For Israel's Iraqi Jews, war stirs strange homesickness

TIBERIAS, Israel -- Fingers crackle on a goatskin drum over the soft cry of a fiddle as Albert Elias plays an Arabic melody on a homemade flute carved out of a broomstick. Sometimes, when audiences of fellow Iraqi Jews hear the fluttering sound, they cry.

"Iraqi music now is very sad for us. It reminds us," says the 72-year-old Elias, who left Baghdad for the new state of Israel together with tens of thousands of other Iraqi Jews a half century ago.

Elias' music turned last month's Iraqi Jewry festival in the Galilee town of Tiberias a little melancholy. Even as hundreds danced, some began to weep, reflecting the odd duality of homesickness for what is now an enemy land.

Among the community of 250,000 there is no sympathy for Saddam Hussein, who hit Israel with Scud missiles in the 1991 Gulf War and has paid millions of dollars to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. But there is a soft spot for the Iraqi people, and many hope that if Saddam is ousted his successors will be friendlier and enable them, for the first time, to visit their former home.

"It's the place of my birth, my childhood," says Binyamin Ezra, 75, who still fingers a string of prayer beads in the Muslim manner. "It's hard to say I love Iraq ... (But) if Iraq was without Saddam, it would be like the Garden of Eden."

Iraq's Jews were among the Middle East's richest, growing out of a 2,600-year-old diaspora. Jews were taken as captives to what was then Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar, who conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the first Jewish Temple.

In the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, many holy writings were penned. Psalm 137 begins with the words, "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion" -- a reference to Jerusalem.

Jewish seminaries flourished even after the 7th century Arab conquest and subsequent Ottoman rule. On his travels through the Middle East, a 12th century Spanish rabbi, Benjamin of Tudela, described how even Muslims rose to their feet and saluted the leader of Baghdad's Jews.

In the first half of the last century, Jews were among Iraq's elite of engineers, doctors, lawyers, musicians and professors. Many were merchants and goldsmiths, and Baghdad's commerce slowed when they shut for the Jewish Sabbath.

Jews were the core of government employees after the country gained independence from British colonial rule in 1932, and the first finance minister was Jewish.

But resentment of Jews grew, and hatreds were fueled by Nazi Germany's ambassador. In June 1941, mobs used axes and sticks to kill 135 Jews in two days of rioting.

Legally barred from leaving, Jews began to slip out, sometimes dressed as Bedouin nomads and accompanied by smugglers on dangerous treks through neighboring Iran, Syria, Jordan and Turkey. Leaving behind businesses and houses, some tossed their gold jewelry into the Tigris so Arabs wouldn't loot it from empty houses.

After Israel's establishment in 1948, hundreds of Jews in Iraq were jailed without trial under martial law. Others were fired from government jobs and had their businesses and property confiscated. Five Jews were hanged.

Then in 1950-51, Israel helped arrange the exodus of about 120,000 Jews, after Iraq changed its laws to allow Jews to leave.

Only a few stayed and the ancient community dwindled, clearly no longer welcome. In 1969, nine Jews were publicly hanged in Baghdad's Liberation Square on accusations of spying for Israel, charges that were hotly denied and provoked worldwide condemnation. In the following years several dozen more Jews were executed or died in jail.

Today just 41 Jews are left in Baghdad, Israeli officials says. Except for three teenagers, all of them are older than 50. None speak Hebrew. A few can pray. The rabbi of the only functioning Baghdad synagogue died in 1996.

Mordechai Ben-Porat, who led the Jewish underground in Iraq and was jailed and tortured, says Iraq's Arabs could someday welcome the return of Jewish visitors.

"The older generation of Iraqis know very well the Jews' big contribution to the state of Iraq," says Ben-Porat, who helped Israeli intelligence organize the 1950s exodus and today runs the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center near Tel Aviv.

Despite the violence, Ben-Porat and other Iraqi Jews describe the land of their childhood with a romantic nostalgia.

During the rioting in 1941, the 79-year-old Ben-Porat recalls, an Arab neighbor who was the wife of an Iraqi colonel kept a mob away from Ben-Porat's house with a pistol and hand grenade.

He yearns to again see the Tigris, whose Hebrew name Hidekel is based on the word for the palm trees that line its shores. Low summer waters would leave tiny islands where he and other Jewish boys sat with girlfriends, singing as someone strummed a lute, Ben-Porat says. They'd bake river fish in brick ovens.

He wonders if his family's house is there, still ringed with a garden of date palms, peach and apple trees, and leafy twists of grape vine.

There is curiosity, too, among younger Israelis of Iraqi Jewish descent, like 29-year-old Rachel David, who is learning to play the oud, a stringed instrument similar to a lute.

"The young are interested again in Oriental music, which was forgotten and thought to be inferior," she says. "It's like going back."