In 1941, Nazi ideology 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 Nazi ideas 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. 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 that I’ve come to know through her stories. On June 1st, 1941 she was there like always.
Suddenly, she heard screaming. She turned her head and saw a man screaming “Kill the Jews” in front of a woman with eight children. One was just a baby.
To my grandmother’s horror, he began shooting. One by one, he shot the little children as their mother screamed. He saved her for last.
The cafe owner grabbed my grandmother and hid 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. The man then broke a glass bottle that he used to continue violating her.
My grandmother did not speak for the rest of that day. She could only weep inconsolably.
My grandmother adored Iraq: the streets she grew up walking, the neighbors her family counted as friends. But she was not safe in Iraq after the Farhud, nor was any other Jew.
This is my history. It’s also 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.
Jews had lived in Iraq for almost three millennia – since the Babylonian exile. Before the Farhud they made up one third to a quarter of the population of Baghdad. Now there are none – an astonishing ethnic cleansing that somehow rarely gets mentioned. And it wasn’t just Iraq:
The Farhud sounded the death knell for the Jews of Iraq. 120,000 fled ten years later. Other riots followed (Libya in 1945 and 1948 – 148 Jews dead), Aden (87 Jews dead) Syria (the Aleppo Great synagogue destroyed), Morocco (48 dead) as Jews felt the full force of state-sponsored incitement and persecution in Arab states.
Mick Hartley 
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