Time is running out to record the stories of Jews born in Arab countries: that's why projects to document their forgotten exodus such as Sephardi Voices, a worldwide effort to create an audio-visual 'Spielberg archive', are so urgent. Adi Schwartz has this article in The Tablet (with thanks to all those who emailed PoNR):
“Sometimes I still have nightmares,” says Juliette Glaser to her interviewer, as she sits in front of a video camera in her Miami living room, recalling in a confident voice her childhood memories from Cairo—where she was born in 1941 and which she fled 15 years later. “They were putting the city on fire during the revolution of 1952. They were getting rid of King Farouk. The city was black, and there was fire everywhere. I remember Egyptians walking in the streets, holding big knives, saying, ‘We’re going to kill the Jews, where are the Jews? Any Jews around here?’ And we would hide in the basement, turn all the lights off, just shivering, shaking of fear.”
The anti-Jewish policies continued to get worse in Egypt, and in the wake of the Sinai Campaign in 1956, her father, like many other Jews, was given 48 hours to leave the country. With only one suitcase for each family member, Glaser, her parents, and her three siblings left for France and later the United States.
Glaser’s recorded testimony is part of Sephardi Voices, an audio-visual history project currently under way to document and archive the testimonies of Jews displaced from North Africa and the Middle East in the 20th century. Started in 2009, the project is modeled after Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which has recorded the oral histories of tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors. With branches in Los Angeles, Miami, London, Paris, Jerusalem, and New York, Sephardi Voices has already collected 250 testimonies and is aiming to gather 5,000 in the next five years.
University of Miami Professor Henry Green is leading the effort to assemble these oral histories. “The project’s purpose,” he told me, “is to give voice to the nearly 1 million Jews that confronted growing discrimination and violence beginning in the 1940s.” From the Tigris and Euphrates to the Arabian Peninsula and throughout the Mediterranean, these Sephardi Jews were expelled or compelled to flee their homes and communities. The Jewish population in Arab lands, once totaling 850,000, collapsed in the quarter-century following the founding of the State of Israel; by 1980, 95 percent had been displaced.(..)
The general Arab conduct toward the Jews throughout the years was determined to a great extent by traditions originating in the very early stages of Islam: Believers were required to humiliate non-Muslims living under their rule, as befits those who reject the divine truth. Yet, as the historian Bernard Lewis notes in his book The Jews of Islam, “in contrast to Christian anti-Semitism, the Muslim attitude toward non-Muslims is one not of hate or fear or envy but simply of contempt.” Jews were assigned the inferior status of dhimmi (dependent)—a position that required them to submit to various forms of legal and social discrimination but also ensured the protection of their lives and property, and the right to practice their religion.
Starting in the 1940s and later when the State of Israel was proclaimed, the situation of the Jews in Arab countries deteriorated greatly. In 1941, for example, 150 Jews were murdered in a two-day pogrom (the Farhud) in Baghdad. In November 1945, 133 Jews were murdered, and hundreds were injured, in Tripoli, Libya. In 1948, dozens of Jews were murdered in a long series ofattacks in Egypt’s major cities. At the same time, many of the already independent Arab governments ordered the nationalization of Jews’ property, freezing of bank accounts, and mass dismissals from employment.
Lisette Shashoua’s family was a victim of such policies, which continued many years after Israel’s independence. A 65-year-old native of Iraq and resident of Montreal, Shashoua says in her testimony for Sephardi Voices that her grandfather “was one of the richest Iraqis in Baghdad in the 1920s and 1930s. He had hundreds of acres of land … but the property was either confiscated or frozen.”
Shashoua’s family remained in Iraq after much of the Jewish community left by the beginning of the 1950s. But Anti-Jewish sentiments peaked again during the Six-Day War in 1967, and Jews were treated as spies and traitors and were rounded up from their homes at night. “My mother told me, ‘You’d better prepare a bag with your pajamas and toothbrush,’ because she thought I would be arrested. Every time a car passed by at night in front of the house, I would wake up and I hoped it won’t stop. I would pray, I would kneel, that the car does not stop because if it does, then they came to arrest one of our family.” Shasoua finally left Iraq in 1970.
In Morocco, Jewish life deteriorated greatly after the country gained its independence in 1956. “It became difficult,” says Gienette Spier (née Rosilio), a Miami resident who was born in Essaouira in 1938, in her Sephardi Voices testimony. “It wasn’t safe anymore. That is when everyone started to leave—for Israel, for Canada, for England. My mother was worried for me as a girl, since we heard that [Jewish] girls were attacked. We started to be scared, we started to cling together.” The last straw was Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s visit to Morocco in 1961, which was accompanied with an anti-Jewish wave of violent physical attacks. “My mother decided that that’s it, we’re leaving.”
Most of the Jews who were living in Arab countries in the mid-1940s emigrated to Israel, the United States, the U.K., or France. Today, there are only a few thousand left; several countries that once had thriving Jewish communities today have no Jews at all.
While world Jewry has paid great attention to the plight of European Holocaust victims, the plight of Sephardi Jews has long been a “forgotten exodus,” said Green. His project is the first comprehensive effort to record and preserve this vast and rich Diaspora with audio-visual means.
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