The death of Dhafer Eliyahu hit Iraq hard, not only because the doctor treated the neediest for free, but because with his passing, only four Jews remain in the country.
At the Habibiya Jewish cemetery in the capital, Baghdad, wedged between the Martyr Monument erected by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the restive Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in east Baghdad, an aged Muslim man still tends to the graves, but visitors are rare.
On the day of Eliyahu’s burial, “it was me who prayed over his grave,” the doctor’s sister told reporters.
Photo: AFP
“There were friends” of other faiths who prayed too, each in their own way, she added, refusing to give her name.
To hear Jewish prayer out in the open is rare in Baghdad, where there is but one synagogue that only opens occasionally and no rabbis.
However, Jewish roots in Iraq go back 2,600 years.
According to biblical tradition, they arrived in 586 BC as prisoners of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II after he destroyed Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.
In Iraq, they wrote the Babylonian Talmud on the very land where the patriarch Abraham was born and where the Garden of Eden is by some considered to have been located, in the heart of the Mesopotamian marshlands.
More than 2,500 years later, in Ottoman-ruled Baghdad, Jews were the second-largest community in the city, making up 40 percent of its inhabitants.
Some were very prominent members of society like Sassoon Eskell, Iraq’s first ever minister of finance in 1920, who made a big impression on British adventurer and writer Gertrude Bell.
At the start of last century, the day of rest and prayer was Saturday, as per the Jewish tradition, not Islam’s Friday, as it is today.
Today, “one prays at home,” said a Baghdad resident knowledgeable of the city’s Jewish community, who also chose to remain anonymous.
When people with a Jewish name deal with the city administration, “they will not be well received,” he added.
Edwin Shuker, a Jew born in Iraq in 1955 and exiled in Britain since he was 16, said that “there are only four Jews with Iraqi nationality who are descendant of Jewish parents” left in the country, not including the autonomous Kurdish region.
A turning point for Jewish history in Iraq came with the first pogroms in the middle of last century. In June 1941, the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad left more than 100 Jews dead, properties looted and homes destroyed.
In 1948, Israel was created amid a war with an Arab military coalition that included Iraq.
Almost all of Iraq’s 150,000 Jews went into exile in the ensuing years.
Their identity cards were taken away and replaced by documents that made them targets wherever they showed them.
The majority preferred to sign documents saying that they would “voluntarily” leave, and renounce their nationality and property.
Still today, Iraqi law forbids the restoration of their citizenship, Shuker said.
By 1951, 96 percent of the community had left. Almost all the rest follow after the public hangings of “Israeli spies” in 1969 by the Baath Party, which had just come to power in a coup.
“Promotion of Zionism” was punishable by death and that legislation has remained unchanged.
Decades of conflict and instability — with the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, an international embargo, the 2003 US invasion and the ensuing violence — completed the erosion of the Jewish community.
By the end of 2009, only eight members remained, according to a US diplomatic cable.
The haemorrhage did not end there. A jeweller threatened by militants who coveted his goldsmith’s work went into exile, followed in 2011 by Amer Moussa Nassim, the grand nephew of author and renowned economist Mir Basri.
At 38, Nassim left Baghdad to finally live “a normal life” and get married, as the only remaining Jewish women in the city of millions of people were two elderly ladies.
Six months ago, one of the two, known as Sitt Marcelle, a tireless advocate of the community, passed away.
On March 15, she was followed by Elyahu, aged 61.
Israel, on the other hand, is now home to 219,000 Jews of Iraqi origin.
They left behind in Iraq homes and synagogues, which, up until 2003, “were in perfect condition and each owner identifiable,” Shuker said.
“All it takes is a vote in parliament” to return everything to the families, he added.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
TOWERING FIGURE: To Republicans she was emblematic of the excesses of the liberal elite, but lawmakers admired her ability to corral her caucus through difficult votes Nancy Pelosi, a towering figure in US politics, a leading foe of US President Donald Trump and the first woman to serve as US House of Representatives speaker, on Thursday announced that she would step down at the next election. Admired as a master strategist with a no-nonsense leadership style that delivered for her party, the 85-year-old Democrat shepherded historic legislation through the US Congress as she navigated a bitter partisan divide. In later years, she was a fierce adversary of Trump, twice leading his impeachment and stunning Washington in 2020 when she ripped up a copy of his speech to the
RSS