Claiming
Jewish Communal Property in Iraq
Michael
R. Fischbach
On
June 23, 2008, representatives of Iraqi Jewish
communities in several countries met in London
to form a new group, the World Organization of
Jews from Iraq (WOJI). According to a press release
issued shortly after the meeting, the purpose
of WOJI was to “protect, preserve and promote
Jewish communal assets remaining in Iraq and
to protect, preserve and promote Iraqi Jewish
heritage, including holy sites and shrines remaining
in Iraq.” Iraq is home to the oldest continuously
present Jewish community in the world. After
the June 1941 farhud (attacks on Jews
in the wake of the British invasion of Iraq)
and the harsh measures directed against certain
Jews during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948,
Jews began to emigrate from Iraq, and from 1950
to 1951 alone, nearly 120,000 of Iraq’s remaining
135,000 Jews left the country, mainly for Israel.
The law required those leaving to relinquish
their citizenship, and the Iraqi government later
sequestered the property left behind. Jews continued
to emigrate in the years that followed, to the
point where it is estimated that only about ten
Jews live in Iraq today. Only one synagogue,
the Me’ir Avraham Taweq Synagogue in Baghdad,
was still open at the time of the US invasion
in March 2003. Many other closed synagogues,
along with Jewish shrines and other communal
property, still remain in the country, however.
What is the fate of this property as a Jewish
endowment? Enter WOJI.
WOJI
was the brainchild of Mordechai Ben Porat, founder
and chair of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center
(BJHC) in Or Yehuda, Israel. Born in Baghdad
in 1923, Ben Porat immigrated to Palestine in
1945, but returned to Iraq to work with the Israeli
foreign intelligence service Mossad in Baghdad
during the period of mass Iraqi Jewish emigration
to Israel in 1950–1951. Ben Porat and his accomplices
were active in coordinating Jewish emigration,
and even were accused of orchestrating a series
of bombings of Jewish buildings from 1950 to
1951 in the hopes of sparking a larger and speedier
Jewish exodus.[1] After
his return to Israel, Ben Porat entered Israeli
politics and was elected to the Knesset as part
of the Labor Alignment. By 1975 he had risen
to the post of vice chair of the Knesset. That
same year, he formed the World Organization of
Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC). Ben Porat left
the Labor Alignment in 1977, served as a minister
without portfolio in the government of Menachem
Begin and joined the Likud Party. For decades,
he has remained one of the highest-profile Iraqi
Jewish activists in the world.
Ben
Porat took the first steps toward the formation
of WOJI, and raised the issue of the fate of
Jewish communal property in Iraq, in 2005. He
and BJHC officials were likely influenced by
the fierce intra-Jewish dispute over who should
control the communal assets of the dwindling
Jewish community in Egypt. In contention today
are the hundred or so Jews still in Egypt and
the various Egyptian Jewish heritage groups abroad,
including the Historical Society of Jews from
Egypt in New York, the World Congress of the
Jews of Egypt in Israel and the Association Internationale
Nebi Daniel in France.[2] No
comparable group existed for Iraqi Jews, so Ben
Porat and two other Iraqi Jews—former WOJAC Chairman
Moshe Shahal and BJHC Deputy Chairman Aryeh Shemesh—arranged
for meetings among Iraqi Jewish expatriates in
Israel, New York and London to discuss the matter.[3]
More
controversial, however, is what another BJHC
official, Zvi Gabay, claimed publicly: that WOJI
intends to become “the official representative
of Jews of Iraqi origin in matters concerning
the community as a whole” now that Jewish life
in Iraq is virtually extinct.[4] Gabay stated that this will include
submitting “an official claim to community property
in Iraq,” a claim presumably to be made to the
new Iraqi government.[5] According to Heskel Haddad, the
Iraqi Jewish head of WOJAC’s office in New York,
the plan is to sue the Iraqi government.[6] This could pit WOJI against a number of parties, not the least
of which are the governments of Iraq and the
United States, as well as other Jewish groups.
One
of WOJI’s primary interests is control over and
renovation of Iraqi Jewish communal properties,
shrines and artifacts, both inside and outside
Iraq. Ben Porat maintains that he and BJHC possess
lists of Jewish communal real estate in Iraq,
probably a reference to a report that he himself
commissioned five decades ago while still operating
as an underground Mossad agent in Iraq. In 1951,
he arranged for three Iraqi Jews to conduct a
survey of Jewish communal assets. Their March
1951 report detailed Jewish communal endowments
(waqf) in Baghdad, and family endowments
in al-Kifl, al-Hilla and al-Hindiyya. Among these
properties were hospitals, cemeteries and synagogues.
