BAGHDAD – ‘I have no future here to stay.’ Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon. The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah’s prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar’s sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago. Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead. Among those who remain is a former car salesman who describes himself as the ‘rabbi, slaughterer […]
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
Baghdad Jews Have Become a Fearful Few
Author: STEPHEN FARRELL
Source: The New York Times
Publication Date: 1-Jun-08
Link: Baghdad Jews Have Become a Fearful Few
Source: The New York Times
Publication Date: 1-Jun-08
Link: Baghdad Jews Have Become a Fearful Few
Stephan: In 1979, when I was the project director of the the expedition that located Cleopatra's Palace, Marc Antony's Timonium, and remains of the Lighthouse of Pharos, we had to dig in the Jewish cemetery. Thus, I entered into the sad and secret world of the Jews in Egypt. At the time there were only nine Jewish men in Alexandria and, like this report from Baghdad, they could not convene a Minyan. I will never forget my visit to the last synagogue in Alexandria. A very large beautiful building, now empty and crumbling, with an ark behind the podium stacked high with the Torahs from now forgotten sister congregations, its cobwebbed rooms still and littered with the detritus of a fast departure. The only sound and movement birds flying in and out of broken windows. This report presents the same bleak imagery and, like Egypt, marks the end of a community which dates back to events recounted in the Old Testament. This is a largely unmarked passage, but one with profound implications for all humanity.
