و و Peace and prosperity, for the most part, reigned in this time. The husband and wife duo of Alfred and Hanina Shasha, as well as Shlomo el Kuwaity – whose father was one of Iraq’s all-time most popular musicians – describe various aspect of what is sometimes called the ‘golden age.’ Artist Oded Halahmy, chimes in with sweet, rich memories of his youth a few decades later, bringing to life the tastes, smells and sights of the Baghdad he recalls fondly to this day. We also get a taste of old-world business conducted in the Middle East from our interview with Ezra Zilkha, who describes the creation of his father’s banking mini-empire that originated in Baghdad at the turn of the century. و – King Faisal’s death in 1933 and his son Ghazi’s rise to the throne that year coincided with the rise to power of Nazism in Germany. Ghazi’s pro-Nazi stance enabled the infusion of Nazism into Iraq. Many minorities in Iraq felt - ام عم
adopted a Western approach. My father was very familiar with Western music and got this idea from it. He also introduced Western instruments into the Iraqi music: the cello, accordion, and violin. 5. وهو ، هذه 6. Salah was born in 1908 and Daoud in 1910, in Kuwait, to the Arzouni family. Their names became el-Kuwaity [meaning ‘from Kuwait’] only after they left Kuwait for Iraq. They were the only boys in the family and they had nine sisters. Their father told them: ‘You can get married only after all of your sisters get married, because I have to pay out nine dowries.’ He needed his sons to help him financially until the girls were out of the house. So the brothers married late in life. My father married at the age of 36, and my mother, who is his cousin – the - daughter of the uncle who gave them their first instruments – was 16. 6. 1908 36 16 7. When Salah and Daoud were children, their uncle, who was a merchant, brought them an oud and a violin from India, and as children they started listening to records from Hijaz [in Saudi Arabia], Yemen and Egypt. They
و و و شيش و هذه 10. My mother used to make bamya [okra], which was virtually a staple of the Iraqi diet and is prepared many different ways. Because the ends of the bamya were very gluey, we would cut off the ends and then let them dry in the sun. Then, with a hawan, a mortar and pestle, we crushed them finely, then mixed it with water and made a gluey paste. We used that mixture for mango sauce and other sauces as a thickener. I also used this as glue for my kites in the summer as a child. 10. و و تحت و – و و 11. I loved to watch my mother baking or cooking and sometimes we children would put a reed mat on the floor and help with the cooking. For instance, my mother gave one of the children the hawan when we made medgugah – which is the process of pounding dates and nuts into a thick paste with the hawan, but it is also the end product. The women in the family – my mothers and aunts – would sit and gossip while they cooked,
[communes] and moshavim [co-operatives], but the Iraqi Jews were city people, not farmers, for the most part, and did not share the Ashkenazi ideology of ‘settling the land by working the land’. We were discriminated against by those who called us schwartze [black, in German]. Everything was a shock for us because we had grown up being told that Israel was the Garden of Eden. Still today, I feel that the ‘land of milk and honey’ is Iraq. 24. و و و : schwartze 25. The Iraqi Jews created their own community in Israel, because they had an instinct to stick together. Schunat Ha’tikva [a neighborhood in Tel Aviv] was filled with Iraqi bakers, restaurants, spice markets, fruit and vegetable markets, goldsmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, kubbeh makers, the classic Iraqi style street food vendors, musicians, café and tea houses, and all of my father’s friends and many acquaintances from Baghdad. Doctors and lawyers from Iraq mixed more with the Westerners in the wealthier parts of Israel. 25. و و و و و و
هذه 2006 35. When I work on a sculpture, I improvise as I go along, like dancing without choreography. I talk to my work and my work talks back to me. I cut shapes and forms and put them together. I leave the piece for a while to see if it grows on me. I’ll break it and change it and play with it until it is right. My concern is always to create a kind of harmony and dialogue between the forms, like a harmony between people. Of course it is easier to create harmony with material than with people! 35. وهو و و و و و و 36. I’m also working with the newest generation of Iraqi musicians to create concerts which we will bring to America and England and, in sha' Allah [Arabic expression for ‘God willing’] one day we will play in Baghdad when there is peace. I am also involved in a project to preserve and restore the Jewish holy sites in Iraq, which the Iraqi government would like to open for Jewish tourism in the future – a heritage tour of sorts. The hope is that these places will be open to the public by 2010, depending on the security situation. For that project, my foundation is compiling a book and film about these holy sites.
thousands of secret messages to and from Mossad operatives in Tehran, Paris, Tel Aviv and Baghdad. The messages conveyed by Saig, Marcus, and others – often under the noses of the Iraqi government but unknown to it – relayed information about political and security issues in Iraq, Jewish fugitives headed towards EretzYisrael, and a myriad of operational instructions. و و – تحت و و لا As a woman, Marcus wasn’t an anomaly in the Zionist network. One of the earliest female activists, for instance, Raya Moallem*, was an instructor who hid weapons and Hebrew books and materials on EretzYisrael in a hidden space beneath her living room floor. But the movement was so controversial even within families that she and her siblings and mother hid her involvement, and that of a sister and brother, as well as their knowledge of the hidden cache, from her father. When the crackdown on the movement forced hundreds of activists to flee in 1949, Moallem escaped Iraqas a teenager through Basra to Iran, and then to Israel, with only the clothes on her back.
