Eileen Khalastchy, 70, remembers falling asleep on the roof of her house near the Tigris River as a child in the 1950s, listening to “the sound of music and of people clapping; the sky was full of stars.” Now living in Britain, she longs to go back to Iraq, she says. Edwin Shuker, 48, member of the World Sephardic Congress, recalls living as if “we were in a big, virtual concentration camp” in Iraq in 1971. He was 16 when his family fled north through the mountains to freedom. “We were willing to lose everything,” he says. “You felt you were going to die anyway.” Yet he, too, wanted to return, and last month for a few days he did. “I was unable to control the tears,” he says. As he saw Baghdad from the air, he broke down. “I cried for our whole life, for our community, now dispersed all over the world, for all the people killed by Saddam Hussein.”
As the United States moved to oust the Iraqi dictatorship earlier this year, many partisans of the war imagined it would create a new Middle East where Israel could survive in security, where borders would open, trade would flourish. Even the road to peace among Israelis and Palestinians would go through Baghdad, it was said, as the city would become an example of prosperity, tolerance and coexistence. After all, less than a century ago a quarter of the city’s population was Jewish, and among their hundreds of thousands of descendants, many dared imagine they could visit their old homes, perhaps reclaim their birthrights, even build new businesses.
http://msnbc.com/news/978403.asp?0cl=c1
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