy David, as well as a performance of Sephardic songs by Israeli musician Yair Harel.

David praised the Knesset for passing the new education law.

Daniel Khazzoom

“Now it’s part of the curriculum,” he told J. “In a year or two [Israeli] students will have to be tested on [Mizrachi history]. It will be on a higher level of the agenda. It was the Israeli leadership that advocated for it and wanted to pass it, not just Mizrachi Jews.”

Sarah Levin, executive director of JIMENA, called passage of the law “fantastic.”

“Everyone is so proud of the Knesset for passing this bill,” she said. “Ideally it will have an impact on Jewish education curricula in the United States.”

Corrine Levy, who came as a child to the United States from her native Morocco, rejoiced at the passage of the law and spate of commemorations. For her, it’s personal.

“I’m glad to see awareness is being raised,” said Levy, who serves as director of women’s philanthropy at the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation. “We all know so much about Jews in the Holocaust. There were very different circumstances Jews endured in the Arab world.”

For her family, it meant leaving their Casablanca home in the early 1960s, joining an exodus that shrank the Moroccan Jewish community from more than 250,000 to around 3,500 today. Still, for Jews, Morocco was perhaps the least intolerant Arab country.

Levy remembers playing on the roof of her grandmother’s home in Casablanca.

Daniel Khazzoom (left) with family members in Baghdad photo/courtesy jimena

“The Jews lived a very rich life in Morocco,” she said. “Even after [the establishment of] Israel it was OK for them. They felt the monarchy was favorable to the Jews. Many in business did commerce with the king. However, when France ended its protectorate in 1958 (1956 - ed) and Morocco gained independence, Jews felt they would lose everything. Many left for Israel, some to France, Spain and Montreal.”

Unlike so many other Mizrachi Jews forced to leave everything behind when they fled, Morocco’s Jews were treated more leniently. The Levys were allowed to take their assets with them.

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Commemorating the exodus of Jewish refugees

Yemen minister donates award to Jews

Some of Yemen's last Jews

Yemen’s culture minister, who was recently honoured for her work combating extremism and discrimination against women, said she is giving her award to Yemen’s dwindling Jewish population. Report in the Times of Israel:(With thanks: Michelle; Lily) See my comment below.

Arwa Othman won Human Rights Watch’s Alison Des Forges Award in September. At a Thursday celebration in Sanaa, Othman called for “tolerance” and dedicated her award to “brothers and friends from the Jewish community.”

Othman has been subjected to a smear campaign by hard-line Salafi groups because of her civil rights work and support for the Jewish community.

According to the Jewish Agency, fewer than 90 Jews live in Yemen — half of them in a guarded compound which protects the US Embassy in the capital of Sanaa. They are often subject to attacks by both Sunni and Shiite Muslim terrorists.

Read article in full:

My comment: rights activists in Yemen are brave and outspoken (and in the past have had sympathetic coverage in the local press). They  use Jews, the only non-Muslim minority, as a barometer of Yemeni society's human and civil rights in general. But it is not clear what the Jews' situation is like after the Houthi invasion. We do not even know how many Jews remain in Yemen - the figures quoted here* are almost certainly out of date.


Minority rights champion insulted

* According to a Yemen Times article of 28 November 2013 (with thanks: Andrew) there were 84 Jews in Yemen (29 in Raydah and 55 in the Sana'a compound). There are almost certainly fewer now.

Historian forgets to mention Jewish refugees

Of all the refugee populations created after World War ll, only the Palestinians remain refugees, the historian Andrew Roberts  points out in the Wall Street Journal. What is disappointing, however, is that he does not once mention the greater number of Jewish refugees in the Arab-Israeli exchange of populations, nor that many Palestinian Arabs were enthusiastic supporters of Adolph Hitler.

Yet all of these refugee groups, except one, chose to try to make the best of their new environments. Most have succeeded, and some, such as the refugees who reached America in that decade, have done so triumphantly. The sole exception has been the Palestinians, who made the choice to embrace fanatical irredentism and launch two intifadas—and perhaps now a third—resulting in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis.

After Germany lost World War II in 1945, more than three million of its people were forced to leave their homes in the Sudetenland, Silesia and regions east of the Oder and Neisse rivers—lands that their forefathers had tilled for centuries. These refugees embarked on a 300-mile journey westward under conditions of extreme deprivation and danger with only what they could carry in suitcases.

