The multi-award-winning, chart-topping Jewish podcast, The Forgotten Exodus, is back for season two.
The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.
The Forgotten Exodus, a limited podcast series by American Jewish Committee (AJC), explores the important lessons we can learn from this pivotal moment and the little-known Jewish heritage of the Middle East and North Africa. As Jews around the world confront rising antisemitism, hear five new stories of Mizrahi and Sephardi courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people. The world has ignored them. We will not.
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“It's quite clear to me that he was trying to recreate the hillside of Haifa with the gardens... It comes from somebody being ripped out from their home.”
Syrian Jewish Playwright Oren Safdie, son of world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie, who designed Habitat 67 along with much of modern Jerusalem, knows loss, regret, and longing. Oren and his father explore their Syrian heritage and their connection to the Jewish state that has developed since Moshe’s father left Aleppo, Syria and moved, in the mid-20th century, to what is modern-day Israel.
Oren also knows that being Jewish is about stepping up. Describing his frustrations with modern anti-Israel sentiments and protests that harken back to 1943, Oren is passionately combating anti-Israel propaganda in theater and academia.
Abraham Marcus, Associate Professor Emeritus at University of Texas at Austin, joins the conversation with historical insights into Jewish life in Syria dating back to Roman times.
“Suspense Middle East” Publisher: Victor Romanov, Composer: Victor Romanov; Item ID: 196056047
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Episode Transcript:
OREN SAFDIE: I've sort of wanted to shine a light on North American Jews being hypercritical of Israel.
Because I've spent a lot of time in Israel. And I know what it is. It's not a simple thing. And I think it's very easy for Americans in the comfort of their little brownstones in Brooklyn, and houses in Cambridge to criticize, but these people that live in Israel are really standing the line for them.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century.
Welcome to the second season of The Forgotten Exodus, brought to you by American Jewish Committee. This series explores that pivotal moment in history and the little-known Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations. As Jews around the world confront violent antisemitism and Israelis face daily attacks by terrorists on multiple fronts, our second season explores how Jews have lived throughout the region for generations despite hardship, hostility, and hatred, then sought safety and new possibilities in their ancestral homeland.
I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore untold family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people and the Middle East.
The world has ignored these voices. We will not.
This is The Forgotten Exodus. Today's episode: leaving Aleppo.
MANYA: Playwright and screenwriter Oren Safdie has had just about enough of the anti-Israel sentiments on stage and screen. And what irks him the most is when it comes from Jewish artists and celebrities who have never spent time in the Middle East’s one and only democracy. Remember film director Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the 2024 Academy Awards?
JONATHAN GLAZER: Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the … [APPLAUSE]
MANYA: Yeah, Oren didn’t much appreciate his own Jewishness being hijacked in that moment. Drawing a moral equivalence between the Nazi regime and Israel never really sits well with him.
OREN: I do feel like they're very selective in their criticism of Israel. You know, it's very easy to say, ‘Oh, well, they didn't do that. They don't do this.’ But it's a complicated situation. And to simplify it, is just to me beyond, especially if you're not somebody who has spent a lot of time in Israel.
MANYA: Oren Safdie has penned more than two dozen scripts for stages and screens around the world. His latest film, Lunch Hour, starring Alan Cumming, is filming in Minnesota.
Meanwhile, The Man Who Saved the Internet with A Sunflower, another script he co-wrote, is on the festival circuit. And his latest play Survival of the Unfit, made its North American debut in the Berkshires this summer, is headed to Broadway.
And by the way, since an early age, Oren Safdie has spent quite a bit of time in Israel. His father Moshe Safdie is the legendary architect behind much of modern Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion International Airport, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum.
Oren’s grandfather, Leon, emigrated from Syria.
OREN: I'm sort of a synthesis of the two main parts that established Israel because my mother came from Poland, escaped the Holocaust. And my father's family came from Syria. So, I'm a half breed.
I've never been asked about my Sephardic side, even though that was really the dominant side that I grew up with. Because my mother’s family was quite small. I grew up in Montreal, it was much more in the Syrian tradition for holidays, food, everything like that.
My grandfather was from Aleppo, Syria, and my grandmother was from Manchester, England, but originally from Aleppo. Her family came to Manchester, but two generations before, had been from Aleppo. So, they’re both Halabi Jews.
