Lyn Julius
Shlomo Hillel and the Aliyah from Iraq

Lyn Julius - Shlomo Hillel and the Aliyah from Iraq

- Shlomo Hillel died in Israel on the 8th of February 2021. He was aged 97. He was many things during his long life, undercover agent, kibbutznik, member of Knesset, government minister, ambassador, but his life’s passion was to help ingather Jews from the diaspora to Israel no matter how challenging or illegal. He may not be widely known outside the Iraqi Jewish world, but he will always be remembered for his part in the mass aliyah or immigration to Israel of the Iraqi Jews. Today, it’s the third largest community in Israel after the ex-Soviet and the Moroccan Jews. Shlomo Hillel was the youngest of a family of 11, seven brothers and four sisters. He was born in 1923 into a middle-class Jewish family in the capital Baghdad, and attended the elite Alliance Israelite Universelle school. Two of his brothers initially went to India and Japan to run the family trading business before moving to Israel. In 1934, Shlomo Hillel followed his brother Eliyahu to Palestine. He was just 10 ½. He enrolled at the Tel Aviv Herzliya Gymnasium but was effectively a latchkey kid not seeing his brothers until they returned home late at night. A year or so later, the rest of the family joined the boys in Israel. And this of course is the Herzliya Gymnasium, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was knocked down to make way for the Shalom Meir Tower, which I think was the first tower block to be built in Tel Aviv.

In 1945, Hillel was waiting to start a new kibbutz in Pardes Hana. Later he became a founding member of kibbutz Ma'agan Michael near Haifa, He aspired to settle into a quiet life tilling the soil, but fate had other plans for him. He received instructions from the Haganah, the precursor of the Israel Defence Forces that his group should establish a new kibbutz in the Rehovot. This was to become known as the Ayalon Institute and is today on Hillel’s own initiative, a museum. What happened there is a story of outstanding courage, ingenuity, and sheer hutzpah displayed by a group of young dedicated pioneers. The Jews living under the British Mandate anticipated that they would soon be fighting the Arabs when the British left. Leaders of the Haganah were deeply concerned about their ability to defend themselves. They had produced 450 Sten guns that had hardly any ammunition. Moreover, if Jews were found in possession of weapons, they faced imprisonment or even execution at the hands of the British. Shlomo Hillel, then only 22, led a group of scouts composed of school leavers from the prestigious Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv and the Reali School in Haifa. Many of them were refugees from Nazi Europe. One was Hillel’s future wife, Temima, who had survived the sinking of the Patria. The kibbutz they built comprised accommodation, a children’s house, dining room, laundry, bakery, chickens, gardens, and agriculture. Most of the kibbutzniks did not know about the factory beneath, they were known as the giraffes. And here you see the bakery and the laundry above the bullet factory. The factory workers joined the rest of the kibbutzniks for lunch.

They sat under an ultraviolet lamp in the underground factory to make it look like they had been working in the fields. The factory was the size of a tennis court. It took three weeks to excavate and cover with earth. The first entrance was hidden under a washing machine in the laundry. And the second was concealed under the 10-ton base of a bakery oven. Two mattresses were laid underneath to muffle the noise of the bullet factory below. Electricity and water were supplied courtesy of his Majesty’s government by illegally connecting to the mains. The brass for the bullets actually came from Britain too. But the British were told that it was destined for a workshop in Jaffa making lipstick casings. In fact, the British officers were presented with lipsticks for their wives. The gunpowder for the bullets was stolen from the British. The machinery to make them came from Poland. The British almost intercepted the shipment bound for Haifa, but it was diverted to Beirut Port after a spy for the Haganah gave the alert. Remarkably, the bullet factory at the Ayalon Institute operated under the noses of the British whose army camp was nearby. From time to time, the British came unannounced to visit the kibbutz. One bright spark suggested that the British give advance notice of their visits so that beer could be put in the fridge and chilled so they could have nice cold beer.

