Under

Saildiam's

Eye

A tiny Iraqi
Jewish
community
survives
amidst
Baghdad's
chaos.

MICHAEL ARNOLD
Special to The Jewish News

erusalem — About a year ago
Vera Cohen told her friends
she was going on vacation,
but they knew better. Her
family had sold all its belongings,
paid the necessary bribes and the
required $400 fee per person — an
astronomical sum in Iraq after the
Gulf War — and said discreet,
guarded goodbyes to close friends in
Baghdad.
When her family walked out of
their house on Karada Street for the
final time, their friends lined the
street, crying. Vera, her brother, Jack
and parents, Naddam and Jacqueline,
traveled for nearly 24 hours to reach
Iraq's border with Jordan.
Three days later, they were in
Israel. Now they are comfortably
ensconced in Ramat Gan, the area
north of Tel Aviv in which 40 percent
of the residents have immigrated from
Iraq in the past five decades.
Recently, the Cohens have become
limited celebrities, appearing before
the Knesset's Immigration and
Absorption Committee to tell their
story. The juiciest details — whom
they bribed in order to leave, for how
much, and how the Israeli govern-
ment and secret services helped —
must remain hidden for good reason.
Revealing too many details could
jeopardize others who wish to follow
or it could provoke the Iraqi govern-
ment, which has acquiesced to the
emigration, to hurt the scant few Jews
still there.

0

f the once-proud Iraqi Jew-
ish-community, only a rem-
nant remains. There are 61
Jews left in Baghdad; before
World War I the city was estimated to
be one-fifth Jewish. Of those still in
Iraq, Vera Cohen believes that just
three are under the age of 15. The
rest are well into middle age or
beyond. Because of fears for their
security, no pictures of these Jews can
be shown.
Another 200 or so Jews live in
Kurdish areas in the north, according
to Mordechai Ben-Porat, chairman of
Israel's Center For The Heritage Of
Babylonian Jewry. Most other Iraqi
Jewish communities, some established
by biblical exiles 2,500 years ago, no
longer exist.
With the establishment of Israel in

Vera Cohen
with her father,
Naddam.

Michael Arnold is a writer for the

Jerusalem Post.

4/24
1998

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