c. 2003 Religion News Service

OR YEHUDA, Israel _ This year, Passover _ the holiday of freedom _ has particular resonance for some 300,000 Jews of Iraqi descent, most of whom live in Israel.

Nearly the entire Jewish population of Iraq fled to Israel 53 years ago. For many, the rushed manner of their departure recalls the exodus of Jewish slaves freed from Egypt, whose release about 3,300 years ago forms the basis for the Passover holiday and Seder meal.

The Iraqi Jews traded their wealth and community standing to start over in a country free of persecution. Half a century later, some have regained social status and material advantages, but many are wistful for a life they remember as idyllic.

“In Baghdad, I was like a queen,” said Dorin Shaharabani, 77. She arrived in Israel as a 26-year-old mother of four who had been educated at the finest Baghdad schools where she learned flawless English and French.

“We were rich. We were happy. Everything was nice for us,” she said. “We had a big house, two shops, a big garden.”

But like the candied orange rinds she made for Wednesday (April 16) night’s holiday guests, her memories of Baghdad are bittersweet. After a period of British rule ended in 1932, nationalist extremism and Nazi sympathies surfaced. As conflicts between Arabs and Jews over Palestine increased, Jews in Iraq came under attack. The watershed moment occurred in 1941 when 140 Jews were killed on buses, in the streets and in their homes.

“Before Israel, the life was very good; after Israel, they were angry,” Shaharabani remembered. The Jewish state of Israel became an independent country in 1948.

The accusatory tone of interrogators still sticks in her head more than 50 years later: “You are Zionist? Zionist! You are Zionist? Zionist!” she recalled. “All the time. We were afraid.”

So along with 120,000 others over the course of a few months, she left with her family for Israel.

“I came here only with this,” she said, tugging at her clothing.

In Israel, her fortunes changed dramatically. Widowed at 40 when her husband had a heart attack, she worked for 37 years as a sewing teacher to raise five children.

Now several of her children are professionals, and she lives in a spacious, sunny duplex with oil paintings on the walls. Her daily routine includes bridge and poker games, and her only work is cooking Sabbath and holiday meals for her extended family, including 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. This week, she crammed her refrigerator and freezer with authentic Iraqi Passover dishes to serve to the 20 people she expected for Wednesday’s meal.

Perhaps because they remember a time of peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews, the Iraqi Jews are particularly hopeful for a day when their new country, Israel, can be on better terms with its Arab neighbors.

Shaharabani speaks fondly of Muslim friends who still call her on the telephone. But she fears that “we forgot” how to get along with Arabs during the years living in Israel.

Dan Nadiv is more positive about the ability of Jews and Arabs to live together. Born in Israel to Iraqi parents, he is a retired brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces and a former director of the postal authority. Now chief executive officer for a logistics company that does defense contract work, he is known in the tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community as one of the first of his generation to attain success in their new country.

“After 55 years of independence for Israel, all of us know what is the mentality of the Arabs. We all know that this generation (of Jews and Arabs) doesn’t have to pay for what the last generation did,” Nadiv said.

Besides a political resolution, the Iraqi Jews also yearn to make peace with their own curiosity.

Nadiv speaks of a “roots trip” with family members. Shaharabani said she hopes to be able to return to Iraq to see the land of her youth, especially after seeing familiar streets on TV during the war coverage.

Right now, the closest they can get to Baghdad’s Jewish quarter is a replica in the Babylonian Jewry Museum in Or Yehuda, a small town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv whose grounds provided space for tents and cabins that were home to many Iraqi refugees for a decade. The museum includes a life-size simulation of a Baghdad commercial alley, complete with tailor, seamstress and an ornate wood synagogue. There is also a three-dimensional map of the old Jewish community showing locations of schools, community centers and synagogues.

The museum takes its name from Babylonia, Iraq’s ancient predecessor. During its heyday 1,000 years ago, a thriving community of Jewish scholars and rabbis there were the authority on legal and religious matters for all Jews.

The museum’s collections focus on the mass migration to Israel, but have few actual Iraqi Jewish artifacts. Much of that was left behind in the rush to get out of the country.

Mordechai Ben-Porat, a former Israeli minister of state and the informal dean of Iraqi Jews, said he hopes one day to retrieve Torah scrolls and other artifacts from Baghdad and add them to the museum’s collection. But with chaos in Iraq and recent news of the plunder of Iraqi national treasures, he was hesitant to estimate when or how.

“I’m waiting for the right time so we can rescue them,” said Ben-Porat, 79, who is chairman of the museum.

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In the meantime, families like Salman Khalastchi and his wife consult books in Israel to help them re-create an authentic Iraqi Passover meal. Khalastchi hopes to bring the search for his own heritage to a successful end. He knows he will not achieve his goal until there is peace in Iraq.

“We try to give a special prayer for the people in Iraq because they’re now free from the Baath government,” said Khalastchi, 57, an accountant who left Baghdad as a child with his family. “What the Americans did in Iraq, they give the chance for peace, the chance for freedom and the chance to rebuild again.”

In prayer, his family asks God to bring peace and prosperity to the people of Iraq _ a people who once had been good neighbors to a proud and flourishing Jewish community there.

“We need to close circles in our lives; we need to look even once again to the places we used to love,” Khalastchi said. “To build a peace, it takes a lot of time. But anyway, we start now. Any time would be a good time.”

DEA END GOLDSMITH