The washing machine needed to operate full time to conceal the noise of the factory. Because the kibbutz did not have enough dirty laundry, the laundry served the local community too. A maternity home in Rehovot used their services, and so did soldiers from the British camp. Said a veteran worker, the British liked us because we did such an excellent job cleaning their uniforms. Customers never collected their washing. It was always delivered to them to avoid their coming to the kibbutz. The project was never discovered and operated until 1949. It, excuse me, it produced 2.5 million bullets. By then, the British had left and the Israelis could manufacture bullets openly. There was only one accident. The worker whose job it was to trim the bullets known as the mohel, cut his finger when momentarily distracted by another worker, Temima, who would later become Hillel’s wife. I do suggest you go and visit the Ayalon Institute. It is absolutely fascinating. And you can actually take a guided tour around it. Hillel himself only spent one year at the Ayalon Institute before being sent to Lebanon and then Iraq to help Jews travelling over land to reach Palestine. He was then working for Mossad Aliyah Bet. Bet stood for Bilty Legalit, illegal immigration. Of course, their major efforts were directed at Europe, trying to get Holocaust survivors into Palestine. But from 1942, Aliyah Bet began to send emissaries to Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. Jews were not able to leave these countries legally, and the British had banned Jews from entering Palestine. Aliyah Bet focused on teaching Hebrew and holding lectures on Zionism. Most of the Iraqi Jewish community were not Zionist.

At this point, I need to give you a bit of background on the community. It numbered about 150,000 Jews. Iraq was the oldest Jewish diaspora and shaped Judaism as we know it. It was 2,600 years old and went back to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar who took captives from Jerusalem to Babel to Babylon. And there a community was founded and stayed in residence for all that time until about 50 years ago. The Jews predated Islam by a thousand years or more. They survived waves of conquerors, Medes and Persians, Umayyads, Abbasids, Mongols, Arabs, Ottomans right up to the post World War I British Mandate. The early 20th century was a golden age for the Jews. 1/3 of Baghdad was Jewish. It was more Jewish than Warsaw or New York. However things started to go wrong when Iraq acquired its independence in 1932. The turning point for the Hillel family came in 1933 when they heard of a massacre of 600 Assyrian Christians at Simele in the north of Iraq. The Hillel family witnessed the Iraqi army march triumphantly through the streets of Baghdad. If they can do this to the Christians, what will they do to the Jews? Shlomo Hillel remembers his father saying. With the rise of Arab nationalism and Nazi influence, Iraq became a hotbed of antisemitism. The Palestinian mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini moved to Baghdad in 1939, he spent two years in Iraq and incited anti-Jewish hatred.

The result was the Nazi-inspired Farhud massacre in 1941, in which nearly 200 Jews were murdered. The community was in shock. The Jewish youth of Iraq turned to Zionism or communism. The Zionist underground set about building up arms caches and giving training in self-defense. In 1944, it became official Zionist policy to encourage immigration from the Arab countries. Concerned at rising antisemitism in the Arab world, Ben-Gurion introduced the One Million Plan. By then, he knew about the extermination of Jews in Europe, and the million Jews of the Arab world were the last great repository of diaspora Jewry outside the Jews of North America. If we do not do away with Iraqi Jewry in the Zionist manner, he meant aliyah, there is a danger that it will be done away with in the Hitlerian manner, i.e. extermination, he said. But remember, Jews were not allowed to leave Iraq and were banned from entering Palestine. Between 1943 and 1948, some 5,000 Jews were smuggled across the desert to Palestine. The first illegal immigrants to mandate Palestine from Iraq travelled through Transjordan, a route 1,500 kilometres long. Some walked all the way. The shortest and quickest route was along the oil pipeline, which is the bottom line on the map. Bedouin smugglers, taxi drivers, even officials of the Royal Jordanian Court acted as guides but the overland route had its dangers. The Iraqis and the British tried to thwart aliyah with military inspections. Migrants could be imprisoned and interrogated and they could be robbed or die in traffic accidents.