MANYA: Halabi refers to a diverse group of Jews from Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world that has gone by several names. The oldest? Haleb.
Halabi Jews include Mizrahi Jews -- the name for Jews who call the Middle East or North Africa home; and Sephardi Jews, who fled to the region after being expelled from Spain in the 15th Century.
Jews are believed to have been in what is now Syria since the time of King David and certainly since early Roman times.
ABRAHAM MARCUS: It's a community that starts, as far as we can record, in the Greco-Roman period. And we see the arrival of Islam. So the Jews were really the indigenous people when Arabs arrived.
MANYA: Abraham Marcus, born to parents from Aleppo, is an internationally renowned authority on the city. He served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. For the past 16 years, he has been working on a book about the history of Aleppo’s Jews that goes well beyond what has been previously published.
As part of his research, he examined thousands of documents from the Syrian national archive and the Ottoman archive in Istanbul. He also did extensive fieldwork on the ground in Aleppo, documenting the synagogues, cemeteries, residential districts, and workplaces.
MARCUS: One of the synagogues, the famous ancient synagogue of Aleppo, which dates to the 5th Century, meaning it predates the arrival of Arabs. It is a remarkable structure. Unfortunately, what is left of it now is really a skeleton.
MANYA: Abraham is referring to the Great Synagogue or Central Synagogue of Aleppo, which functioned as the main house of worship for the Syrian Jewish community for more than 1,600 years. For 600 of those years, its catacombs safeguarded a medieval manuscript believed to be the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Aleppo Codex. The codex was used by Maimonides as a reference for his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, or Jewish religious legal code.
In the 7th Century, Aleppo was conquered by Arab Muslims and a Great Mosque was built. For the next four centuries, the Byzantine Empire, Crusaders, and various Muslim rulers fought to gain control of Aleppo and the surrounding region. A savage Mongol invasion, a bout of the Black Death and another invasion took its toll on the city, and its Jews.
For most of this time, Muslim rulers treated them as dhimmis, or second-class citizens.
MARCUS: There were restrictions on dress, which were renewed time and again. They could not carry arms. They could not ride horses.
MANYA: After half of Spain’s Jews converted to Christianity following the pogroms of 1391, the Catholic monarchs issued the Alhambra Decree of 1492 – an edict that expelled any remaining Jews from the Iberian Peninsula to ensure their descendants didn’t revert back to Judaism.
As Jews fled, many made their way to parts of the Ottoman Empire. In 1516, Aleppo became part of that empire and emerged as a strategic trading post at the end of the Silk Road, between the Mediterranean Sea and Mesopotamia, or modern-day Iraq. As was the case in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Jews lived relatively comfortably, serving as merchants and tax collectors.
MARCUS: The policy of the Ottoman Empire was to essentially welcome the Sephardic Jews. The Sultan at the time is reputed to have said, ‘I don't understand the King of Spain. But if he's thinking at all, giving up all this human capital, essentially, we can take it.’
Many of the successful Jews in Aleppo and Damascus–in business, as leaders, as rabbis–were Sephardic Jews. They revived these communities, they brought new blood and new energy to them, a new wealth.
MANYA: This was not always the case throughout Ottoman Syria as persecution and pogroms erupted at times.
By the mid-19th Century, Aleppo’s Jewish population was slightly smaller than that of Baghdad, by about 2,000. In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal shifted trade away from the route through Syria. Aleppo lost much of its commercial edge, motivating many Jews to seek opportunity elsewhere.
MARCUS: The story of Aleppo is one of a society gradually hemorrhaging, losing people.
They went to Beirut, which was a rising star. And Egypt became very attractive. So they went to Alexandria and Cairo.
And many of the rabbis from the 1880s began to move to Jerusalem where there were yeshivot that were being set up. And in effect, over the next several decades, essentially the spiritual center of Aleppo’s Jews was Jerusalem and no longer Aleppo.
MANYA: Another turning point for Aleppo came in World War I when the Ottoman Empire abandoned its neutral position and sided with the Central Powers–including Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Germany.
Many wealthy Jews had acquired foreign nationalities from countries that were not allies. Now considered enemy citizens, they were deported and never came back.
In addition, Jews and Christians up to that point could pay a special tax to avoid serving in the army. That privilege ended in 1909.