One can’t be expected to sympathize too much with people who had enthusiastically supported Adolf Hitler, but among them were children who were not responsible for the sins of their fathers. Having reached the new borders of East and West Germany, as delineated by the victorious Allies, they settled and made no irredentist claims to Poland and Czechoslovakia, the countries they had left. Today those once penniless refugee children include some of the most successful people in Germany, a country they helped make a prosperous, model democracy.

Across the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, the paranoiac evil of Joseph Stalin ensured that entire peoples, sometimes numbering in the millions, were moved from one side of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. to the other. Some, like the Cossacks who had fought for Hitler, were massacred wholesale when they fell into the hands of Stalin or his satellite henchmen, such as Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Tito.

Millions of other people, as part of Communist schemes unrelated to the war, were “relocated” to Siberia, the Crimea or Central Asia, often many hundreds of miles from their ancestral lands and under the harshest conditions short of genocide. In all, forced internal migrations of the Tatars, Volga Germans, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskheta Turks and other ethnic groupings numbering some six million led to the deaths, according to the Soviets’ own figures, of up to 1.5 million, including 46% of the Crimean Tatars. Yet there are no appreciable irredentist movements among these former Soviet citizens today. They made the best of a new reality rather than carrying on a decades-long and ultimately hopeless struggle to return.

Similarly, the late 1940s saw massive population transfers in the Punjab and Northwest Frontier territories of India when the British brought their empire there to a close in 1947. Some 16 million people crossed between the new states of Pakistan and India, leading to the deaths of between one-half and three-quarters of a million people in the communal massacres that ensued.

Yet while there are severe border disputes still between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, practically no one from the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities is today agitating for restitution of the lands their forefathers farmed or owned in Punjab, the Northwest Frontier or elsewhere. There is distrust, but modern Indians and Pakistanis have moved on. The same is true of other parts of the world, such as Burma and South Africa, which also saw ethnic upheaval in the late-1940s.

Sadly, it has been the Arab states’ cynical and self-interested policy for nearly seven decades to keep the Palestinians boiling with indignation. No one can doubt that for those who have continued to live in camps intended for long-ago refugees, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, when thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled, was indeed a catastrophe. But many other peoples have learned to deal with equal or worse by moving onward and upward; calling them refugees several generations after their forebears’ upheaval would be unthinkable. The lessons of history are rarely enunciated more clearly.

Read article in full

Frenzied antisemitism in Turkey

 This poster virtually accuses Jews of using the Ebola virus as a biological weapon for 'global occupation'. It's only one manifestation of an officially-sanctioned antisemitism reaching frenzied levels in Turkey. Read this MEMRI report and weep (with thanks: Lily):


Antisemitic incitement by Turkish government officials, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's oft-repeated statements that Israel is more barbaric than Hitler, and antisemitic accusations and threats by the media that support and promote Turkey's AKP ruling party have fostered an upsurge in antisemitism in the country. A recent survey by Gonzo Insight, the Turkish polling institute, found that in just 24 hours, on July 17-18, 2014, 27,309 Turkish Twitter users sent 30,926 Turkish-language tweets in support of Hitler's genocide against the Jews.[1]
 
In addition to statements by government officials, the pro-AKP media regularly accuse Turkey's Jews of "treason,"[2] and other accusations are also levelled, including connecting Jews with the use of Ebola as a biological weapon in "global occupation" that "knows no borders"; in addition, a professor tweeted about sending Jews to Treblinka.

Antisemitism is an accepted part of the government discourse; for example, in protests following the May 2014 mine collapse in Soma, in which over 300 miners died, then-prime minister Erdogan yelled at and scuffled with a miner, calling him "sperm of Israel."

At the same time that President Erdogan was denying, in his September 22, 2014 speech at the Council of Foreign Relations, that he or his government were in any way antisemitic, members of his party back home were tweeting praise for Hitler, and shops in Istanbul were displaying signs reading "No Admittance To Jewish Dogs."

On November 9, 2014, a sign reading "This Location To Be Demolished" was hung on the entrance to Istanbul's Neveh Shalom Synagogue; the synagogue has already been the target of two major terrorist attacks in which many congregants at prayer were killed and wounded.

