Lyn Julius
The Impact of the Shoah on the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa
Summary
The lecture focused on the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish communities in the Arab world, highlighting the misconception that the Holocaust only affected European Jews. The Nazis had considered including the Jews from North Africa in their plan to exterminate Jewish communities. However, the Nazi plans were thwarted by the Battle of El Alamein in late 1942. In total, the Holocaust affected a relatively small number of MENA Jews, with approximately 4,000 Jews dying in the war, primarily due to Allied bombing. The MENA Jews in Europe, about 2,000 of them, were also affected by the Holocaust.
Lyn Julius
Lyn Julius was born in the UK and educated at the French Lycée in London and the University of Sussex. The daughter of Jewish refugees from Iraq, she is a journalist and founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (www.harif.org). Lyn blogs daily at Point of No Return (www.jewishrefugees.org.uk). Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Huffington Post, Jewish News, and Jerusalem Post. She has a regular column in the Times of Israel and JNS News. Her book Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight has been translated in to Norwegian, Portuguese and Arabic, and a Hebrew version is in progress.
Some Jews were extremely assimilated and secularised, for instance, the Jews of Algeria, who are actually French citizens. They identified more with French culture than with Arab culture after a while. European culture was actually very influential in the Arab world.
The grave was demolished along with the rest of the Jewish cemetery in Iraq in between 1958 and 1960. We have no idea what happened to the bodies which is why we don’t know how many people were actually killed.
Very few. There are about 1,500 Jews living in Morocco.