On Shavuot, the holiday which Jews around the globe begin celebrating this Tuesday night, Iraqi Jews mark 72 years since the Farhud — the 1941 riots in which 137 people were slaughtered and hundreds more injured. The Babylonian (Iraqi) Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda has inscribed the victims’ names, and Iraqi Jews worldwide recall the horrible disgrace of those events, which were so reminiscent of Kristallnacht in Germany. The Farhud riots were carried out by a mob that had been incited to violence, and resulted in the Iraqi Jewish community losing faith in the country they had called home for millennium; the community of some 140,000 Jewish people dwindled to just a sparse few today.

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I come from a family of refugees. My mother was younger than I am now when she was forced to flee for her life from the Islamic Revolution of Iran. My mother recalls being forced to sit in the back of her classroom along with a group of young Jewish children during her school years.

When my mother went to buy groceries in the market, she was not allowed to touch the produce because she was considered a “dirty Jew.” These are only a few indicators of the systematic oppression of the Iranian Jews, some of the oldest inhabitants of Persia. At the age of 20, she was forced to abandon her life in Iran as her family was scattered across the world. My grandmother, Mamanjani, was never allowed to return home because of her active involvement in Jewish organizations. Though she had no ties to any other government, she was warned not to go home for fear of execution without trial. Despite calling Persia home for 2,500 years, in 1979, my family and many Jewish families like my own were forced to forced to flee their homes. My family’s home, business and property was confiscated. We were torn from our homes, forced to flee to whichever country would take us in. Read More

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Times of Israel

April 26, 2013

I recently had the opportunity to see the Academy award-winning film “ARGO” and was impressed to see the producers of the film had correctly depicted the horrifying sense of terror and imminent death individuals living in post-revolutionary Iran experienced at the hands of the Iranian regime’s thugs. The scenes in the film showing “enemies” of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime hanging dead from construction cranes in the middle of the streets of Tehran or an individual being randomly shot by the regime’s revolutionary guards were indeed commonplace in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Iran.

Yet the heart-pounding terror shown in “ARGO” was just a small glimpse into the longstanding pain and suffering created by Iran’s radical Islamic regime towards average Iranians—especially Jews and other religious minorities living in Iran during the last 30 plus years. While “ARGO” is an entertaining film based on true facts that occurred in Iran at the start of the revolution, many of us Iranian Jews living in the U.S. and elsewhere relive this nightmare on a daily basis when we recall what suffering our community has endured at the hands of the current Islamic regime’s leadership.

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Of all the holidays, Passover was the one I waited for impatiently. I usually got a new pair of shoes, new trousers, white shirt, socks and underwear. I was happy as a lark and looked like a clown. The trousers were too long, the shirt was too big and my feet were swimming in my shoes. To prepare for Passover my mother baked Matzah at home. The helpers scrubbed, cleaned and washed drapes, sheets and everything else. All pots and pans had to be dipped in boiling water. On the first night of Passover, the table was set lavishly on an elegant table cloth with special posh dishes and fancy cutlery, and individual wine cups. I dressed up in my new clothes.

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This should not be the end of the story but only the beginning of a question:

What exactly was the Morsi regime’s issue with the showing of this film?

The post Running with Denial– Morsi and Egyptian Jews appeared first on JIMENA.

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The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

March 31, 2013

Earlier this month perhaps one of the most important efforts to document the tragic loss of life and property that Jews from North Africa and the Middle East experienced during the 20th century took placed here in Los Angeles. Members of the San Francisco-based “Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa” (JIMENA) gathered at local Sephardic synagogues to video interview 10 L.A. area Jews who escaped their native lands in North Africa and Iran when those countries had turned violently against their Jewish populations during the last century. While the world has been obsessed with the “right of return for Palestinian Arabs” that were supposedly “exiled” in 1948 and 1967 from Israel, no one seems to care about the near 1 million Jews expelled from Arab lands during the same period. What about the loss of property, finances and life Jews from these Islamic lands and Iran suffered? What about the thousands of Jews who were forced to leave their assets behind in Iran or had their assets confiscated  by the new Islamic regime in Iran after 1979? Who is speaking out on their behalf and speaking up for justice for their right of return? The answer is simple; JIMENA!

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TIMES OF ISRAEL

March 18, 2013

In my grandmother’s time, making what we Iraqis call silan (see-lan), a syrup, made from dates, was a daylong labor of love. She cooked and stirred and squeezed the dates dry in cheesecloth for hours. I watched how the brown juice turned into thick syrup, silan! Iraqi dates deliver the thickest syrup. The mixture in the pot glistened. “It’s not ready till you see that shine,” she taught me.

When you mix finely ground walnuts with the silan (usually at around a 4:1 ratio of silan to nuts) to thicken the texture into a “mortar,” you have Iraqi haroset.

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