Free Republic

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- A Yemeni Jewish woman who reportedly ran away from her new husband's home has embraced Islam, according to a Yemeni newspaper. The English-language Yemen Observer reported Monday that Lia Saeed Hamdi was going to marry a Muslim man from the northern Yemen village of Kharif, located near her hometown. Citing Jewish sources, the News Yemen Web site reported last week that Hamdi had been kidnapped from her husband's home in Tourist City in the capital Sana'a after their wedding. Hamdi married the Jewish man, Haroun Salem, on June 30 after the family refused the Muslim man's request...

There is a troubling silence here and in the global Jewish community, in the context of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, about the fate of those Middle Eastern Jews who were persecuted, stripped of their citizenship and expelled from their homes and in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Whatever might be the final settlement with the Palestinians and with individual Arab countries or with all the member states of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, the violation of their human rights, confiscation of their property and annulment of their citizenship...

Algeria has created its first official Jewish association, which will be headed by a prominent Algerian Jewish lawyer. The establishment of the association is in accordance with a 2006 law on non-Muslim religions, which mandated that all non-Muslim religions should have representation from accredited associations. Mohamed Fellahi, the Algerian minister for Religious Affairs, appointed Roger Saïd, a lawyer from the Bilda region, to act as the representative of the Jewish community in a religious and cultural capacity. In Algeria, Jews are scarce and difficult to account for. There are no official records on the number of Jews living in the...

During the recent uprisings in Iran following the June 12th elections in that country, I have been approached by dozens of individuals asking me what is going on in Iran’s Jewish community today. The simple answer is pure fear . An emotion which is nothing new to Jewish minorities who have lived and somehow survived massacres, pogroms, as well as forced conversions in Iran for the past 2,700 years. Iranian Jewish fear is not only present today among the Jews in Iran but has also gripped thousands of Iranian Jews living in Southern California and New York. My piece this...

Their names often pay tribute to Iranian culture and their accented speech still sings the unique music of the language, even after decades. They stay on top of Iranian news, culture, sports and trivia, and stay in touch with friends and family living in a country whose distance from Israel is measured in more than geography. The Israeli community of Iranian Jews numbers about 170,000 -- including the first generation of Israeli-born -- and is deeply proud of its roots. On Tuesday, around 150 members of the community demonstrated in the Israeli city of Holon, home to the country's largest...

Even though most of his friends and relatives have left, Albert Cameo says he will never abandon Syria. "My family has always been here," said Cameo, 68, a retired tailor and president of Syria's estimated 200-member Jewish community. "It's important for some of us to stay here to keep our traditions." Most Jewish Syrians left in waves after the creation of Israel in 1948 and the enactment of harsh Syrian laws barring them from owning property, withdrawing funds from bank accounts and traveling. "If they had let Jews go back and forth, no one would have left," said Joey Allaham,...

SANA'A, June 28 – The death sentence passed on Abdulaziz Al-Abdi, charged with killing Yemeni Jewish and father of nine Masha Al-Nahari last December, heeds mixed reactions among the Jewish community in Yemen. Despite growing US and Israeli pressure to bring them out of Yemen and settle them in other destinations, the majority of Yemen's Jews prefer to stay in their ancestral homeland, as long as the government ensures their safety. Last Sunday's ruling overturned a previous March sentence that deemed the defendant, a retired pilot in the Yemeni air force, "mentally unstable" and ordered him to pay a "blood...

A French comedian has canceled his participation in a festival in Lebanon next month because of concerns for his safety after Hezbollah's TV station claimed he served in the Israeli army. Al-Manar TV said Gad Elmaleh, who is of Moroccan-Jewish descent, was an avid supporter of Israel and showed a purported picture of him wearing an Israeli military uniform. The performer's agent denied the report's claims and said the photo was a fake. Lebanon and Israel technically remain in a state of war, and it is illegal for Lebanese to have contacts with the Jewish State. Israel and the Shiite...

Sam Kermanian is watching the election drama unfold in his native Iran with great interest and pride. The Los Angeles resident and former secretary-general of the Iranian Jewish American Federation was shocked, he said, by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's statements on Friday that the June 12 vote was not rigged and that opposition leaders would be held responsible for any "bloodshed and chaos" resulting from future street protests. However, "it appears that the people of Iran have decided that they are not going to surrender to Khamenei's threats," Kermanian said Saturday, as news of defiant protests on the streets...

As our rundown Mercedes puttered past the olive groves and wheat fields of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, our taxi driver, Mohammed, pulled off the dirt road to ask a shepherd for directions. “Do you know how to find David Dra’a?” I was skeptical that the Arab shepherd would be able to lead us to the tomb of an obscure kabbalist rabbi, but he knowingly pointed us forward, higher into the peaks. Rabbi David Halevy, from the Dra’a area 60 miles northeast of Marrakech, is one of more than 600 tzadikim (righteous men) buried in Morocco who are recognized by local Jews...