MARCUS: Because of the Balkan Wars, there was a sense that the empire is going to collapse if they don't essentially raise a large force to defend it. And there was a kind of flight that really decimated the community by 1918, when the war ended.
MANYA: Besides those two wartime exceptions, Abraham says the departure of Jews from Syria was almost always motivated by the promise of better opportunities. In fact, opportunity might have been what drew the Safdie family to and from Aleppo.
MANYA: Originally from Safed, as their name suggests, the Safdie family arrived in Aleppo sometime during the 16th or 17th centuries. By that time, the Jewish community in Safed, one of the Four Holy Cities in Judaism located in modern-day Israel, had transformed it into a lucrative textile center. So lucrative that the sultan of the ruling Ottoman Empire ordered the forced deportation of 1,000 Jewish families to Cyprus to boost that island’s economy.
It’s not clear if those deportations or the decline that followed pushed the Safdie family north to Aleppo. Most of them stayed for roughly three centuries–through World War One and France’s brief rule during the Interwar period.
But in 1936, amid the Great Depression, which affected Syria as well, Leon Safdie, the ninth of ten children born to textile merchants, moved to Haifa and set up his own trading business. Importing textiles, woolens, and cottons from England and fabrics from Japan and India.
A year later, he met his wife Rachel who had sailed from Manchester to visit her sister in Jerusalem. She spoke English and a little French. He spoke Arabic and French. They married a month later.
OREN: My grandfather lived in Haifa, he was a merchant like many Syrian Jews were. He imported textiles. He freely went between the different countries, you know, there weren't really so many borders.
A lot of his people he worked with were Arab, Druze, Christian, Muslim. Before independence, even though there was obviously some tension, being somebody who is a Syrian Jew, who spoke Arabic, who spoke French, he was sort of just one of the region.
MANYA: Moshe Safdie was born in 1938. He says the onset of the Second World War created his earliest memories – hosting Australian soldiers in their home for Shabbat and making nightly trips into air raid shelters.
Every summer, the family vacationed in the mountain resorts of Lebanon to visit aunts and uncles that had moved from Aleppo to Beirut. Their last visit to Lebanon in the summer of 1947 culminated with all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins piling into three Chrysler limousines and caravanning from Beirut to Aleppo to visit their grandmother and matriarch, Symbol.
MOSHE: I remember sort of the fabric of the city. I have vague memories of the Citadel of Aleppo, because it was an imposing structure. I remember her – a very fragile woman, just vaguely.
MANYA: While most of Moshe’s memories of Aleppo are vague, one memory in particular is quite vivid. At that time, the United Nations General Assembly was debating the partition plan that would divide what was then the British Mandate of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Tensions ran high throughout the region. When Moshe’s uncles noticed Moshe wearing his school uniform on the streets of Aleppo, they panicked.
MOSHE: They were terrified. We were walking in the street, and we had khaki shirts and khaki pants. And it had stitched on it, as required in our school, the school badge, and it said, ‘Thou shalt be humble’ in Hebrew. And they saw that, or at least they noticed we had that, and they said: ‘No, this is very dangerous!’ and they ripped it off.’
MANYA: It would be the first and last time Moshe Safdie visited Aleppo. On the 29th of November, the UN voted on a resolution to divide Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish. The news arrived in Aleppo the following morning.
MARCUS: This was New York time, in the evening, when the decision was made. So already, people started planning demonstrations for the next day, in support of the Palestinians. And that next day began with what was a peaceful demonstration of students, and then all kinds of people joined in and before long it became an attack on Jewish property.
The synagogues were set ablaze. Many Jewish homes were burned, businesses were looted. And so the day ended with the Jews really in a state of fright.
MANYA: The mob looted the Jewish quarter and burned the Great Synagogue, scattering and desecrating the pages of the Aleppo Codex. The caretaker of the synagogue and his son later returned to the ashes to salvage as much as they could. But most of the community’s leadership took a train to Beirut and never looked back.
Of course, as previously mentioned, Aleppo had already witnessed a steep decline in its Jewish population. The numbers vary widely, depending on the source, but by 1947, on the eve of the Jewish exodus from Syria, Iraq, and other Arab countries, Aleppo had anywhere between 6,000 and 15,000 Jews, whereas Baghdad had between 75 and 90,000.
