Posted on 02/05/2003 10:40:53 PM PST by yonif
OR YEHUDA, ISRAEL—It was an eerie experience, driving through the Jewish quarter of Baghdad recently in search of the last lonely holdouts among a community with roots that stretch back 2,600 years.
There are exactly 38 Jews left in Baghdad. Most are elderly. Most live in fear.
A request to an Iraqi government official for permission to interview the last of the true Babylonian Jewry had prompted incredulous laughter. "Not possible. Too sensitive."
Even an Iraqi taxi driver refused to do more that slow down for a cruise past Bataween — the last Baghdad synagogue still in operation — assuming the location to be under surveillance by Iraqi agents.
In a drive-by glimpse, the lonely synagogue was ringed with three-metre-high walls, foreboding steel gates and not a person in sight.
Two countries to the west, in the village of Or Yehuda, Israel, lives a man who can fill in the blanks better than any.
At 79, Baghdad-born Mordechai Ben-Porat has dedicated his life to the exodus of Iraqi Jews.
In the early 1950s, he was the Mossad-trained leader of the underground movement known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah that brought 120,400 people to Israel, the second-largest population transfer in Jewish history.
Ben-Porat was arrested four times for his efforts, which included mass mobilization by planes, trains, automobiles and even on foot.
He often dressed in Bedouin clothing to find safe passage. He once lost two teeth in a beating by Iraqi police.
It is a mission that never ended. In the last five years, 220 Jews have fled Iraq, the most recent emigrants arriving just eight months ago.
Says Ben-Porat: "Whatever happens to Saddam Hussein, the community is finished. Forever. The 38 who are left, the story will end when they die.
"From 586 BC to today. And now the gates of Baghdad are closed."
Ben-Porat remembers well his childhood, when relations were different. The eldest of 11 children from the northern Baghdad community of Adhamiya, where his father ran a general store, he speaks of time shared with Muslim and Christian Arab children. These were true friendship, sealed with visits to each other's homes.
Back then, the Jewish Quarter really was one-quarter of Baghdad — an estimated 137,000 people worshipping at dozens of synagogues. Some Jews had standing in the greater Baghdad community as business leaders and at one time Jews held half the seats on the city's 16-member municipal council.
But times were about to change.
Under the Ottoman Turks, the Jews of Baghdad were dhimmis, a protected minority, guaranteed freedom of worship.
Under the British Mandate, relations slowly began to sour, increasingly so as Jewish agitation for a homeland grew stronger.
The turning point came in June, 1941, in the aftermath of a pro-Nazi coup, when 135 Jews were murdered in a two-day pogrom.
"It was an earthquake," recalls Ben-Porat. "The mob even came to our door and was about to attack. But our Muslim neighbour — the wife of an Iraqi army colonel — came rushing out to save us. She held a hand grenade and said she would blow them up if they didn't go away.
"For the next two days, we gave shelter to every Jew in our neighbourhood. There were 200 people in our house."
In the aftermath of the attack, Ben-Porat's parents plotted their exit, eventually winning passage to Palestine with forged passports. They left Iraq for good in a seaplane that touched down on the Dead Sea.
Ben-Porat stayed behind, ostensibly to complete his matriculation exams but also to work with the underground Halutz movement, dedicated to creating a pathway for Jews to reach Palestine.
"In 1945, I walked to Jerusalem," he says. "I walked for 30 days, through Syria and then down from the north through Lebanon."
Ben-Porat soon found himself a company commander in Israel's War of Independence, commanding a group in the battle of Latrun.
By 1948, he was selected by the Mossad for a mission to enable the exodus from Baghdad.
Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was planned for some 150 emigrants a month, at most. But when Iraqi authorities approved the project on March 3, 1950, 63,000 people — nearly half the Jewish population of Baghdad — registered in the first two months.
By the end of 1951, only 9,000 Jews remained in the Iraqi capital.
After his final exit, Ben-Porat helped found the town of Or Yehuda, about 10 kilometres east of Tel Aviv, on the site of an immigrant transit camp where many of the Iraqi arrivals were sent upon arrival.
He later became its mayor, eventually sitting in the Knesset as a member of parliament for 16 years.
But his crowning achievement is the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Centre, the culmination of a lifework for which he was last year awarded the Israel Prize, the country's highest civilian honour.
"The saga of this Diaspora community is nearly finished, but we can keep the memory alive," he says of the heritage centre.
The museum serves as an ancestral lifeline for the nearly 250,000 Jews of Iraqi descent living in Israel, tracing the initial exile to Baghdad by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar through to the present. Treasures from more than two millennia of Iraqi Jewry are on display, from silverwork and wedding gowns to stories of the Babylon Talmud.
As for the 38 remaining Jews of Baghdad, Ben-Porat shrugs. They have no rabbi now and only two know the Hebrew language.
They do, however, have protection of a kind, under Saddam Hussein. Ben-Porat acknowledges that Saddam has taken pains to preserve and protect at least three Jewish sites in Iraq.
"Iraqi Jews have an old saying: `Baghdad is a pot of gold, but there is a snake in the pot,'" he says.
"Some of us see the gold; others see the snake.
"I have no doubt Iraqis would be better off with a different leader. I'm not talking about what is good for Israel, I mean Iraqis themselves. So many have suffered and died.
"There will never be a Jewish future in the new Iraq, of this I am certain.
"But I do think we can help build a bridge to the new government. We speak the same language and we remember our fathers could work together.
"That is a history we can build on."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.