By 1947, immigration was stagnating. Shlomo Hillel was increasingly frustrated. Then Operation Michaelberg was conceived. When Hillel learned two veteran American pilots with an itch for adventure and empty pockets who had offered their services. They were told there are some crazy people in Palestine who are willing to pay a lot of money. The operation was named Michaelberg, after the pilots, Leo Vessenberg and his copilot Mike, neither of them Jewish. From Palestine, the two Americans flew a C46 plane to Baghdad Airport with Hillel aboard. The plan was to park the plane at the end of the runway far from the gaze of the authorities. 50 Jewish members of the Zionist underground in Iraq would be ferried in 10 cars past an Iraqi military camp, and then climb aboard the plane through a breach in the airport fence. The plane almost took off without the passengers of the 10th car, but it arrived just in time. Just before the plane took off for Israel, Vessenberg, the pilot, demanded to be paid upfront. Hillel wrote a check with a fictitious account number. Operation Michaelberg worked perfectly. They took off after midnight and landed in a field in the Galilee at daybreak, A Mossad agent handed the pilots a briefcase of cash. The pilots did not need to cash in Hillel’s fake check. And here you see the plane actually landing in a field at Yavne'el in the Galilee, and there’s a bonfire that was lit to guide the pilot to the the landing area.

The Haganah ran the operation one more time. And here you see the passengers actually coming off the plane, being helped off the plane in another picture. So obviously it was a historic moment for an official photographer to be there, to record it. The Haganah ran the operation one more time from Iraq bringing back 50 more Jews and once more from Rome. But then the outbreak of war in 1948 made the operation too risky. Besides the Haganah needed the plane to ferry arms and ammunition. But Hillel had proven that the experiment to transport immigrants by air had worked. In 1948, Iraq declared war on Israel and martial law was declared and Iraq ramped up persecution of its Jews. The Mossad helped find smugglers to help Jews over the border with Iran, which is not an Arab country. And this by the way, is what you see when you climb into the C46 plane that is now at the Atlit Detention Camp Museum, which is near Haifa. It’s a new exhibit and it tells you the story of Operation Michaelberg. So as I was saying, against this background of increased persecution in Iraq, more and more Jews were seeking to leave the country, and the Mossad helped find smugglers to help Jews over the border with Iran, which is not an Arab country and was then quite friendly to Israel. Jewish immigration surged mainly through the south of Iraq, and soon it was running at a thousand people a month. But how could the Mossad stop the refugees being sent back to Iraq?

Hillel found the solution when stopping off in Paris on his way back to Iraq in June 1948. It was in Paris that Hillel met the Abbe Alexander Glasberg. Glasberg was a Ukrainian Jew who had converted to Catholicism. During World War II, he fought in the French Resistance and saved 2,000 Jewish children from the Nazis by hiding them with families or in monasteries. He also played a part in the Exodus Affair. He represented the IRO, which is the International Refugee Organisation in France. Glasberg had friends among the Assyrian Christians who straddled the border between northern Iraq and Iran. Hillel posed as the Frenchman, Monsieur Perez. Glasberg and Hillel, together with Glasberg’s half Jewish secretary, went on a fact-finding mission to an Assyrian monastery. They wanted to see if the Assyrians could help get Jews from Iraq to Iran. The possibilities were somewhat limited as the Assyrian plane was far from the main Jewish population centres. But the contact with Glasberg proved invaluable. Glasberg said he knew the French interior minister and could supply them with an unlimited number of French visas through the French consulate in Iran. So Hillel made arrangements with the Iranian police so that the refugees would not be sent back to Iraq. There would be issued with the French visas be sent to France, and from there continue on their journey to Palestine. Altogether, some 13,000 Jews ended up fleeing Iraq, including many Jews sentenced in absentia by the Iraqi courts to imprisonment or death for Zionism or communism.

But where could the refugees be housed while they stayed in Iran? The only place Hillel could find was the old Jewish cemetery in Tehran. And this was set up as a refugee camp and in use between 1949 and 1950. Ironically, the cemetery was called Beheshtia, which means paradise. How Hillel got the refugees to Israel from Iran is a story in itself. First, he made a deal with Iranian airways to get the Iraqi Jews out. The Dakota planes actually made unscheduled stops in Haifa on their way to landing empty in Beirut. The first flight was supposedly bound for Paris, but Hillel pretended it had engine failure and staged an emergency landing in Haifa. The operation to fly Iraqi Jews to Israel was not without its setbacks. One time the French pilot received a message that his plane could be shot down over Syrian airspace. He turned back towards Iran, but Hillel managed to persuade him to fly back westward towards Haifa. When Iraq tried to improve its relations with Iran, with a visit by the Iraqi regent Abdul Ilah, Iraq demanded that Iraqi Jews in Iran be deported back to Iraq. Hillel and his colleague Zion Ezri corralled the refugees into a synagogue and managed to persuade the police to postpone the deportation. Pressure was applied at high level.