MARCUS: More than half the population left within a month. The community after that, in the next two, three weeks, was in a situation in which some people decided that was the end.
They took possessions that they could, got on buses and left for Beirut. That was the safe destination to go to. And there was traffic between the two areas.
Some people decided to stay. I mean, they had business, they had interest, they had property that they didn't want to leave. You can imagine the kind of dilemmas face people suddenly, the world has changed, and what do I do? Which part of the fork do I go?
MANYA: Those who left effectively forfeited their property to the Syrian government. To this day, the only way to reclaim that property and be allowed to sell it is to return and become Syrian citizens.
Those who stayed were trapped. Decimated and demoralized, Aleppo’s Jews came under severe travel restrictions, unable to travel more than four kilometers from their homes without permission from the government, which tracked their comings and goings.
MARCUS: The view was that if they leave, they'll end up in what’s called the Zionist entity and provide the soldiers and aid to the enemy. So the idea was to keep them in.
So there's a reality there of a community that is now stuck in place. Unable to emigrate. That remained in place until 1970, when things began to relax. It was made possible for you to leave temporarily for a visit. But you have to leave a very large sum as a deposit.
The other option was essentially to hire some smugglers to take you to the Turkish or the Lebanese border, and basically deliver you to another country where Jews had already networked.
The Mossad had people who helped basically transfer them to Israel. But that was very risky. If you were caught, it's prison time and torture.
Over the next 45 years, many of the young left gradually, and many of them left without the parents even knowing. They will say ‘I'm going to the cinema and I'll come back’.
MANYA: On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. But the socialist politics of the new Jewish state did not sit well with Leon Safdie who much preferred private enterprise. He also felt singled out, as did many Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel at the time.
OREN: In some ways, it almost created some tension for him on several fronts, right? First of all, between him and his clients, who he had been doing business with in the Arab world, for many years. All of a sudden, those relationships are called into question.
And as my grandfather was an importer of textiles, it was considered a luxury good. And when you’re in wartime, there were rations.
The high tariffs really killed my grandfather's business. So, he wanted to stay in Israel. He helped with the war effort. He really loved the country and he knew the people, but really for three years, he sat idle and just did not have work. He was a man that really needed to work, had a lot of pride.
MANYA: In 1953, Leon and Rachel sought opportunity once again – this time in Montreal – a move Moshe Safdie would forever resent. When in 1959 he married Oren’s mother Nina, an Israeli expat who was trying to return to Israel herself, they both resolved to return to the Jewish state. Life and phenomenal success intervened.
While studying architecture at McGill University, Moshe designed a modern urban apartment building [Habitat 67] that incorporated garden terraces and multiple stories. It was built and unveiled during the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal, and Moshe’s career took off.
OREN: It's quite clear to me that he was trying to recreate the hillside of Haifa with the gardens. And it's something that has sort of preoccupied him for his whole career. It comes from somebody being ripped out from their home. Those kinds of things I think stay with you.
MANYA: Eventually, in 1970, Moshe opened a branch of his architecture firm in Jerusalem and established a second home there. Oren recalls visiting every summer – often with his grandfather Leon.
OREN: And I remember going with him when he’d come to Israel when I was there, because we used to go pretty much every summer. He would love to go down to Jericho. And we'd sit at the restaurants. I mean, there was a period of time, you know, when it was sort of accepted that Jews could travel to the West Bank, to Ramallah and everything. And he loved to just speak with the merchants and everything, he loved that. He felt so at home in that setting.
It was not dangerous, as it is today, obviously. I think everyone back then thought it was a temporary situation. And obviously, the longer it goes, and the more things happen, it feels more permanent. And of course, that's where we are today. But that time, in my head, sort of just is a confirmation that Jews and Arabs have a lot more in common and can get along … if the situation was different.
MANYA: As the son of an Israeli citizen, Oren is considered an Israeli citizen too. But he concedes that he is not fully Israeli. That requires more sacrifice.
In 1982, at the age of 17, he signed up for Chetz V’Keshet, at that time a 10-week program run in conjunction with the Israel Defense Forces for American and Canadian teens and designed to foster a connection to Israel. The program took place during the First Lebanon War, Israel’s operation to remove terrorists from southern Lebanon, where they had been launching attacks against Israeli civilians.
