JULY 2021

In July 1948, Iraq made Zionist
affiliation a criminal offense. When
arrested, Ades was accused simultaneously
of being a Zionist and a
Communist. Ades accumulated business
and personal ties with high-profile
Iraqi notables and officials and
even had accessibility to the regent
Abdul Ilah. The Ford importer was
by 1948 the wealthiest Jewish individual
in Iraq.
With one historian calling it the
“greatest shock to the Jewish community
[of Iraq],” the execution of
Ades had a profound impact on the
Jewish community. Ades was both
assimilated to Iraq and a non-Zionist
Jew. The affair significantly reduced
support for assimilation into Iraqi society
and increased support for emigration
as a solution to the crisis in
the Iraqi Jewish community. There
are streets in the Israeli cities that are
named after Ades.
In 1950, the ban was lifted and
the Iraqi government issued an edict
allowing the Jews to leave the country
if they forfeited their Iraqi citizenship.
The government of Israel,
the Jewish Agency and the Joint
Organization combined to carry out
“Operation Ezra and Nehemiah,” in
which 120,000 Jews were brought to
Israel from Iraq. The edict decreed
that each Jew of age ten and up could
take a limited amount of money with
them as they left. Many Jews were
forced to leave their significant property
behind for free.
One year later, the property of
Jews who emigrated was frozen and
economic restrictions were placed
on Jews who chose to remain in the
country.
In 1952, the Iraqi government
closed the borders of the country
once again and did not allow the remaining
Jews to emigrate. Iraq’s government
barred Jews from emigrating
and publicly hanged two Jews after
falsely charging them with hurling
a bomb at the Baghdad office of the
U.S. Information Agency.
Eleven years later, in 1963, the
newly established Ba’ath government
imposed further restrictions on
the Jews. The sale of property was
forbidden, and all Jews were forced
to carry yellow identity cards.
In 1967, following the Six Day
War, the treatment of Jews worsened.
Some 3,000 were arrested and fired
from their jobs, their bank accounts
were frozen, Jewish-owned businesses
were closed, trade deals signed
by Jews were voided, and many telephone
lines in Jewish homes were
disconnected. Jews were placed under
house arrest for long periods of
time or restricted to the cities.
Persecution was at its worst in
1968. On January 27th of that year,
scores of Iraqi Jews were jailed upon
the discovery of the so-called local
“spy ring” composed of Jewish
businessmen. Fourteen men, eleven
of them Jews, were accused of spying
for Israel. The accused were put
on staged sham trials, at the end of
which some were sentenced and
hanged in public squares in Baghdad
while others died of torture. Due to
international pressure, the Iraqi government
allowed the remaining Jews
to leave for Israel. As of 2014, there
were only an estimated 60 Jews living
in Baghdad.
Many Iraqi Jews felt rage and frustration
at their loyalty to the state
being doubted. Shalom Darwish, the
secretary of the Jewish community
in Baghdad, for instance, refused to
renounce his Iraqi citizenship and
chose to flee the country covertly.
“I inherited my Iraqite’s from my fathers
and grandfathers just as I inherited
the blood in my veins,” he wrote.
Clockwise from top left:
1. Bar-Mitzvah Celebration in 1961
2. Iraqi Jews with Hakham Sasson Khadhoori
3. Iraqi Jews being airlifted to Israel in the Exodus of 1950-1951
4. 1947 Iraq’s Beauty Queen Renee Dangoor (in Arabic)
5. Baghdadi Jewish Girls wearing traditional Abayya
“I could not turn my citizenship into
a piece of paper that you hand to a
clerk to be put together with hundreds
of others. My Iraqi citizenship
was born thousands of years ago, before
the grandfathers of those claiming
to be Iraqis ever came to Iraq.”
The Jewish community in Baghdad
was founded in the mid-eighth century
and from the 9th-11th centuries
was the seat of the Exilarch (Resh
Galutah).
The community continued to
function to the extent possible from
1950 through the 1970s despite significant
constraints. The recovered
documents provide a vivid picture
of the persistence of Jewish organizational
life in Baghdad with the dwindling
numbers of Jews and increasing
insecurity. Jews and other minorities
faced ongoing persecution following
the revolution of 1958 and the rise
of the Ba’athist Party in 1963, culminating
in the public hanging of nine
Jews in January of 1969.
In response to international pressure,
the Baghdad government quietly
allowed most of the remaining
Jews to emigrate in the early 1970s,
even while leaving other restrictions
in force. Most of Iraq’s remaining
Jews were now too old to leave. They
had been pressured by the government
to turn over title, without compensation,
to over millions of dollars’
worth of Jewish community property.
Only one synagogue continued to
function in Iraq, “a crumbling buffcolored
building tucked away in an
alleyway” in Bataween, once Baghdad’s
main Jewish neighborhood.
Baghdad’s Jewish quarter, in Taht al-
Takia, no longer exists.
The Jewish community had a
presence in many Iraqi cities and
provinces such as Hilla (Babel),
A’anna, Rumadi, Duhok, and Erbil.
In recent years, Jews in Iraq were
permitted to live in two cities only –
Baghdad and Basra. They numbered
about 500 in total.
Operation Ezra and Nehemiah
From 1949 to 1951, 104,000 Jews
were evacuated from Iraq in Operation
Ezra & Nehemiah (named after
the Jewish leaders who took their
people back to Jerusalem from exile
in Babylonia beginning in 597
JEWISH continued on page 32
JULY 2021 CHALDEAN NEWS 33