Finally, a story about Iraqi Jews!

Finally, a story about Iraqi Jews!

My parents were Polish refugees in World War II who obtained US immigration visas after waiting for nearly three years with my mother’s Viennese Tante Elsa in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. They fled to the US in the spring of 1941, a week or two ahead of the Nazi invaders, no thanks to the obnoxious delaying tactics of the US consular official, whom we now know was following a directive of Under Secretary of State Breckenridge Long to make it as difficult as possible for Jews to obtain visas.

In part of my parent’s epic three-month journey, they crossed into Iraq from Turkey directly into the custody of mounted Iraqi border guards. “Yahud?” [Jew] they guessed as three bedraggled Jews made it across the river. The Iraqi police were actually helpful in readily granting them transit visas and even in hiring a car and driver to take them to the train station in Baghdad. The driver was so afraid of the police commander, who had carefully instructed him on exactly how many dinars to charge, that he would not accept US dollars, the currency my parents and Tante Elsa were mainly traveling with. He insisted that my father go to the bazaar to find a Jewish money changer to get dinars.

Having finished their business in Baghdad, they took the train to Basra, Iraq’s major port. My father reported that the conductors were all Jews with whom he conversed in Hebrew. In Basra, they wangled passage on a British troop ship that had brought reinforcements to put down the pro-Axis Iraqi rebellion, while shipping off German and Italian prisoners of war down in the hold. So my parents made it to Karachi — then British India, now Pakistan — from whence they took a British cruise ship to Bombay where they boarded the American liner, the President Harrison, as it steamed to Cape Town, Port-of-Spain (Trinidad) and Hoboken.

My father recalled that this was a very tense time in Iraq. In fact, the pro-Nazi Iraqi rebels were being directly organized by Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the exiled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was an active ally of Hitler during the war. They knew enough not to dawdle in Baghdad. During the first week of June, 1941, exactly 67 years ago, over 130 Iraqi Jews were murdered in a major pogrom when the remnants of the defeated rebels vented their rage on the Jews before the British managed to restore order.

Finally, in the June 1 issue of the New York Times, there is something in the mainstream media on Iraq’s once thriving Jewish community of over 130,000, now moribund. It feels spooky to me that in discussing Iraq’s genuine mosaic of multiple ethnic and religious communities there is no mention or recognition that this ancient Jewish presence has disappeared practically without a trace.

Iraq’s not-so-ancient enmity toward Israel is concretized in a main drag in Baghdad called Haifa Street. We may also recall that a favorite haunt for Saddam-era foreign correspondents was the Palestine Hotel. Even though Iraq has no border with Israel and was not threatened by it in any real way, Iraqi troops were dispatched against Israel in three wars: 1948, 1967 and 1973. And in 1991, even though Israel was not part of the coalition assembled by George H. W. Bush against Saddam Hussein, the latter sent 38 missiles crashing into Israeli soil.

By | 2008-06-06T04:35:00-04:00 June 6th, 2008|Blog|6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. Anonymous June 6, 2008 at 7:11 pm - Reply

    Hi Ralph,

    While much of your piece here is interesting and valuable, your concluding paragraph includes a number of non-sequiturs:

    “Iraq’s not-so-ancient enmity toward Israel is concretized in a main drag in Baghdad called Haifa Street. We may also recall that a favorite haunt for Saddam-era foreign correspondents was the Palestine Hotel. Even though Iraq has no border with Israel and was not threatened by it in any real way, Iraqi troops were dispatched against Israel in three wars: 1948, 1967 and 1973. And in 1991, even though Israel was not part of the coalition assembled by George H. W. Bush against Saddam Hussein, the latter sent 38 missiles crashing into Israeli soil.”

    Sorry, but what does having a main drag called Haifa Street or a hotel called the Palestine Hotel have to do with anything, other than showing some interest in and sympathy with Palestinians? Does using the names Haifa and Palestine somehow reveal a form of irrational enmity?

    You say Iraq has no border with Israel and was not threatened by it in any real way. Did the US and USSR have any common border? For that matter, do the US and Iraq have any common border?

    Did Israel’s 1981 bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor not threaten Iraq in any really way?

    Unfortunately, you’ve lumped a number of highly questionable pieces of “evidence” and conclusions onto what was otherwise a telling story.

    While undoubtedly there are examples of real anti-semitism in Iraqi history, you diminish them by seemingly conflating them with signs of understandable support or sympathy towards fellow Arab Palestinians, and by minimizing the extent to which Israel might also have been justifiably viewed by countries like Iraq as an expansionist, belligerent and threatening regional (super)power.

    Ted

  2. Ralph Seliger June 7, 2008 at 7:32 pm - Reply

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  3. Ralph Seliger June 8, 2008 at 4:19 pm - Reply

    While on the surface, the names, Haifa Street and the Palestine Hotel, show ethnic solidarity with their fellow Arabs, the context is of a country making it known to its Jewish minority that its presence was not welcome — especially when one considers the Baghdad pogrom in 1941. Most Iraqi Jews fled to Israel in the 1950s.

    Opposition Labor Alignment supporters have long wondered if Osirak really represented a threat at that time or if it was a convenient maneuver that helped Begin win reelection in a diffcult campaign. But, I ask you, was a concentrated attack on a nuclear facility — which may in fact have been developing a nuclear bomb for a country that had sent troops against Israel three times in its brief history — the same thing as launching 38 missiles at Israel’s population centers? Is Ted arguing that the Osirak incident in 1981 justifies Iraq’s attack on Israel’s civilians in 1991?

  4. Anonymous June 9, 2008 at 4:15 pm - Reply

    Hi Ralph,

    Porgroms against Jews are not excusable, nor is any form of ethnic cleaning targeting any racial or ethnic group.

    Are you unable to concede that the Zionist plan to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from 1948-50 (and onward to the present), not to mention Suez in 1956 and subsequent wars, created real grievances against Israel that exacerbated existing religious prejudices? Are you able to concede that Israel gave the Arab world many reasons to see it as belligerent, expansionist and thtreatening? In your favorite words Ralph, “it’s a two way street.”

    In that context, your unwillingness to allow Iraqis the possibility of using Palestinian names is a bit much.

    Of course, I never suggested that Iraq’s 1991 bombing of Israel was in any way justified. But your claim that Iraq was never really threatened by Israel is myopic. Added to that is the concept that Iraq understands itself a part of a larger Arab nation, that certainly again had many many reasons to feel threatened and wronged by Israel.

    Ted

  5. Ralph Seliger June 10, 2008 at 4:23 am - Reply

    Ted strikes again. Of course, the Iraqis had every right to name their streets and hotels anything they liked. But there was a clear subtext.

    There was a conflict that the Arab world forced upon the Jews of Palestine when they rejected the UN partition plan. As a result of losing the war of 1948 — which they had started — about 750,000 Palestinian Arabs lost their homes. By the early ’60s, a similar number of Jews fled from Arab lands — some happily, others fleeing their centuries-old homes in terror. The larger Arab nation, of which the Iraqis were a part, made their indigenous Jewish populations know that they were not wanted.

  6. Anonymous June 11, 2008 at 11:34 pm - Reply

    Ralph: I suggest your correspondents have a look at my two earlier articles below. I think they are available online, or they can email me directly at philip.mendes@med.monash.edu.au for a copy.

    1) “Voluntary departure or expulsion: The Jewish Exodus from Modern Egypt 1948-1967”in Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol.19, 2005, pp.134-146.

    2) “The Forgotten Refugees: The Causes of the Post-1948 Jewish Exodus from Arab Countries” in Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol.16, 2002, pp.120-134.

    Philip Mendes

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