لا The British would not take the ship back to Palestine. So the protest caused the British to find another port to send the ship, and they took it to Hamburg, Germany. That created an uproar. Everyone cried, ‘How could the British take Jews who were rescued from the Holocaust back to Germany?’ This incident, in my mind, is one of the factors that compelled the United Nations to vote for the partition of Palestine. It really caused people to say, ‘It is impossible to have a situation in which the British are bringing Jews back to the place where they were slaughtered. There must be a place for the Jews to find refuge.’ So Glasberg was seen by Israel as a real hero for helping precipitate the UN resolution. Because of what he did, Glasberg was invited to Palestine to meet with officials from Mossad L’Aliya Bet. هذه لا و When I met him that first time, a few months earlier, I began to speak to him in English. He said, ‘I don’t speak English. Let’s speak French.’ My French at that time was fairly weak. So I said, ‘I can't speak French.’ So he said,
كل بهذا one dared to tell him, ‘It’s rubbish.’ They said, ‘Alright. Go for a week. Let’s see what happens.’ و و لا هذه و و و And so it was decided that I will go to Iran and a week after that, he would come with his secretary – he never went anywhere without her. She was half Jewish. It was somewhat surreal, the whole thing: A once-Jewish Catholic priest and his half-Jewish secretary go to Iran to meet with an undercover Mossadnik with a French alias – with my new French passport, I became Maurice Perez – to get Assyrian Christians living in mountaintop monasteries to help Iraqi Jews escape to Israel. و و -
to Moscow?’ They said, ‘Are you nuts? We would be killed in Moscow.’ I went on, ‘So why don’t you go back to Baghdad?’ ‘In Baghdad they will hang us,’ they said. I asked, ‘Why don’t you go to Israel?’ ‘Will they take us?’ They asked. I said, ‘Yes.’ And they became the first group of Jews that used our visas to leave Iran for Israel. I convinced them to be ready to go to the police, as I had arranged for all the incoming refugees, and say that they had run away from Iraq and were willing to pay the fine so as not be sent back to Iraq. The thought of going to the police scared them, but I convinced them. I sent them to Paris, and from Paris, they were sent to Marseilles. From Marseilles, they waited in a refugee camp called the ‘Grand Arenass’ for a ship to take them to Israel. They served as my test case in getting Jews out of Tehran: once I had completed their escape successfully, the system was in place for everyone else. هذه و لا لا " لا
له Iraq, the new generation of Iraqis is so anti-Jewish and anti-Israel that we could soon reach a point of the Iraqis’ total denial of the historical existence of the Jewish community and its contribution over so many centuries. Given the news we hear these days, I’m afraid that’s where Iraq looks to be heading. Iraq is in a sad chapter today. In our days, while the division between Shi'ite and Sunni was acknowledged, there wasn't physical fighting or even a belligerence of any kind between the two. What's happening now is absolutely shocking. And while it’s very sad that the Jewish community of Iraq is gone, can one imagine what the Jews would have been facing today if there were still a good-sized Jewish community in the country? I think most Iraqi Jews really had strong feelings for Iraq and great wishes for its prosperity, and that has been squelched as well. 36 . و و و و و و و 37. When I left in 1971, I had already been admitted to graduate school in Canada, at the University of Toronto. My younger sister followed me a year or two later. My parents couldn’t get passports at the time, because they knew that if the whole family tried to get passports at once we would have
been under tremendous scrutiny. Throughout the years he was headmaster of Frank Iny, my father was also teaching at the University of Baghdad. So when the school closed, he just continued his teaching at the university until the day he left Iraq to join us, in 1982. My parents never tried to leave or really wished to until then, as my father had a good position at the university and he wasn't sure what he, would do if he were to join us in Canada. Eventually, as he got older, the urge to be with his children became stronger than that fear, and that year my parents moved to Montreal, where my younger sister also got married and settled. 37. تحت و و و 38. When I arrived in Canada, my first thoughts were, ‘This is a re-birth. This is almost like life starting again.’ I knew I was free, but several years later as I was relaying some feelings to a Canadian friend, he told me, ‘Richard, relax. You're free!’ And then I realized that all this time that I was in Canada I was physically free but I hadn’t been free from the oppressive feeling of restraint and fear that I experienced in Iraq. Yet in spite of the hard times my generation of Jews experienced growing up in Iraq, the more enduring feeling I have is one of the camaraderie between students who
1. Dia Kasim Kashi is a Shiite Muslim born in 1952 in Baghda., He describes his family’s relationships with Jews in Iraq and his friendships with Iraqi Jews in London, where he lives today. Kashi, traveled to Israel twice in 1998 to meet with Iraqi Jews and helped to found the Iraqi-Israeli Friendship Committee. He laments the community’s demise and has become a vocal advocate pushing for Iraq to acknowledge its treatment of its Jewish population, which he often compares to the Ba’ath Party’s decades-long discrimination against Shiites and other minorities. 1. 1998 -
3. The regime killed people just to control the society with fear so no one would threaten the regime. It killed just for the sake of killing. Some of the victims were young university students or adults whom it accused of being members of the Hizbil Dawa party – an Islamic, mainly Shia party – or the Communist Party. Some victims were members of the Ba’ath Party itself and who were accused of being traitors. 3. لا – وهو 4. The Iraqi regime was typically in the hands of the Sunni minority even prior to the rule of the Ba’ath Party so the Shia and other minorities – Christians, Jews, and Iraq’s 17 or so other religions – were oppressed by various regimes throughout the last century, but with greater severity starting with the Ba’ath Party coup in 1963. In a period of 10 months in which the Ba’ath Party rule before it was over thrown, it killed about 100,000 Iraqis, mostly leftist political opponents. The brutality began again after the Ba’ath Party overthrew the nationalists in 1968. 4. – و و 1963. 000،100 و 1968. 5. Historically, there were more partnerships and friendships between Jews and Shia than between Jews and Sunni Muslims because both Jews and Shia