Abba Eban, then Israel’s ambassador to the US had a talk with his Iranian opposite number, a Jewish woman went to see her friend, the shah’s twin sister Ashraf, and threatened to take poison if the shah did not prevent the deportation. Hillel also negotiated for unlimited number of Iranian Jews to be airlifted out using Iran’s national carrier. And this before Israel and Iran even had diplomatic relations. In the years that Hillel was working to help the aliyah of Iraqi Jews, some 24,000 Iranian Jews also immigrated to Israel. The unstoppable flow of Jews from Iraq became so embarrassing for the Iraqi government that in March 1950 it decided to allow legal immigration for one year only. It thought only hotheads and undesirables would want to leave perhaps 10,000 Jews out of the total of 150,000. As it turned out, over a hundred thousand Jews registered to go. The condition was that they forfeited their Iraqi citizenship. Hillel can take credit for forcing the Iraqis to legalise immigration. The operation lasted into 1952 and would be known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, although Hillel himself preferred the name Operation Babylon. The New York Times would report that it was the biggest air migration in history. Shlomo Hillel went back to Iraq to negotiate the airlift. Just before he did, he had a meeting with Levi Eshkol, head of the Jewish Agency. I thought he was going to congratulate me, recounts Hillel. But instead, Eshkol told him, if you bring them now when there’s no work or food or housing, they’ll start demonstrating against us. I’ll round them up and bring them to your kibbutz to deal with. So I hesitated, said Hillel, and thought I wouldn’t go.

Then I was called to see Ben-Gurion and he said, I hear you’ve been to see Eshkol. Everything he said is true. There’s no food, no work, no houses. Go get them now as fast as possible. Who knows when the Iraqis will change their minds. Returning to Iraq, Hillel pretended to be a pipe-smoking Englishman called Richard Armstrong. The Mossad concocted a cover story to explain why Richard Armstrong was small and dark. His father had had a love child with an Indian lady. Hillel posed as a director of Near East Transport to negotiate the franchise for the airlift. This was the airline run by an American called James Wooten. Near East Transport Incorporated Alaska Airlines, which had already successfully transported 50,000 Jews from Yemen to Israel in 1949. Hillel aka Richard Armstrong, was accompanied by Ronnie Barnett, a genuine British citizen who ran a travel business arranging for Muslims going on pilgrimage to Mecca. Soon a meeting was arranged with the Iraqi Prime minister himself, Towfik El-Suweidi, to discuss this lucrative deal. Suweidi, who you see here on the left, had shares in Iraq tours. Armstrong and Barnett, Barnett’s in the middle, were careful to specify that the flights would land in Cyprus. In fact, they would fly onto Israel. And by the end of the operation, they were flying direct to Israel. Suddenly the Jewish community head was summoned to join the meeting, Yehezkel Shemtob, who you see on the right. Hillel squirmed in his seat. Shemtob was a cousin of Hillel’s mother. What if he recognised Hillel? Thankfully, he did not.

Or if he did, he did not let on. Finally a deal was signed between Near East Transport and Iraq tours to transport the Jews at a cost of $12 a passenger, that’s about $150 today. But Iraq Airways wanted a piece of the action. Sabah Said, the son of the veteran politician Nuri Said, was a director of Iraqi Airways and also headed the Civil Aviation Authority. So Iraqi Airways were given exclusive responsibility for handling passengers and aircraft on the ground. Why was Said so interested in the operation? As he told Barnett, every Jew who left for Israel would be another nail in the coffin of the Israeli economy. Hillel’s cover was almost blown once again. And heres another picture of one of the planes used for the Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Hillel’s cover was almost blown once again when he was invited to Shemtob’s home to taste the famous specialty samak masgouf, barbecued fish from the river Tigris. As he recounts in his book “Operation Babylon,” which I have here. Hillel had another close call, when two Arab guests spotted the rose of Baghdad on his cheek, the scar left by the bite of a sandfly parasite. Almost everyone in Iraq gets bitten by one. Hillel parried the curious Arabs with a tall story about how he was wounded when fighting the Germans during the war. Just as the first plane was about to take off, Hillel got wind that the Iraqi secret police had received a tip-off that Richard Armstrong was a Jew. Hillel made his exit from Iraq the next day and never went back. But the operation could not cope with the numbers which had registered to leave.

