Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: Israel Parker/Wikimedia Commons
An ornate Holy Ark and its Torah scroll taken from Iraq by fleeing Jews is on display at the Babylonian Jewish Heritage Center in Or Yehuda, Israel, and pictured here in November 2021
(JNS) — When Iraq’s Jews fled, they left behind assets with a current-day worth of about $34 billion, according to a report published this month about the largely forced exodus.
The report, by the Justice for Jews from Arab Countries group, or JJAC, catalogs the assets, institutions and property left behind or expropriated from the roughly 135,000 Jews who left Iraq between 1941 and the 1960s, ending a 2,500-year-old community.
The report, which is unusual in its attempt to quantify with forensic accounting the financial loss visited upon Iraqi Jewry, is the second in a series of 11 commissioned by JJAC to document the history, heritage and losses of Jewish communities from Arab countries.
Iraq’s was among the most illustrious, with an ancient history dating back to 586 BCE, and among the richest thanks to many Jewish business magnates, including some families with ties to the United Kingdom, India and beyond.
“The grand and impressive Jewish community in Iraq was persecuted, imprisoned, expelled and ultimately destroyed,” said Sylvain Abitbol, co-president of JJAC. “To ignore this fact is to erase 2,500 years of Jewish life and culture. We compiled this report so that the Jews of Iraq will not be forgotten and their contributions to the region are duly recorded.”
The displacement of Iraqi Jews began in earnest in 1941 with the Farhud, a deadly pogrom against the Jewish community of Baghdad. By 1950–1951, between 120,000 to 130,000 Jews had emigrated as part of “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah,” following an Iraqi government decree that permitted them to leave only if they renounced citizenship. Those who remained faced escalating oppression, culminating in public executions in 1969. By the early 1970s, nearly all Iraqi Jews had fled.
“In the 20th century, the breadth and scale of the near-total displacement of Jews from 11 Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region rank among the more significant cases of mass displacement in modern history,” said Rabbi Elie Abadie, co-president of JJAC. “From a population of one million Jews in 1948 across 10 Arab countries and Iran, today, less than 1% remain.”
Stanley Urman, executive director of JJAC, underscored the immense historical significance of the Iraqi Jewish community.
“Over centuries, Babylonian Jews played a central role in Judaism, producing the Babylonian Talmud and shaping Jewish traditions worldwide. The abrupt cancellation of this culture constitutes a tremendous loss to civilization,” he said.