Read report in full

A five-year-old girl recalls leaving Iraq

 The release of the doves in the film 'The Dove Flyer'* is a metaphor for the exodus of Jews from Iraq.

Stella J was five when 93 percent of Iraqi Jews fled Iraq between 1949 and 1951.  Her father was repeatedly called in for questioning by the secret police. He was forced to borrow money in order to pay 10, 000 dinars (a huge sum in those days) for his release.

When the time came for the family to join the exodus to Israel, Stella remembers a great deal of commotion at the airport. Jews were only allowed one suitcase and 40 dinars each (25 dinars for children). They were not allowed to take out jewellery or precious possessions.

The customs officers were busy ransacking the contents of the refugees' suitcases. One seized Stella's doll, threatening to pull apart its head. "I'm sure there is jewellery stuffed in the doll's body," the officer said. It was only when a second customs officer intervened that Stella's doll was spared mutilation.

She remembers a crowd witnessing the Jews' ordeal. They shouted abuse at the refugees. But then she recognised the voice of the family's long term servant Sa'id: "Take me with you to Israel", he shouted. "I want to be Jewish!"

Bitter-sweet memories. Within three years, a 2, 500-year-old civilisation had been wiped out.

*Link to Hebrew/ Judeo-Arabic version

'After Saturday comes Sunday'

  Increasingly, we are hearing this slogan, as applied to the religious minorities of the Middle East. First it is the Jews' turn to be wiped out, then the Christians will follow. Where did this proverb come from? Opinions vary, but there is strong evidence that the saying originated with Islamist mobs in the 1930s and 40s. Extract from a Wikipedia entry: (With thanks: Edwin)

A Christian church burning in Iraq

In 1940, a pro-Zionist soil conservationist Walter Clay Lowdermilk asserted the proverb meant that after Arabs ‘have destroyed the Jews they will destroy the Christians,’ predicting a massacre of Jews would occur if Britain left Palestine. Lowdermilk further claimed that 80,000 Iraqi Assyrians had been massacred after the British relinquished their mandate in Iraq in 1932.^[13]

In the opinion of Benny Morris, who again provides no source for the claim, around 1947-8 in Palestine, ‘all (Christians) were aware of the saying: 'After Saturday, Sunday,' which he calls a 'popular mob chant' of the time and glosses as meaning,'after we take care of the Jews it will be the Christians’ turn'.^[14]

The phrase appears to have gained currency to refer to population expulsions, following the establishment of the State of Israel and the subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries. According to a 1956 field report by American Universities staff, the phrase had been circulating for roughly a decade by that time in the Near East with the sense: 'after the expulsion of the Jews, whose Sabbath is on Saturday, the Christian Westerners will follow.'.^[15]

According to author Bat Ye'or, it was employed by members of the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt in 1947, as part of their demonstrations against Zionism, which spilled over into attacks on Christian communities, held accountable for attempts to secularize Arab society, in 1947. A Coptic church in Zagazig was burnt down, and in anti-Christian demonstrations in Upper Egypt the slogan was:

Today it is Zionism’s turn, tomorrow it will be Christianity’s; today is Saturday, tomorrow will be Sunday.^[16]

Joseph Wahed, founder of advocacy group JIMENA, whose own family was expelled from Egypt in November 1952, recalled in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that sixty years earlier a Copt cited the phrase to his Jewish neighbour.^[17][18]

A certain Royce Jones stated that it was a Jordanian slogan used on the eve of the Six-Day War, and that it expressed an intention to commit genocide on Christians.^[19][20] Royce’s letter was cited by Yosef Tekoah before the UN Security Council as proof of the relief Christians in Bethlehem supposedly felt with the Israeli conquest of the West Bank. The Jordanian representative Muhammad el-Farra dismissed the use of the proverb as ‘cheap propaganda’ and cited as testimony Bethlemites affirming their allegiance to Jordan.^[21]

According to blogger Gerald A. Honigman,^[22] the phrase was first given prominent circulation in English by Bernard Lewis in the form: 'First the Saturday People, then the Sunday People,’ in an article written for Commentary in early 1976. Lewis claimed that the phrase was heard in the Arab world on the eve of the Six Day War (1967), and argued that recent developments in Lebanon suggested that the Arabs had reversed their priorities.^[23