OREN: So this was a mix of basic training, where we trained with artillery and things and did a lot of war games. And from there, you know, their hope was that you would join the military for three years. And I did not continue.
I guess there's a part of me that regrets that. Even though I'm an Israeli citizen, I can't say I'm Israeli in the way that Israelis are. If the older me would look back, then I would say, ‘If you really want to be connected to Israel, the military is really the only way.
I'd say at that young age, I didn't understand that the larger picture of what being Jewish, what being Israeli is, and it's about stepping up.
MANYA: Now in his early 50s, Oren tries to step up by confronting the anti-Israel propaganda that’s become commonplace in both of his professional worlds: theater and academia. In addition to writing his own scripts and screenplays, he has taught college level playwriting and screenwriting.
He knows all too often students fall prey to misinformation and consider anything they see on social media or hear from their friends as an authoritative source.
A few years ago, Oren assigned his students the task of writing a script based on real-life experience and research. One of the students drafted a script about bloodthirsty Israelis killing Palestinian children. When Oren asked why he chose that topic and where he got his facts, the student cited his roommate.
Oren didn’t discourage him from pitching the script to his classmates, but warned him to come prepared to defend it with facts. The student turned in a script on an entirely different topic.
OREN: You know, there were a lot of plays that came up in the past 10 years that were anti-Israel. You’d be very hard-pressed to find me one that's positive about Israel. No one's doing them.
MANYA: Two of his scripts have come close. In 2017, he staged a play at the St. James Theatre in Old Montreal titled Mr. Goldberg Goes to Tel Aviv– a farce about a gay Jewish author who arrives in Tel Aviv to deliver a blistering attack on the Israeli government to the country’s left-leaning literati.
But before he even leaves his hotel room, he is kidnapped by a terrorist. Investors lined up to bring it to the silver screen and Alan Cumming signed on to play Mr. Goldberg. But in May 2021, Hamas terrorists launched rockets at Israeli civilians, igniting an 11-day war. The conflict led to a major spike in antisemitism globally.
OREN: The money people panicked and said, ‘We can't put up a comedy about the Middle East within this environment. Somebody is going to protest and shut us down,’ and they cut out.
MANYA: Two years later, an Israeli investor expressed interest in giving the movie a second chance. Then on October 7 [2023], Hamas launched a surprise attack on 20 Israeli communities -- the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed, thousands of rockets have been fired on Israel, and more than 100 hostages are still in captivity.
OREN: Mr. Goldberg Goes to Tel Aviv collapsed after October 7th. I don't think anybody would have the appetite for a comedy about a Hamas assassin taking a left-wing Jew hostage in a hotel room.
MANYA: Another play titled “Boycott This” was inspired by Oren’s visit to a coffee shop in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2011. The walls of the cafe were plastered with posters urging boycotts of Israel and accusing it of blood libel. Oren and his daughter created their own posters and stood outside the coffee shop calling on customers to boycott the cafe instead.
But the father and daughter’s impromptu protest is just one of three storylines in the play, including one about the 1943 boycott of Jews in Poland–where his mother spent part of her childhood in hiding during the Holocaust.
The third storyline takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where Iran has succeeded in wiping Israel off the map. A Jewish woman has been forced to become one of the enemy’s wives – a threat some hostages taken on October 7 have reported hearing from their captors.
OREN: It was really my attempt to try and show how the boycotts of Israel today, in light of, you know, 1943, were really not different.
MANYA: Even now, Oren has not been able to convince a college or theater to stage “Boycott This,” including the Jewish museum in Los Angeles that hosted his daughter’s bat mitzvah on October 7, 2023.
OREN: I've sort of wanted to shine a light on North American Jews being hypercritical of Israel, which I guess ties into BDS. Because I've spent a lot of time in Israel. And I know what it is. It's not a simple thing. And I think it's very easy for Americans in the comfort of their little brownstones in Brooklyn, and houses in Cambridge to criticize, but these people that live in Israel are really standing the line for them.
MANYA: When Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton finally secured a legal way for Syrian Jews to leave between 1992 and 1994, most did. The last Jews of Aleppo were evacuated from the city in October 2016.
MARCUS: They took all the siddurim and everything, put them in boxes. It was just essentially closing shop for good. They knew they're not coming back.