Israel had set a quota of only 2,000 to 3,000 a month. It was not sufficient, and a backlog of Jews waiting to come to Israel had built up. Weeks before the deadline for legal immigration expired in March, 1951, 80,000 Jews had registered to go but were stranded inside Iraq, stateless, homeless, and jobless. It was only at the beginning of 1951 that Israel raised the quota to 15,000. Six months earlier in September 1950, Nuri al-Said who had served eight terms as prime minister returned to power. He floated a plan to literally dump the stranded Jews in the Kuwaiti desert, or alternatively to leave them on Jordan’s border with Israel. The British were appalled and the Jordanians refused to cooperate, fearing that Nuri’s plan would lead to clashes with the Palestinian refugees. On the 9th of March 1951, the immigration law expired. On the 10th of March. Nuri called the Iraqi Parliament into special session and passed a law freezing the Jews’ assets. To get around this, a holding company could have been established to sell the assets in an orderly fashion and pass on the receipts to the owners, Hillel suggests. This was amenable to the Nazis in 1933, but the Iraqis would not hear of it. Jews who still had assets in the banks, or had not yet sold their property were made instantly destitute. 95% of Iraq’s Jews left for Israel after 2,500 years of continuous residence in the country. Their exit from the country was ignominious. Their suitcases were ransacked. Insults were held at them by customs offices. Grandmothers were strip-searched. In fact, this was not the end of the story as the smuggling route through the north of Iraq had to be activated once again in 1970.

My relatives were among 2,000 of what remained of the Jewish community who was smuggled out to Iran with the help of Mossad and the Kurds. But Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was not the end of Hillel’s career in the Mossad. In 1951, Hillel was posted to Cairo and Alexandria to deal with the Zionist underground there. He stayed eight months posing as an Iranian. In 1952, Hillel was elected to the Knesset replacing Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who had become president. Hillel had forgotten that he was on the list for the Mapai party. He was at number 50. He had just married to Temima. And here you see the young couple. He was revelling in possessing a real passport for once in his life and he was working in the Paris Embassy handling Jewish immigration from North Africa. The Knesset seat remained vacant for five months until Hillel reluctantly took it up. In May 1953, he was sworn in as a member of the Knesset and served until 1959 and then in diplomatic posts. In 1956, the Suez war broke out. As a member of Knesset, he was not supposed to serve, but insisted on participating in the war as an infantry commander. Despite suffering many losses, his unit reached El Arish near Gaza. After the French and British withdrawal from the Suez Canal, the Jews of Port Said were thought to be at risk. Hillel admits to having played a small part in the rescue operation. He left Israel in a torpedo boat, meeting two fishing vessels on the open sea. The fishing boats were intercepted by the British. Hillel spent a whole night walled in by two enormous British crusaders.

He could not even go for a pee, he said. A French tugboat came to the rescue and led them to Port Said. About 67 Jews were evacuated on the fishing boats and brought to Haifa. Hillel was ambassador to several African countries in the 1960s. He returned to the Knesset in 1969 and stayed on until he was defeated in 1992. He was elected as speaker in 1984. As a member of Knesset, he served as minister of police and minister of the interior, and he received the Israel Prize in 1998. And here he is with his wife Temima and their two children. And here he is as minister of police. In 1977, as minister of the interior, Hillel decreed that Jews in Ethiopia would be able to make aliyah. Over the following years, more than a hundred thousand Ethiopian Jews moved to Israel. Among them was a young woman named Enatmar Salam, she met Shlomo’s son Ari in college. They later married and had three daughters. And here they are. Shlomo Hillel is survived by Ari and his three granddaughters. His wife, Temima, whom he married in 1952, predeceased him in 2011. His daughter Hagar died in 2005. When he died in 2021, Reuven Rivlin then president of Israel said that Hillel came from a great generation, a generation that fought with its hands for Israel’s independence and its existence as a safe haven for the Jewish people. Of course, Hillel himself never really thought of himself as a hero. With characteristic modesty he always said, we had a job to do and we got on with it. We might never see his life again. So with that, thank you very much for listening. Very happy to answer any questions if I can.