The report determined that the total value of
these waqf holdings was 2,567,620 dinars
or $10,347,508 (1 dinar was equal to $4.03 in
1951).[7]
Moreover,
WOJI aims to “preserve” several important Iraqi
Jewish holy sites, many of which have been maintained
and venerated by other religious communities.
These include the shrine of the prophet Ezekiel
in the village of al-Kifl near al-Najaf, at which
both Jews and Shi‘a worship. The tomb of the
prophet Nahum lies in a village near the northern
Iraqi town of al-Qush, which is inhabited today
primarily by Chaldean Christians. The reputed
tomb of the prophet Jonah is contained within
a mosque in Mosul. Kirkuk is home to the tomb
of the prophet Daniel, and that of Joshua the
high priest is in Baghdad. Finally, the tomb
of Ezra, the priest-scribe, lies in the southern
town of al-‘Uzayr, near Basra. The town is inhabited
by Shi‘a, who also venerate the shrine.
WOJI
also intends to “salvage” and “repossess” moveable
Jewish assets such as Torah scrolls and marriage
registers.[8] Many Jewish religious artifacts
remained in Iraq after the mass exodus of Jews
in the early 1950s. Some were placed in museums;
others were confiscated and warehoused by Iraqi
security officials. After the fall of Baghdad
in April 2003, a number of them disappeared.
A number of Torah scrolls were stolen from the
Iraq Museum in Baghdad in the looting after the
US invasion. Some were later returned; others
resurfaced in New York. The Shi‘i cleric Sa‘id
Kamal al-Din al-Muqaddis al-Ruwayfi issued a
call to Shi‘a to relinquish stolen museum goods;
twenty-two scrolls and other manuscripts, plus
dozens of other items, were subsequently returned
to museum officials.[9] Saad Eskander, a Kurdish exile who returned
to become director of the Iraq National Library
and Archive, further managed to locate and collect
a large number of Jewish books that Saddam’s
regime had removed from synagogues.[10]
WOJI
also seeks to gain control of the Jewish community’s
marriage and death registers, as well as property
lists maintained by the community’s office in
Baghdad that continues to oversee the assets
of the tiny Jewish community still living there.
At the time of the US invasion, the office was
staffed by Naji Diwaniyya, the acting rabbi of
the Jewish community in Baghdad, along with representatives
of Iraqi intelligence and the Ministry of Awqaf
(the Arabic plural of waqf). Persons residing
in properties still registered in the names of
the original Jewish owners paid rent to the office.[11] By 2005, they were paying the rent to an elderly
Jewish woman.[12]
WOJI’s
efforts to lay claim to Iraqi Jewish artifacts
could spread beyond Iraq, insofar as many such
items are now located outside the country. According
to media reports in July 2000, the Mossad, through
intermediary Jordanian merchants, spirited some
Torah scrolls and other religious artifacts out
of Iraq in the 1990s after bribing Iraqi military
officers who had found them hidden in a Baghdad
warehouse.[13] Ben Porat and the BJHC themselves
possess other Jewish artifacts that they arranged
to be smuggled out of Iraq in recent years. Ben
Porat admitted in June 2008 that the BJHC paid
approximately $25,000 for some 300 old Jewish
books in Iraq, having dispatched an agent to
purchase them from what he called “thieves.”
After American occupation authorities, anxious
to stem further smuggling of Iraqi cultural items,
put a stop to the agent’s direct shipments to
Israel, Ben Porat’s operative resorted to more
shadowy methods to send the items to Israel.[14]
Potentially
even more controversially, WOJI has sought to
claim a cache of Jewish books and documents that
American occupation officials shipped out of
Iraq to the United States. On May 6, 2003, US
soldiers from the Army’s Mobile Exploration Team
Alpha, along with members of the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), descended into the flooded basement
of the bombed-out Department of General Intelligence
in Baghdad. Although the team’s job was to search
for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that day
the soldiers were acting on a tip provided to
the INC by a former Iraqi intelligence official
that an old Jewish Talmud lay deep within the
building. The Americans decided that finding
such a valuable cultural artifact merited diverting
the army team from its normal task. Although
they did not find the Talmud, they did discover
something else: a Torah scroll along with thousands
of manuscripts, documents and books dealing with
Iraq’s Jewish community. What they had found
were the archives of two offices within the General
Intelligence Department: the Israel-Palestine
and Jewish Sections.[15]
The
waterlogged documents consisted largely of items
that were confiscated from synagogues and libraries
after the mass exodus of the Iraqi Jewish community
in the 1950s. With the permission of the interim
Iraqi Ministry of Culture, the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) had the damaged documents frozen
and shipped to Texas, whereupon they were freeze-dried
and sent to the National Archives in College
Park, Maryland for restoration and preservation.