MANYA: The food, liturgy, music, the traditions of hospitality and social welfare endure, but far from the world of which it was part. Walk into any synagogue in the Aleppo tradition after sundown on Shabbat and be treated to a concert until dawn – a custom called baqashot.
MANYA: Before Oren’s grandmother Rachel passed away, his cousin Rebecca did a piece for Canadian Broadcast News featuring their 95-year-old grandmother in the kitchen.
RACHEL SAFDIE: When we were children, we used to love all these dishes. My mother used to make them all the time and it’s very, very tasty. Anything made, Middle East food, is very tasty.
OREN: It's 10 minutes for me to see my grandmother again, in video, cooking the mehshi kusa, which is sort of the stuffed eggplant with the apricots and the meat. And there's really a great moment in it, because they're doing it together and they put it in the oven, and at the end of this 10-minute movie, they all come out of the oven, and like they're looking at it and they're tasting, and my grandmother points …
RACHEL: I know which ones you did. You did this one.
CBN INTERVIEWER: How do you know?
RACHEL: I know. And this recipe has been handed down from generation to generation.
OREN: It's so much like my grandmother because she's sort of a perfectionist, but she did everything without measuring. It was all by feel. The kibbeh, beans and lamb and potatoes and chicken but done in a different way than the Ashkenaz. I don’t know how to sort of describe it. The ka'ake, which were like these little pretzels that are, I'd say they have a taste of cumin in them.
MARCUS: Stuffed aubergine, stuffed zucchini, tomatoes, with rice, pine nuts and ground beef and so forth. Meatballs with sour cherries during the cherry season.
MANYA: Oren would one day like to see where his ancestors lived. But according to Abraham, few Aleppo Jews share that desire. After the Civil War and Siege of Aleppo in 2012 there’s little left to see. And even when there was, Aleppo’s Jews tended to make a clean break.
MARCUS: People did not go back to visit, the second and third generations did not go back. So you see, for example, here Irish people of Irish origin in the United States, they still have families there. And they go, and they take the kids to see what Ireland is like. Italians, they do the same, because they have a kind of sense, this is our origin.
And with Aleppo, there wasn't. This is a really unusual situation in terms of migrations of people not going back to the place. And I think that probably will continue that way.
MANYA: Syrian Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who, in the last century, left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.
Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.
Many thanks to Oren and Moshe for sharing their story. You can read more in Moshe’s memoir If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture.
Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn’t have the answers to my questions because they’d never asked. That’s why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to ask those questions. Find your stories.
Atara Lakritz is our producer. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer.
Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Nicole Mazur, Sean Savage, and Madeleine Stern, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible.
You can subscribe to The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more at AJC.org/theforgottenexodus.
The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC.
You can reach us at theforgottenexodus@ajc.org. If you've enjoyed this episode, please be sure to spread the word, and hop onto Apple Podcasts or Spotify to rate us and write a review to help more listeners find us.
Tunisia
Season 2 · Episode 1
Monday, August 26, 2024 • Duration 31:58
“In the Israeli DNA and the Jewish DNA, we have to fight to be who we are. In every generation, empires and big forces tried to erase us . . . I know what it is to be rejected for several parts of my identity... I'm fighting for my ancestors, but I'm also fighting for our future generation.”
Hen Mazzig, a writer, digital creator, and founder of the Tel Aviv Institute, shares his powerful journey as a proud Israeli, LGBTQ+, and Mizrahi Jew, in the premiere episode of the second season of the award-winning podcast, The Forgotten Exodus.
Hen delves into his family's deep roots in Tunisia, their harrowing experiences during the Nazi occupation, and their eventual escape to Israel. Discover the rich history of Tunisia's ancient Amazigh Jewish community, the impact of French colonial and Arab nationalist movements on Jews in North Africa, and the cultural identity that Hen passionately preserves today. Joining the conversation is historian Lucette Valensi, an expert on Tunisian Jewish culture, who provides scholarly insights into the longstanding presence of Jews in Tunisia, from antiquity to their exodus in the mid-20th century.
