Hanukkah Candle Lighting, Meir Tweig Synagogue, Baghdad, Iraq 1990s
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- čas přidán 13. 12. 2020
- A UN official on assignment in Iraq to monitor Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program found something unexpected: the last Iraqi-Jewish community in Baghdad praying at the Meir Tweig, the only functioning synagogue in a city that once boasted over 45. Their services for Hanukkah and other holidays were thankfully captured on tape by this official.
The story, however, doesn’t end there.
The tapes were in storage for years and time was taking its toll as the film degraded. When the footage was donated, in 2016, we immediately took action to digitize these last video vestiges of Iraq’s last Jews before they, like Jewish communities throughout Iraq, vanished.
Imagine what that loss would have meant.
Now consider how this preserved footage, published by the ASF here for the first time, can inspire future generations with the example of Babylonian Jewry’s last remnant lighting up the darkness in the depths of Saddam Hussein’s anti-Semitic regime.
What better way is there to make meaningful the Maccabees’ message for contemporary Jews than showing a modern day miracle: the courageous Iraqi-Jews who chose to celebrate religious freedom (Hanukkah) while beset by repression.
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We hope you, your family, friends, and community will contact us (info@americansephardi.org) if you have documents and artifacts, photographs and footage, memories and memorabilia in need of preservation.
Together, we can guarantee that this and future generations have tangible connections to, and knowledge of, the Greater Sephardi past, without which there is no Jewish future.
(Video courtesy of A.H./Diarna Geo-Museum)
I pray iraq becomes this again
Do the Jews of Iraq abroad marry each other?
יישר כוח בלי עין הרע כל הכבוד חג שמח
Mashallah
Beautiful Emad. May HaShem protect you ❤
Interesting to see this piece of history, glad it was recovered. I am not religious, which if anything makes me even angrier that people would be so mistreated for merely a difference of beliefs. What pointless hate, directed always ultimately back onto itself. The wheel of time turns, dictators die, usually violently.
I am gladdened to know that the vast majority of Iraqi Jews were able to flee before another pogrom. As I am still saddened for those that stayed.
I know the young man very well ,we would meet sometimes when he would come to visit our neighbor, who was from the Jewish community.
I see 3 antisemites chose to object!
That could be the case or it can be the audio quality 😷 0:17
what?
Do the Jews of Iraq abroad marry each other?
Most marry Non-Iraqi Jews since there are many more Non-Iraqi Jews than Iraqi Jews in most places.
Drediel