Archivists originally estimated that it would
cost between $1,525,000 and $3,000,000 to restore
the materials.[16] As they were not official government
documents, the National Archives solicited private
funds to aid in the process. Donors were hesitant
to commit, however, because of the uncertain
future of the manuscripts. The future of these
religious artifacts thus remains in limbo. Doris
Hamburg, the National Archives official who was
overseeing their restoration, stated in late
2007 that the American government had taken the
documents with “the expectation of the return
of the materials to Iraq,”[17] but
final arrangements for their repatriation have
yet to be made.
However
legitimate WOJI’s campaign may be, making a public
claim to Jewish communal assets is certain to
stir up considerable opposition in Iraq. The
fact that Israelis play a major role in WOJI
will only add fuel to that fire. In fact, the
prospect of Jewish property compensation and
Jews buying up land in Iraq already has engendered
a hostile reaction. Rumors of “foreign Jews”
(presumably former Iraqi citizens) seeking to
buy land were rife in Iraq in mid-2003. Sunni
Muslim clerics in Mosul issued a fatwa in
July 2003 forbidding the sale of real estate
to non-Iraqis for fear it might end up in Jewish
hands.[18] Exiled
Shi‘i cleric Ayatollah Kazim al-Husayni al-Ha’iri
issued a fatwa in June 2003 from Qom,
Iran demanding death for any Jew seeking to buy
land in Iraq.[19] And in late 2003 and early 2004, the Iraqi Turkmen Front claimed
that Kurdish Jews in Israel were repurchasing
their former properties with the help of the
Kurdish Credit Bank.[20] The veracity of these reports
aside, they indicate the depth of hostility to
Jews seeking the restitution of properties abandoned
long ago.
WOJI
claiming communal property on behalf of the worldwide
Iraqi Jewish community could also complicate
Washington’s relationship with the Iraqi government,
and indeed American authorities have already
instructed other Iraqi Jews to stop pressing
for property compensation.[21] The
WOJI claim to the Jewish documents at the National
Archives further puts the Americans in a quandary.
Claimants to the artifacts could include WOJI,
the few remaining Jews in Baghdad and the Iraqi
government. Given high-profile international
efforts to return Iraqi cultural heritage items
plundered after the invasion, the US cannot avoid
this quandary by maintaining possession of the
items.
Finally,
WOJI’s efforts are controversial within Jewish
circles as well, particularly as many Jews (Iraqi
or otherwise) might not recognize WOJI as their
representative. Moreover, WOJI’s claims collide
with parallel property compensation and restitution
efforts by other Iraqi Jewish groups. In September
2005, the Iraqi-Israeli lawyer David Nawi filed
a suit with the Israeli High Court of Justice
on behalf of the group Shemesh-Shalom ve Shilumin.
The suit seeks to force the Israeli government
to enter into compensation negotiations with
the new Iraqi government.[22] Other Iraqi Jews, like WOJAC
officials ‘Oved Ben ‘Ozer in Israel and Heskel
Haddad in the United States, are similarly against
WOJI’s efforts, believing that suing Iraq would
only stir up anti-Semitic feeling.[23]
WOJI’s
efforts also might run afoul of the coalition
Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC).
Since its inception in New York in 2002, it has
mounted a vigorous campaign to categorize all
Jewish emigrants from the Arab world after 1948
as “refugees” whose fate, and property losses,
should be linked to any diplomatic discussion
about the 1948 Palestinian refugees. JJAC is
supportive of Israel’s long-standing assertion
that any Israeli obligation to the Palestinians
should be connected to property losses sustained
by Jewish emigrants from Arab countries. JJAC
has argued that there was an irreversible Jewish-Arab
population and property exchange during and after
1948. Insofar as former Jewish citizens of Arab
states are not seeking a “right of return,” JJAC
asserts, neither should the Palestinians demand
a right of return to Israel.[24] The
efforts of WOJI and other Arab Jewish groups
seeking property compensation and restitution
thus threaten Israel’s justification for not
compensating Palestinians for their losses. On
the other hand, WOJI’s efforts might strengthen
JJAC’s claim of a population and property exchange
by offering an example of Jews demanding property
restitution from Arabs.
