From Baghdad to Boston and Beyond

         The Iraqi army returned home, dejected. Once Israel was established, they looked upon their own Jews as enemies in their midst who would become Zionists and therefore traitors. Never mind that the Jewish community in Baghdad had been established for more than 2,000 years and that Iraqi Jews felt just as “Iraqi” as anyone else. The government took out their wrath on their own (Jewish) citizens, especially in the big cities of Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. Even before the U.N. declared the Partition Plan, anti-Semitism escalated in Baghdad in the summer and fall of 1947. It came to a head in 1948 and 1949. Many of the Iraqi Jews, especially the young, saw no future in their homeland. Many planned to leave the country but as time went on, the government made it harder and harder for them to go.

        While I was in Middlebury, many of the Jews in Baghdad began selling their homes in preparation to leave. My grandfather, uncles, and to a lesser extent, my father, began shifting money out of the country. They had to transfer funds abroad through trusted Arabs for a fee of one third of the total amount. My relatives began sending me whatever they could get out. Overnight I became their personal banker. I deposited their money in a savings bank in the town of Middlebury, diligently keeping a record of each account in a tiny notebook with a black cover. I remember this just as if it happened yesterday. As soon as I received a check, I walked a mile or so to the little town bank. It was my good deed to all of my family members in time of their need. As I mentioned earlier, from a young age I was taught to help others. In return it gave me a sense of accomplishment and a tremendous uplift of the soul to know that even” little me” could be of help even though I was about eight thousand miles away.

       Toward the end of 1948, my father started to lose vision in one of his eyes. The local eye doctors couldn’t help him. He elected to travel to London for treatment. It took him a few months to get a passport. He found out that he had a retinal detachment. The operation on his eye entailed both mobilization of the orbit and relieving the coagulated fluid in the back of the retina with a cautery needle inserted through the back of the eye. After surgery he remained in bed with sandbags on each side of his head to keep it motionless for a full month.

       Not long after he left the hospital in London, his eyesight in the treated eye got so bad that he was reduced to seeing only shadows. For the next few months he lived near Liverpool with old friends from Baghdad who left before WWII. He was very happy to re-establish his friendship.

      Rationing in England continued long after the war and made life very difficult for its inhabitants. My father asked me to send as much as I could, items including rice, tea and coffee. I would go to the general store, buy several one pound cartons of rice (for example), carry them back to the dormitory, properly package them in brown paper made from cut-up shopping bags and tie the bundle with strong cord. I shipped multiple such packages as his requests for more supplies increased. My father must have given these packages to many of his friends.

      Before too long, my father started to lose vision in his “good” eye. The doctors told him it was retinal detachment all over again. He had always been dear to me, which made me all the more sad that he could barely see anything. He was put through the same operative routine and prolonged convalescence to no advantage, but he remained hopeful. Upon continued investigation, he learned that there was a certain doctor in Utrecht in the Netherlands who was the expert in his condition. He went there for surgery, but again it was to no avail. His world plunged from seeing only shadows to total darkness.

      He went back to London and Liverpool where socializing with his old cronies kept him happy. He kept up his morale, and I continued to receive cheerful mail from him. Time marched on. During his two year absence my oldest brother assumed the role of temporary surrogate dad for the rest of the family. My mother was home with her younger children awaiting the return of her now blind husband. The news from my brother in Baghdad was not encouraging. Not so slowly, but very surely, Iraqi Jews were stripped of their rights: assets frozen, expelled from municipal and government jobs, restricted as to their own private businesses, unable to attend schools of higher education, unable to sell their homes, unable to travel freely, and above all, unable to leave the country. Many Jews worked in banks and transportation, especially the railway system that had been built by the British and spanned the country from the northern city of Mosul to the southern port city of Basra. They were all fired. A considerable number was reduced from middle income to poverty levels.

      In March of 1950, then Prime Minister Nuri al-Said issued a declaration. Up until that point, Jews weren’t allowed to leave the country. He offered them an “opportunity.” They could leave and in the process, forfeit their Iraqi citizenship and all their assets. The authorities were expecting no more than ten thousand to take advantage of this severe decree. They were flabbergasted when 40,000 applicants applied in the first month. Now they had to deal with an overwhelming number of “new aliens,” too many to process in the two-week period they had set for them to leave. For administrative purposes they had no choice but to extend the two weeks to one year. Those who waited to leave they were interned in refugee camps.

        Most of the refugees went to Israel. Others who could afford the passage money and had family or friends abroad joined them in London, Paris, the United States or in Canada. Having been apprised of the deteriorating situation, many students already abroad chose to stay in their respective new environments. Other young people with a Zionist zeal left home in darkness, made their way either across the western desert or eastward to Iran, and eventually to Palestine where they joined the ranks of the Kibbutzim (collective communities, usually agricultural) or the Haganah (a Jewish paramilitary organization in the British Mandate of Palestine [1921–48], which became the core of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces).

        Although, and in spite of being overwhelmed by a swelling tide of refugees, the Israeli government launched an airlift in March of 1951.  It was called “Operation Nehemiah and Azaria,” two of the prophets of Judah who brought consolation to the Israelites as they were driven out of their homeland 2600 years ago.  Two airplanes were made available daily. One left Baghdad for Lod Airport in Israel. The other headed back to Baghdad.

         Between 1948 and 1951 approximately 121,633 Jews left Iraq. 60,000 of those left after the Prime Minister’s decree. Only 15,000 Jews remained in the entire country. Ultimatums took the form of an elastic band, contracting and expanding at the whim of a dictatorial government. The law expired in March 1951 but was later extended. In 1952 emigration to Israel was again banned.  The Iraqi government publicly hanged 2 Jews who had been falsely charged with throwing a bomb at the Baghdad office of the U.S. Information Agency.