“Meditative Middle Eastern Flute”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI), Composer: Danielyan Ashot Makichevich (BMI), IPI Name #00855552512, United States BMI
Introducing The Forgotten Exodus
Season 1
Friday, July 29, 2022 • Duration 01:22
The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in Arab nations and Iran in the mid-20th century to forge new lives for themselves and future generations. The Forgotten Exodus, a new limited podcast series brought to you by American Jewish Committee (AJC), explores the lessons we can learn from this pivotal moment of Jewish history. The series delves into the rich, yet little-known heritage of Jews from Arab nations, as some of those countries normalize relations with Israel, and the moving stories of courage, resilience, and reconciliation that illustrate how Jews in the Middle East and North Africa overcame tremendous challenges.
Premiering August 1, join us as we share these stories in The Forgotten Exodus.
New episodes will be released weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN, HOST: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left their homes in Arab nations and Iran in the mid-20th century. Some fled antisemitism, mistreatment, and pogroms that sparked a refugee crisis like no other.
CAROL ISAACS, GUEST: A lot of businesses were trashed, houses were burnt, women raped, mutilated, babies killed. It was an awful time. And that was a kind of time when the Jews of Iraq started to think, well, maybe this isn't our homeland after all.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: Others sought opportunities for their families or followed the calling to help create a Jewish state.
BENNY GAMLIELI, TRANSLATOR FOR ZE’EV TZUBERI, GUEST: So during thousands of years, the Jewish people used to dream, to go, that the Messiah will come, to go to Israel, to go to the Holy Land, to see the city of Jerusalem. It was a dream during thousands of years.
The Forgotten Exodus, Season 2: The Untold Stories of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa
Season 2
Thursday, August 22, 2024 • Duration 01:31
The multi-award-winning, chart-topping Jewish podcast, The Forgotten Exodus, is back for season two.
The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.
The Forgotten Exodus, a limited podcast series by American Jewish Committee (AJC), explores the critical lessons we can learn from this pivotal moment and the little-known Jewish heritage of the Middle East and North Africa. As Jews around the world confront rising antisemitism, hear five new stories of Mizrahi and Sephardi courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people. The world has ignored them. We will not.
Season 2 premieres August 26, 2024.
New episodes will be released weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has forgotten them, but we will not: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century.
American Jewish Committee presents the second season of its award-winning podcast, The Forgotten Exodus. As Jews around the world confront antisemitism, this season explores how Jews lived among their Arab neighbors until they no longer safely could.
HEN MAZZIG: They completely destroyed the Tunis Jewish quarter and my family decided to leave.
MANYA: Others sought new paths, only to discover the homes they left behind did not always welcome them back. When countries turned hostile toward Jews, many sought refuge in Israel, to their ancestral homeland.
Vote for The Forgotten Exodus at the Webby Awards
Monday, April 17, 2023 • Duration 01:34
The Forgotten Exodus has been nominated for a Webby Award, also known as “the Internet’s highest honor” — but we need your help to win!
The Forgotten Exodus is the first-ever narrative podcast series devoted exclusively to the fascinating and often-overlooked history of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewry from Arab countries and Iran.
Created by American Jewish Committee (AJC), the series debuted as the top-ranked Jewish podcast in America last August.
Please make sure that these fascinating and impactful stories reach an even wider audience. Vote for the series now.
Home to one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, the story of Jews in Iran has been one of prosperity and suffering through the millennia. During the mid-20th century, when Jews were being driven from their homes in Arab lands, Iran assisted Jewish refugees in providing safe passage to Israel. Under the Shah, Israel was an important economic and political ally. Yet that all swiftly changed in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which ushered in Islamic rule, while chants of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” rang out from the streets of Tehran.
Author, journalist, and poet Roya Hakakian shares her personal story of growing up Jewish in Iran during the reign of the Shah and then Ayatollah Khomeini, which she wrote about in her memoir Journey From the Land of No.
Joining Hakakian is Dr. Saba Soomekh, a professor of world religions and Middle Eastern history who wrote From the Shahs to Los Angeles: Three Generations of Iranian Jewish Women between Religion and Culture. She also serves as associate director of AJC Los Angeles, home to America’s largest concentration of Persian Jewish immigrants.
In this sixth and final episode of the season, the Hakakian family’s saga captures the common thread that has run throughout this series – when the history of an uprooted community is left untold, it can become vulnerable to others’ narratives and assumptions, or become lost forever and forgotten. How do you leave behind a beloved homeland, safeguard its Jewish legacy, and figure out where you belong?