No
matter what transpires, WOJI’s intention to pursue
claims for Jewish communal property in Iraq raises
a number of questions concerning Iraqi reconstruction,
the Palestinian struggle and intra-Jewish political
divides. Along with the unresolved Palestinian
refugee problem, the exodus of the vast majority
of the Arab world’s Jews evinces the ongoing,
disruptive legacy of the large-scale demographic
shifts witnessed by the region over the past
60 years.
Endnotes
[1] Even
some Iraqi Jews believed the rumors that fellow
Jews had planted the bombs. Over the decades,
this accusation has been debated heatedly in
Israel, resulting in official Israeli inquiries
and lawsuits. For views dismissive of the accusation,
see Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus from Iraq,
1948–1951 (London: Frank Cass, 1997); Shlomo
Hillel, Operation Babylon: Jewish Clandestine
Activity in the Middle East, 1946–1951 (translated
by Ida Friedman) (London: Collins, 1998); and
Mordechai Ben Porat, To Baghdad and Back:
The Miraculous 2,000 Year Homecoming of the Iraqi
Jews (translated by Marcia Grant and Kathy
Akeriv) (Jerusalem and New York: Gefen, 1998).
For a view supportive of the accusation, see
Abbas Shiblak, Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass
Exodus (London: Saqi Books, 2005). For a
view that states that there is no solid evidence
implicating any particular party in the bombings,
see Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial
Reading of Nationalism, Religion and Ethnicity (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
[2] For
more information on this dispute, see Michael
R. Fischbach, Jewish Property Claims Against
Arab Countries (Columbia University Press,
2008), p. 198 and passim.
[3] Zvi
Gabay, “Maintaining the Link: World Organization
of Iraqi Jewry,” Nehardea (Spring 2008),
online document available at www.bjcny.org/art-ZviGabay-WorldOrg.htm.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Telephone
interview with Heskel Haddad, August 7, 2008.
[7] Israel,
Prime Ministry, Israel State Archives. (130)
2563/6, “Jewish Inalienable Properties in Baghdad”
(March 7, 1951).
[8] Gabay,
“Maintaining the Link: World Organization of
Iraqi Jewry.”
[9] Jewish
Telegraphic Agency, May 5, 2003.
[10] BBC
News, January 8, 2008.
[11] Al-Hayat,
May 31, 2003 and al-Sharq al-Awsat, May
8, 2003, cited in Nimrod Raphaeli, “The New Iraqi
Press and the Jews,” Middle East Media Research
Institute Inquiry and Analysis 146, August
26, 2003.
[12] Jerusalem
Post, August 31, 2005.
[13] Sunday
Times (London), July 5, 2000, cited in
“Mossad Snatches Sacred Jewish Texts from Saddam,” The
Scribe: Journal of Babylonian Jewry 73
(July 2000); Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December
3, 1999.
[14] Agence
France Presse, June 27, 2008.
[15] New
York Times, May 5, 2003; Michael R. Fischbach,
“Israel Tallies Up Compensation Claims by Iraq’s
Jews,” Daily Star, September 4, 2004.
[16] “The
Iraqi Jewish Archive Preservation Report” (October
2, 2003), online document available at http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/mela/IraqiJewishArchiveReport.htm.
[17] Personal
communication with the author, November 7, 2007.
For more on these documents, see Fischbach, Jewish
Property Claims Against Arab Countries, p.
216 and passim.
[18] Dar
al-Salam, July 10, 2003, cited in Raphaeli.
[19] Reuters,
June 28, 2003.
[20] Cihan
News Agency, November 13, 2003.
[21] Interviews
with ‘Oved Ben ‘Ozer, Tel Aviv, August 30, 2006
and Heskel Haddad, New York, October 22, 2007.
[22] Ynet,
May 29, 2006.
[23] Telephone
interview with Heskel Haddad, August 7, 2008.
[24] For
details on JJAC, see Fischbach, Jewish Property
Claims Against Arab Countries, p. 235 and
passim.