Q&A and Comments:

Sarah Adla says, I believe there was a film made of this factory. Right, I didn’t know that, but it’s certainly well worth seeing. Fantastic experience going around the Ayalon Institute. It’s near Rehovot.

Q: So what were the conditions like says Brenda, for the 50,000 Jews who stayed behind in Iraq, and why had they chosen to stay?

A: Well, 95% of the Jews actually left for Israel in 1950, 1951 and only 5,000 Jews stayed behind. And actually things did improve for that community. In fact, they were probably those who had most to lose by leaving. Perhaps they were the wealthier ones. In the mid ‘50s conditions were actually quite good. And in fact, they were able to come and go from Iraq. And you know, obviously the people who’d gone to Israel were rather resentful of those who’d stayed on in Iraq, because things were very bad in Israel. There was rationing. A lot of the refugees had to stay in tents or ma'abarot. But everything changed for the 5,000 who did remain in Iraq in 1958 when the king was actually beheaded in a coup. And in fact, the whole government was killed. Nuri Said’s body was dragged through the streets of Baghdad and it was absolutely terrible, a very bloody coup. And some Iraqi Jews left at that point. Others decided to stay on. But by the 1960s, they were actually not able to leave. And this was the case until in fact 1970 when as I mentioned, about 2,000 Jews did, were smuggled illegally through the north of Iraq, through Kurdistan. And today there are three Jews left in the whole country.

Q: Ellie, considering the risks faced by Jews in Iraq and other Arab countries, why wasn’t the immigration considered as urgent as that of European Jews?

A: That’s a very good question, Ellie. I think the answer is at the time there were several communities at risk, and in fact at the same time as the Iraqi Jews arrived in the early 1950s, the Romanian Jews were at risk. And in fact, you found that Iraqis and Romanians, you know, were together in the same refugee camps, the same ma'abarot in Israel. So there was always, you know, there were other communities that were in danger.

Q: What was Hillel’s relationship with Ben-Porat, asks Graham Newman.

A: Well, that’s a very good question. Ben-Porat of course was the head of the Mossad operation in Iraq. He’d walked all the way to Iraq, sorry to Israel in 1945. I think they were rivals to some extent. Ben-Porat actually wanted to negotiate the airlift himself, but I don’t think he had the sort of diplomatic nous to do so. And then shortly after that he was arrested. I think he kept getting arrested and he was sort of out of the picture. Meanwhile, Hillel had actually left Baghdad. But Ben-Porat was actually fell out with Yehezkel Shemtob, the head of the Jewish community as well. They had a very bad falling out. And in fact the whole Zionist movement in Iraq did unravel at this time. But you can argue, well it wasn’t, you know, it had achieved what it set out to achieve, you know, and got most of the community out of there.

Sorry Lauren, can you just read out the next one? Ah, here we go. Thank you. Hermione Sternberg, oh, thank you. And Lorraine Cassin’s been to the Ayalon Institute. It was incredible indeed. Thank you, Dennis.

Q: When did the last Jew leave Iraq?

A: Well, the last Jew, there were still three Jews there. You know, after the 2,000 Jews were smuggled out in 1970, there remained about a few hundred. Then when the Americans invaded in 2003, they found about 36 Jews there. And so the numbers kept dwindling and dwindling until now, you know, I mean you could say the community is extinct.

Louise says it would be useful to remind governments today of what is required for genuine migrants to successfully find refuge. Regrettably that we don’t have another Shlomo Hillel. I would agree with you there, Louise.

Q: And could you mention something about his early life?

A: Well, yes, he did move to Israel very early on at the age of 10 or 11. But although he did speak Arabic, he did speak basic Arabic, which obviously served him in good stead.

And Paul has visited the Ayalon factory. Yes, armaments are hidden under schools in Gaza. We are shocked. Well, I don’t think it’s quite the same thing.

Q: Is Baghdad the same city as Nineveh in the Bible?

