“If we leave, who will remain to safeguard the Jewish remnants of Iraq?” Benjamin Elias asks. “Our Jewish community here was once so magnificent. Can we simply allow it to disappear?”
Baghdad is among the oldest and most important centers of Jewish life of yore, whose sages were renowned throughout the world. At its height, the Jewish community numbered some 150,000 souls. Nearly a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish, flourishing in the city and carrying forward the glory of Babylonian Jewry.
Now, of all that grandeur and splendor, almost nothing remains. Today, Baghdad is home to only a tiny Jewish community—if five people can still be called a community at all. Until a few years ago, the community was headed by Dr. Moshe Eliyahu Elias, z”l. After his passing, leadership passed to his sister, Dr. Khalida Elias, a dentist. She and the other remaining Jews try not to draw attention to themselves or publicize their existence.
I make contact with Benjamin Elias, a member of her family, who lives in eastern Baghdad, not far from the hotel in which I am staying. He asks not to be photographed. We meet over tea, and I ask him to guide me to whatever Jewish remnants of Baghdad can still be found today.
According to Benjamin, the Iraqi authorities have recently become more accommodating toward the Jews and even helped restore one of Baghdad’s most important Jewish sites.
Benjamin has lived through Saddam Hussein’s rule, the American occupation and the years of the ISIS insurgency. He too believed Iraq had finally begun returning to stability, until war erupted once more.
“The war is not good for Iraq,” he says.
As for relations with his non-Jewish neighbors, he says that he hasn’t had any trouble: “Most people understand that Jews lived here for many years. We are equal citizens. There are good Muslims, and there are less good Muslims. You cannot generalize. Most people are perfectly fine. Look at the current prime minister, who has truly done much to advance equality and improve the treatment of minorities in the country, including the Jews.
“The Jews lived in Babylonia for thousands of years,” he continues, “and our family, the Eliyahu family, was one of the important families in the Jewish community. We must not forget this glorious history.”
The Last Shul
The remnants of Iraq’s Jews still preserve Jewish tradition and celebrate the Yomim Tovim, but there are no regular minyanim. In fact, of the hundreds of shuls that once stood in Baghdad, only a single active one remains, opened only occasionally.
That shul is located in the neighborhood of al-Bataween, which for decades was one of the city’s central and most diverse districts. This is the neighborhood where Elias grew up.
“At the time it was considered a new neighborhood, where Jews moved from the Old City. Jews lived there comfortably; many owned private homes, including us. It was a very diverse neighborhood,” he recalls. “There were many Jews there, many of them wealthy—merchants and professionals—and we prayed at the Meir Tweig Synagogue, which was the largest in the neighborhood.”
The Jews of Baghdad lived relatively well until signs began to emerge that something terrible was happening. The first warning came with the Farhud pogroms of 1941. During the years of the British Mandate, unrest began spreading, fueled by anti-Semitic elements and encouraged by Nazi Germany. A two-day pogrom erupted, and mobs descended upon the wealthy Jewish quarter. Around 180 Jews were murdered, thousands more were injured, and homes and businesses were looted.
It was the first crack from which the community never truly recovered.
At first, the persecution was unofficial. But after the establishment of the State of Israel, the Iraqi authorities began systematically excluding Jews from public life: dismissals from government positions, restrictions on businesses and arrests.
Later, the Iraqi government permitted Jews to leave the country, but only if they renounced their citizenship and surrendered their property. Some 120,000 Jews immigrated to Israel within a single year in an operation known as “Ezra and Nechemiah,” named after the leaders of the Jewish people who returned to Yerushalayim to rebuild the Beis Hamikdash.
They departed almost empty-handed, leaving behind virtually all their possessions. Those who remained faced increasingly harsh conditions. Before long, the monarchy gave way to Ba’athist rule, under which Jews were accused of spying for Israel and some were publicly hanged. Whoever could flee, did.
After the Jews left al-Bataween, Shiite families moved into the neighborhood, and its condition steadily deteriorated. During Iraq’s oil boom and under Saddam Hussein’s rule, the country encouraged immigration from other Arab states, including Sudan, to fill labor shortages, especially during the Iran-Iraq War, when many Iraqi men were at the front. Many of these newcomers settled in the abandoned Jewish quarter.
Following the American invasion of Iraq, the neighborhood became one of Baghdad’s most notorious areas, plagued by militias and crime that continue to dominate it to this day. For that reason, Elias advises me that if I wish to visit the shul, I should do so quietly without requesting official permission. “If you do,” he warns, “they’ll likely attach a police escort to you from that moment until the end of your stay in Iraq.” Elias himself rarely visits the area anymore because of the danger.
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