ROME (JTA) -- There can be no lasting peace in the Middle East unless the claims of Jews displaced from Arab countries are redressed, Canada's former Justice Minister said. The "exclusion and denial of rights and redress to Jewish refugees" from Arab and Muslim countries, Irwin Cotler told Italian lawmakers, "will prejudice authentic negotiations between the parties and undermine the justice and legitimacy of any agreement." Cotler spoke Tuesday as part of a delegation of the Justice for Jews from Arab Countries organization, which presented its case to the Foreign Affairs Commission of Italy's Chamber of Deputies. Some 850,000 Jews...

ROME (Reuters) - Rome's Jewish community, some of whom were forced to leave Libya 40 years ago, are angry over Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's apparent willingness to meet them only on Saturday, the Sabbath day sacred to Jews. Community leaders also want Gaddafi, who arrives in Rome on Wednesday for his first visit to Italy, to tell them the whereabouts of a Palestinian who was sentenced for a 1982 attack on a Rome synagogue and found asylum in Libya. "At the very least this shows a lack of sensitivity," Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community, told Reuters. "But it...

Iraq's Last Jews - Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval and Escape from Modern Babylon Edited by Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha and Robert Shasha Introduction by Prof. Shmuel Moreh Palgrave-Macmillan 211 pp., $75.99 (hardcover) How does one explain the reason why a prosperous community of 140,000 people, with a history and heritage of 2,600 years, uproots itself en masse, and leaves Iraq, the country which it helped modernize in all areas - government and politics, economy, medicine, education, literature, poetry and music? An explanation for this extraordinary historical phenomenon is found in Iraq's Last Jews. This book includes testimonies of 19...

Seventy-five years after arriving in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Max Block has helped an Iranian Jewish family gain asylum in the UK. The Sinaei family have been helped by the entire Liverpool Jewish community as they struggled to survive without state aid when their application for asylum was turned down. They fled Iran after their land was seized, their home demolished and a grandmother’s funeral was disrupted, with security guards destroying the coffin and kicking the corpse. Farmers and cousins Youssef and Maryam Sinaei lived in a rural area of northern Iran, with their daughter Nazanin, 17,...

RABAT (AFP) — A group of alleged Islamists recently arrested in Morocco planned to attack Jewish interests in the country, a court source said Thursday, citing the charges against them. The suspects, alleged to be members of a cell that was part of the radical Islamist movement Salafia Jihadia, were also preparing attacks against Moroccan security services, the source said. Details of the alleged attack plans were not available.

Thirty years ago this week, philanthropist Habib Elghanian became the first Jew executed by Iran’s radical Islamic regime after he was falsely charged and convicted of spying for Israel. His death by firing squad on May 9, 1979, sent shockwaves through Iran’s tight-knit Jewish community, which once lived in relative peace under the Shah. It prompted scores of Iran’s nearly 80,000 Jews to immediately sell off or abandon their assets and flee the country. At least 13 Jews have been executed in Iran since Elghanian. This week, as local Iranian Jews commemorate Elghanian’s death, The Journal spoke with family members,...

Organization claiming to represent Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel says property worth $100 billion confiscated by authorities. Government says Jews were not forced to leave, sold their property before departing The Iraqi government has rejected recent claims made by an organization demanding that the country's Jews be compensated for property lost when they immigrated to Israel, the London-based Arabic-language al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper reported recently. The issue was raised after an organization by the name of "Nachum", claiming to represent Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel, issued a statement demanding compensation for the property and funds deposited in the banks...

Yemenite Jews face daily discrimination amidst a Muslim population. The Media Line takes a look at some Yemini Jewish families, their move from small villages to luxurious housing compounds and their integration into society. Sasa, 12, and 40 other boys of the Jewish minority in Raida, Yemen have stopped going to school. Sasa no longer plays as he used to, though he has never really played like other children. Sasa, his three brothers and five sisters lost their father and teacher Masha Ya’ish last December when he was shot dead by a former pilot and military officer. Last February, a...

The Iraqi government has launched a project to renovate the interior of the prophet Ezekiel's shrine in the small town of Kifl, south of Baghdad, and the country's Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities says it hopes to eventually repair and renovate other Jewish sites across the country. "The ministry is concerned with all Iraqi heritage, whether it is Christian or Jewish or from any other religion," ministry spokesman Abdelzahra al-Talaqani told AFP. "The present plans do not include the synagogues in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Fallujah and other places because of lack of funding, but I think they will be included...

Moshe Hassan's father knew the process of aliya inside and out. "My father tried to come here from Tunis in 1946, but was caught by the British and sent to Cyprus," Hassan told The Jerusalem Post by telephone on Sunday. "He was put in a camp there, and that's where he met my mother. They immigrated to Israel in 1948." They settled in Beit Hagadi, a religious moshav next to Netivot, but the elder Hassan would spend little time in his new country. Asked by the Jewish Agency to help bring Moroccan Jews on aliya, Ya'acov Hassan returned to North...