Because of their relevance for Biblical studies Palestinian proverbs have been the object of close attention.^[24] The proverb in question does not figure among the 5,000 Palestinian sayings collected by the Bethlehem pastor Sa’īd Abbūd (1933), who, with regard to sayings dealing with Saturday and Sunday, mentions only one: ‘Saturday is longer than Sunday’, used with a variety of meanings: of the need to stay open for business given that Saturday is busier; of people who don’t know their own place, and to a woman whose petticoat is longer than her dress.^[25]

Many sources register this proverb's appearance as an Islamic slogan daubed on walls or putatively on the Palestinian flag during the years of the First Intifada (1987-1997).^{[26][27][28][7]} It was indicative of a tension within the Palestinian resistance as Hamas emerged to vie with the PLO for the hearts and minds of people. Historically, Christians have played a distinguished role in the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement since its inception.^[29] The more secular and socialist PLO was able to attract and integrate support and leaders from the Palestinian Christian community like George Habash or Hanan Ashrawi,^[30] though figures like Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh graduated to a more radical secular leftist politics.^[29]

Mordechai Nisan of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs claims the slogan would have been used on a PLO flag when the Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu visited the Holy Land in 1989.^[27][31] Nisan opines that there is a Muslim-Arab war being waged against Israel and the Jews, and that Christians all over the world cannot escape being involved:

When the Muslim jihad pursues its Jewish victim, it manipulates and blackmails the West into submission. When the two tangle, the third party never escapes the consequences of the brawl.

Read entry in full

Ada and the pomegranate of peace

 For Professor Ada Aharoni, the new Memorial Day for Jewish Refugees from Arab Lands, on 30 November, is something of a personal triumph.

The Cairo-born academic, poet, peace campaigner and author was one of the first to advocate for such a Day.

Several of Professor Aharoni's books deal with the exodus of Jews from Egypt. Her book Not in Vain (Hachette), about the Jewish Hospital in Alexandria has been awarded the Testimony Prize.

On 30 November itself, Professor Aharoni will be launching the French version of her book, published by Le Manuscript, (Thea Wolf: La femme en blanc de l'hopital juif d'Alexandrie) at a Paris lunch organised by the ASPCJE organisation of Jews from Egypt.

Professor Aharoni's favoured message is that greater knowledge of the modern Jewish exodus will appeal to the Arab sense of honour. If Palestinians are made aware that they are not the only victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict, they are more likely to achieve a 'Sulha': permanent peace based on reconciliation. This is also the message of a video she has recorded  in Hebrew. Here is the trailer:  RIMON HASULHA VE HAKAVOD - THE POMEGRANATE OF RECONCILIATION AND HONOR.

She elaborates on this theme in this second 15- minute video, the Second Exodus and Peace: Professor Aharoni hopes that her videos will be used to spread greater awareness of the Jewish exodus.

Commemorating the exodus of Jewish refugees

As organisations around the world prepare to commemorate 30 November, the first official day in the calendar to remember Jewish refugees from Arab lands, it is time to place their story  back on the Jewish communal and international agenda, says Shimon Ohayon MK in the Jerusalem Post (with thanks: Lily):

A refugee family in an Israeli ma'abara or transit camp (1950s)

Today, Israel is seen as a colonialist entity in parts of the world, as a European transplant in the heart of the Middle East which sought, and continues to seek, to uproot the indigenous Arabs from their ancestral homes. Of course, there is much that is wrong historically, factually and morally with this view, whether it stems from ignorance, malice or a mixture of the two.

However, the greatest antidote to these falsities is the history and subsequent expulsion of the ancient Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa, the descendants of which make up around half of the Jewish population of Israel. In the middle part of the past century there were almost a million Jews living across the region, whereas today that number is no more than a few thousand.

While the Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people, for thousands of years Jews developed their unique and indigenous civilization around the Middle East. Jews and Jewish communities have existed in the Middle East, North Africa, Babylon, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf region for more than 2,500 years. Before the advent of Islam, the Arab conquest and occupation of the region, Jews even held sovereignty in parts of the Middle East, including Israel.

