Mick Hartley

Today, June 1st, is the anniversary of the Farhud, a two-day massacre of Baghdad’s Jewery that led to the eventual exodus of Jews from Iraq to Israel.

In 1941, the Nazis incited The Farhud, a massacre against the Jews of Baghdad. Hundreds of Iraqi Jews were murdered in this… pic.twitter.com/bZsZska77k

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) June 1, 2024

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Full text:

In 1941, the Nazis incited The Farhud, a massacre against the Jews of Baghdad. Hundreds of Iraqi Jews were murdered in this extension of the Holocaust

The Farhud and Kristallnacht are so similar – violent massacres against Jews incited by Nazis that sparked the expulsion and mass murder of Jews from their countries. They really should be taught together.

My own grandmother, Hela, lived through the Farhud. She finds it difficult to speak about that time, but she has shared her story with me.Though, she always prefers to speak about Iraq before the Farhud, the place she loved so dearly.

On the first day of the Farhud, my grandmother was at a cafe I knew well, she often told me about the lovely little cafe she loved to go to. On June 1st, 1941 she was there like always.

Suddenly she hears screaming. She turns her head and sees an irate man screaming “Kill the Jews” in front of a woman with eight children, one merely a baby.

To my grandmother’s horror, he begins shooting. One-by-one he shoots the little children as their mother screams. He saves her for last.

The cafe owner grabs my grandmother and hides her in the backroom until my great-grandfather came to fetch her. They went to a neighbor’s house, a kind Muslim family who were equally horrified by the frenzy of hate.

All night there was screaming and crying. Glass shattering. My grandmother could not sleep.

The next day she watched in horror as a disabled Jewish teen was brutally raped. She watched as the man finished and then broke a glass bottle so he could rape her with that too.

My grandmother did not speak for the rest of that day, she could only weep inconsolably.

My grandmother adored Iraq and the streets she grew up in, the neighbors they were friends with. But she was not safe in Iraq after the Farhud, nor was any other Jew.

This is my history and the history of most of the Jews living in Israel today. A majority of us are the descendants of Jews who were violently expelled from the Middle East and North Africa.

I will not “go back” to Poland, nor will I advocate for the destruction of Israel, the one place my grandmother felt safe after she had to witness such horrors.

They were in Iraq a long time, the Jews: 

The history of the Jews in Iraq is documented from the time of the Babylonian captivity c. 586 BCE. Iraqi Jews constitute one of the world's oldest and most historically significant Jewish communities.

Over 1000 years before Arabs arrived in Palestine.

During the 19th century, the influence of the Jewish families of Aleppo of the previous century faded as Baghdad emerged as a strong Jewish and economic center in its own right. The Jewish population had grown so rapidly that by 1884, there were 30,000 Jews in Baghdad and by 1900, 50,000, comprising over a quarter of the city's total population. Large-scale Jewish immigration from Kurdistan to Baghdad continued throughout this period. By the mid-19th century, the religious infrastructure of Baghdad grew to include a large yeshiva which trained up to sixty rabbis at time. Religious scholarship flourished in Baghdad, which produced great rabbis, such as Joseph Hayyim ben Eliahu Mazal-Tov, known as the Ben Ish Chai (1834–1909) or Rabbi Abdallah Somekh (1813–1889).

Then the Farhud, in 1941 – the beginning of the end. And after…

Hoping to stem the flow of assets from the country, in March 1950 Iraq passed a law of one-year duration allowing Jews to emigrate on condition of relinquishing their Iraqi citizenship. They were motivated, according to Ian Black, by "economic considerations, chief of which was that almost all the property of departing Jews reverted to the state treasury" and also that "Jews were seen as a restive and potentially troublesome minority that the country was best rid of." Iraqi politicians candidly admitted that they wanted to expel their Jewish population for reasons of their own….

From the start of the emigration law in March 1950 until the end of the year, 60,000 Jews registered to leave Iraq. In addition to continuing arrests and the dismissal of Jews from their jobs, this exodus was encouraged by a series of bombings starting in April 1950 that resulted in a number of injuries and a few deaths. Two months before the expiration of the law, by which time about 85,000 Jews had registered, another bomb at the Masuda Shemtov synagogue killed 3 or 5 Jews and injured many others. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said was determined to drive the Jews out of his country as quickly as possible, and on August 21, 1950, he threatened to revoke the license of the company transporting the Jewish exodus if it did not fulfill its daily quota of 500 Jews.

And now:

In 2021 the Jewish population in Iraq number was fewer than five. In 2022 the number of living Jews in Iraq had shrunk to three.