Jews of Baghdad

[coda]

Jews of Baghdad

Jews have lived in Iraq for nearly 3,000 years. That era is coming to an end

By Christopher Dickey and Sarah Sennott
NEWSWEEK

Oct. 20 issue —

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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.


But Emad Levy, 38, who was born and raised in Baghdad and lives there still as the “acting rabbi” of a community that has dwindled to 26 people, shares neither the exiles’ nostalgia, nor any grand hopes for what’s to come. “We have no future here, believe me,” he says. Levy’s 82-year-old father was given the chance to leave with five other aging Jews in July, aboard a secret charter flight direct from Baghdad International to Ben-Gurion Airport. “Later I will follow,” says Levy, after he has sold off the house and other assets too difficult to take with him.

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The community has lived through millennia of persecutions and prosperity, panic, hope and despair. “We have been here for 2,600 years, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar,” says Levy, when the Babylonian tyrant carried thousands of Jews from Jerusalem into exile. (“By the rivers of Babylon,” says the psalm, “there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”) But they could not survive the frightening tumult of an Arab world inflamed for more than 60 years by anger against modern Zionism. And it’s that deeply cultivated hatred, now stoked again by television images of Israeli-Palestinian warfare, that makes high-minded plans to transform the region seem so remote from the reality on the ground.


“The people here, they blame everything on the Jews,” says Levy. He should know: his family persevered in Iraq as virtually all other Jews left. His father was alive to witness the atrocities committed against Iraq’s Jewish community in 1941, when hundreds were killed in riots. After 1948, more than 100,000 Jews left everything they had and fled to the new state of Israel. Perhaps 6,000 remained, among them the wealthiest. But a series of mysterious bombings persuaded most of those to leave as well in the early 1950s. The rage that followed Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 war, then the rise of Saddam’s lethally paranoid regime and the public hanging of alleged Zionist spies, pared the community down to hundreds, then scores, and now only those couple of dozen who are left. Most are in their 70s or 80s. There’s not a single woman for Levy to marry.


more........

http://msnbc.com/news/978403.asp?0cl=c1

[papau]

1. From 25% of the population to zero - Is there a right of return?

Do folks - now in the former Jewish homes - now move out?

There is no money in Iraq, so does the US pay those who give up their right of return?

Do Arabs care about a Jewish right of return?