During the centuries after the Islamic conquest, the region became forcibly “Arabized,” becoming known as the “Arab World,” and the original non-Arab peoples became minorities in their own lands. Under Islamic rule, Jews were considered dhimmis, second-class citizens, forced to pay special taxes and wear distinctive signs and articles of clothing and suffering other discriminatory decrees and legislation. The position of the Jews was frequently precarious.

Over the centuries, there were numerous massacres and ethnic cleansings of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, like the many Jewish communities in the Arabian peninsula which were wiped out in the 7th century. In Morocco, Libya and Algeria Jews were forced to live in ghettos or mellahs. On other occasions, as in places like Yemen and Iraq (Iran? - ed), Jews were given the choice of converting to Islam or facing death.

False accusations and blood libels frequently led to massive riots in Jewish areas leaving many dead, expelled and degraded. In the 1930s and 1940s there were Nazi-inspired massacres of Jews in Libya and Algeria, and most infamously in Baghdad, known as the Farhud.

Following the United Nations Partition Plan, which recommended the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, the Political Committee of the Arab League (League of Arab States) drafted a law that was to govern the legal status of Jewish residents in all Arab League countries. This law, instituted across the Arab world, demanded that Jews be seen as enemies and their assets frozen or confiscated and their citizenship stripped. Jews were frequently imprisoned or worse.

These and other state-sanctioned repressive measures, coupled often with violence, precipitated a mass displacement and expulsion of Jews, who were forced to leave without their assets and property, and caused the Jewish refugee problem in the Middle East. This problem was exacerbated by a continuing expulsion and exodus of Jews en masse from Arab countries until the 1970s.

The personal and communal assets left behind were substantial, far greater than those lost by Arabs who fled during Israel’s battle for independence.

Sadly, almost none of this is known, in Israel or around the world.

With this in mind, earlier in the year I passed a long overdue law that instituted November 30 as a day in Israel of national commemoration for the Jewish refugees from Arab countries. On this day, there will be special Knesset sessions devoted to the issue; the Education Ministry is enjoined to teach students about the history and expulsion of their ancestors and the Foreign Ministry will instruct its representatives around the world to commemorate the occasion appropriately.

With our partners around the world, organizations like Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJA C) and Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA ), based in the US, Harif in the UK and Organization of Jews of Libya &Sant Egidio in Italy, we are arranging a host of events around the world, including in Washington, DC, New York, Montreal, Sydney, Singapore, Paris, London and Rome, and a commemorative event at the United Nations.

However, there is still much work to do. Most Jews do not know this history and it is seldom taught in Jewish schools, synagogues or institutions around the world.

If we are to rectify this historic injustice we must first learn about it. Over the next year, a traveling exhibition created by the Foreign Ministry will be sent to Israeli embassies and consulates around the world with the intention of informing other countries around the world about this neglected subject.

It is vitally important that Jewish communities participate in these events so that ignorance will no longer be an excuse. The Jewish refugees issue was recognized in the past by United Nations officials, in peace agreements and most importantly, under international law.

It is time that we placed the story of and ultimate redress for the Jewish refugees from Arab countries back on the Jewish communal and international agenda.

We can start on November 30.

Read article in full

WW2: 40 Tunisian Jews never returned

Tomorrow  the UK Jewish Film Festival will screen Jacques Ouaniche's 'Young' Perez, the story of a young Tunisian-Jewish boxing champion who survived the Auschwitz death camp only to die on the Death March. Tunisia was the only country in the Arab world to be directly occupied by the Nazis - from November 1942 to May 1943. How many Tunisian Jews shared Young Perez's fate? Veronique Chemla blogs.

 Deportations of Jews from Tunisia took place in April 1943, three weeks before the liberation of Tunisia. Forty prisoners did not return. This is very few compared to the six million Jews killed in continental Europe during the Holocaust. But it illuminates the nature of the genocidal project of the Nazis. Wherever the Germans set foot, whether for 24 hours in Rhodes, or six months in Tunisia*, they persecuted the Jewish population, in order to destroy it.

Among the deported Jews was Victor Cohen Hadria, former President of the Bar Association of Tunis murdered in Auschwitz, Edouard Benjamin Dana, a resistance fighter  deported to Auschwitz, sent into the Warsaw Ghetto to clear it and shot while trying to flee.