A: No, Nineveh is actually in the north of Iraq. It’s on the Assyrian plain. Baghdad is in the centre of the country.

Q: Were the Christians treated differently or the same as the Jews?

A: Actually, the Christians were treated badly and are still treated badly in Iraq. And the massacre of the Assyrian Christians in 1933 was really important of things to come, you know, of things that happened to the Jews. Of course, the Jews suffered their massacre in 1941, the terrible Farhud massacre. I’d say all minorities suffered in Iraq. You only have to consider what happened to the Yazidis quite recently, just a few years ago.

Q: So other than Israel, did any other Jewish communities or countries rescue Iraqi and Iranian Jews? That’s Diane Marcus.

A: Yes, Holland actually took Jews in after 1969. And of course Britain did take Jews in. I mean, my family came in in 1950 and there was another wave of Jews who came in the 1970s, but they already had relatives. They didn’t come seeking asylum, which I think that was the problem. You know, I think only Holland really treated incoming Iraqi Jews as refugees.

Hello, Grace. Grace married to Jamil Hillel, whose father was a first cousin of Shlomo’s father. We live in Ottawa, Canada. Jamil left on those flights in January 1951. I left with my family to New York, 1959. Well, you have every right to be proud of your relative there, Grace.

Q: James. Did the Iraqi Jews stay in ma'abarot on their arrival in Israel? And did they fare better than the Moroccan Jews? Were they sent to towns near the borders?

A: Well, actually, yes, they did stay in ma'abarot. Some moved after weeks or months and others stayed for years. But as a whole, the community did fare better than the Moroccan Jews, I would say. And for a start, they were very well educated, the Iraqi Jews. Many of them had been through the Alliance Israelite school system. Many of them were civil servants or worked in banks and that sort of thing. And even today, you know, you will find that many bank managers in Israel are actually, and accountants are actually Iraqi Jews. There were not sent to towns near the borders that came later. And the Moroccans actually, I think were mostly sent to the borders. The Iraqi Jews managed to stay in the centre of the country. And Ramat Gan, which is a suburb of Tel Aviv, is known as Ramat Baghdad today because of its heavy concentration of Iraqi Jews. What happened to the Kurds, asked Shelva. Well there was a very small Jewish community in Kurdistan, about 18,000 of them and they also joined the airlift. In fact, it’s quite a story because they had to come down from Kurdistan. They stopped off in Baghdad. They had to be housed and fed, waiting for the airlift. And I remember my aunt being part of a committee, she was living in Baghdad and she said they boiled a hundred eggs a night to feed these Kurdish Jews in Baghdad.

Q: Lena, why did Iraq disallow the Jews to leave?

A: Well, first of all, Iraq was an enemy state. And also it was under British Mandate until, you know, for much of the '30s. Poland and Russia also made it difficult in the '40s and '50s for Jews to immigrate.

Q: Were politics part of the reason and why?

A: Yes, of course, politics was definitely part of the reason. During the 1940s, toward the end of the 1940s, Jews were effectively hostages. They were not allowed to leave. And if they did, they would have to pay extortionate, you know, funds in order to leave.

Q: Do you know if any Jews from Iraq came to Rhodesia?

A: I actually met one in Ashkelon, or maybe he was married to a Rhodesian. I can’t remember now.

Sarah, thank you. Sarah’s mother left in 1951 as a child, she got married and moved to Ramat Gan where I grew up. I always wanted to go back to see the places she talked about. Is there anything Jewish left in Baghdad? Well, that’s a good question. Unfortunately, a lot of the synagogues have sort of crumbled. There’s only one intact synagogue in Baghdad, the Meir Taweig Synagogue and that’s permanently closed. A lot of, you know that you will see parts of Baghdad where the houses are shuttered and these used to be Jewish houses. There was a popular shrine in the south of the country called Ezekiel’s shrine that’s been turned into a mosque. And unfortunately, there’s very little left. And thank you all of those who are thanking me. And thank you for listening. So I think that’s about it, isn’t it, Lauren?

• [Lauren] Yep, that’s it. Thank you all so much for joining us today, and we will see you tomorrow.

• Okay, thank you so much for having me. Goodbye everyone.