Arrested in Paris, boxer Victor  "Young" Perez (1911-1945),  French flyweight world champion in 1931 was deported from France and killed during the death march.

The synagogue in Tunis was transformed into a storehouse for stolen Jewish possessions.

On 7 May 1943, the Wehrmacht fled the advancing Allies. The British liberated Tunis, the free French took Bizerte. Jews could finally remove the yellow stars of their clothes.

Read post in full (French) 

*the Germans also occupied the western desert in Libya

Jews appeal to king against eviction

 An elderly Jewish couple in Casablanca has appealed to King Mohammed V1 to stop 'Mafioso' gangs from  threatening to evict them from their home of 50 years. This is not a problem exclusive to Jews. Muslims too have been targeted by these gangs, reports Yabiladi. Here is a rough translation from French:

 

"With a quivering voice, Shalom Abdelhak reveals his identity in a video posted on YouTube. A Jewish man of over eighty, visibly weakened by illness he is seeking the intervention of King Mohammed VI in his case. In Moroccan dialect, he says he and his wife are victims of a "group" that  is threatening to evict them from their apartment in Casablanca.

"Shalom has been renting his home for over 46 years. Throughout this period, he said he has had no problem with the owners of the building. He also says he regularly pays his rent. It's the same story with his wife, Viessmann Messody, who is also sick. The latter fears that they will forced to live on the street at their age.
 
Shalom's case is not unique. The video shows the testimony of another woman, also Jewish, who has lived in the building for 50 years. The problem started in 2012 when "a  Mafioso," she claimed, posed as the "owner" of the premises. Since then, "we are experiencing a living hell," she says.

  She accuses "chamkaras"  of being behind these threats. They target empty apartments, trying to remove windows, doors and even marble and mosaic to show the authorities that the building is at risk of falling into disrepair:  then they order its demolition.

Shalom says: " we are very old and we have nowhere else to go. This is where we were born. "

Read article in full (French)

The murder of Raymond Leyris, reconstructed

Enrico Macias is one of the most popular singers in France. Born in Constantine, Algeria, he was forced to leave, along with the country's 130,000 Jews, when Algeria became independent from France.

His song of exile 'par excellence' is 'Adieu mon pays.' The story of Macias's father-in-law, the musician and composer Raymond Leyris, is less well-known.

This clip by Diarna is a dramatisation of Leyris' tragic murder in 1961. The murder triggered panic amongst the Jews, and was a major factor in their exodus.

In 2012, Leyris's son-in-law Enrico Macias was banned from touring Algeria, and has been unable to visit Leyris's grave, atop a Constantine hillside.

The life and sudden death of Cheikh Raymond 

Raymond Leyris et les juifs de Constantine (French)

Does Aladdin deserve ADL award?

ADL National Director Abraham Foxman presents  the Anti-Defamation League’s Daniel Pearl Award to Anne-Marie Revcolevschi, President of The Aladdin Project.

At its Annual General Meeting on 6 November in Los Angeles the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) awarded the prestigious Daniel Pearl prize to the Aladdin project for 'promoting greater understanding between Jews and Muslims'.

Five years ago, Veronique Chemla, a French-Jewish journalist wrote down her misgivings in Front Page magazine. The dalogue promoted by the Aladdin project tiptoes around real bones of contention, throwing the ethnic cleansing of Sephardi/Mizrahi Jewry, among other things, under the bus of mutual understanding.

"We need to go beyond the perennial We are brothers, cousins, shalom, salam! and engage in a real dialogue with the Muslim word in which we recognise what unites us but also what divides us," she says. "We need to air our disagreements in order to build enduring and deep relationships. Jihad targets 'Jews and Crusaders'. We need to enter into a real dialogue with Muslims and non-Muslims in order to make them understand the jihadist threat and build alliances with them.

"Initiatives such as the 'islamically-correct' (anti-Holocaust denial) Aladdin project marginalise and isolate moderate Muslims and distance Jews from their anti-jihadist allies. It is not denial and revisionism which feeds antisemitism but the demonisation and delegitimisation of the State of Israel."

Islamically- correct meeting bolsters coexistence myth