Financier, philanthropist, and longtime president of the World Sephardi Federation Nessim Gaon was proud of the Sudanese birthright that made him part of a long lineage of Jews from Arab lands. However, with growing antisemitism in Sudan, he also believed Israel offered the only safe haven for Jews around the world and devoted his life to constantly improving the Zionist project.
Gaon’s oldest grandchild, Dr. Alexandra Herzog, deputy director of Contemporary Jewish Life for American Jewish Committee, shares the story of her grandfather’s flight from Sudan, his quest for equality in Israel, and his pursuit of peace between the Jewish state and Arab nations that led to the historic 1979 accord between Israel and Egypt.
Along with Dr. Herzog, oral historian Daisy Abboudi describes great changes in Sudan that take place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw the country emerge from a period of Islamic extremism to a land of possibilities for Jewish pioneers. However, this brief window of openness closes once again as Gaon’s cousins, Diana Krief and Flore Eleini, describe how following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Sudan once again became a terrifying place to be a Jew.
Throughout most of her life, Giulietta Boukhobza rarely talked about the life she left behind in Libya when she was 16. However, today, with antisemitism on the rise and Israel under constant threat, she shares her family’s story of their harrowing escape from Libya as part of an effort to raise awareness for future generations.
Joining Boukhobza is filmmaker Vivienne Roumani-Denn, the creator of “The Last Jews of Libya,” a documentary about how her family and others were forced out of their North African homeland, who provides the historical backdrop for Boukhobza’s story, illustrating how life was never easy for Jews in Libya, but it was still home.
Boukhobza’s story is also one of triumph. Together with her husband David Harris, the longtime CEO of American Jewish Committee, they demonstrate that speaking up and fighting for what you believe is the only option.
“Adventures in the East”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI) Composer: Petar Milinkovic (BMI), IPI#00738313833.
Egypt
Season 1 · Episode 3
Monday, August 15, 2022 • Duration 33:32
In the first half of the 20th century, Egypt went through profound social and political upheavals culminating in the rise of President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his campaign of Arabization, creating an oppressive atmosphere for the country’s Jews, and leading almost all to flee or be kicked out of the country.
Hear the personal story of award-winning author André Aciman as he recounts the heart-wrenching details of the pervasive antisemitism during his childhood in Alexandria and his family’s expulsion in 1965, which he wrote about in his memoir Out of Egypt, and also inspired his novel Call Me by Your Name.
Joining Aciman is Deborah Starr, a professor of Near Eastern and Jewish Studies at Cornell University, who chronicles the history of Egypt’s Jewish community that dates back millennia, and the events that led to their erasure from Egypt’s collective memory.
Aciman’s modern-day Jewish exodus story is one that touches on identity, belonging, and nationality: Where is your home when you become a refugee at age 14?
Once home to one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, some 50,000 Yemeni Jews, or Teimanim, left their homes between 1949-50 as part of Operation Magic Carpet. They walked for months to reach Alaskan Airlines planes “filled like sardines” that chartered them to safety in the then-young Jewish nation. How did this incredible story unfold and what were the political, social, and economic forces that drove them to leave?
In the #1 Jewish podcast in the U.S, the history and personal stories of Yemenite Jews are uncovered and told. Hear from windsurfer Shahar Tzubari, who won a bronze medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, about how his grandparents left behind their life as dairy farmers in Ta’iz, Yemen, to come to Israel, and Ari Ariel, a Middle East historian at the University of Iowa, who delves into what the 2,600-year-old community was like and the dramatic transitions that led to the mass exodus.
“Hatikvah (National Anthem Of Israel)”; Composer: Eli Sibony; ID#122561081
“Tunisian Pot Dance (Short)”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI); Composer: kesokid, ID #97451515
“Middle East Ident”; Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Alpha (ASCAP); Composer: Alon Marcus (ACUM), IPI#776550702
“Adventures in the East”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI) Composer: Petar Milinkovic (BMI), IPI#00738313833.
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Episode Transcript:
HEN MAZZIG: They took whatever they had left and they got on a boat. And my grandmother told me this story before she passed away on how they were on this boat coming to Israel.
And they were so happy, and they were crying because they felt that finally after generations upon generations of oppression they are going to come to a place where they are going to be protected, and that she was coming home.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century.
Welcome to the second season of The Forgotten Exodus, brought to you by American Jewish Committee. This series explores that pivotal moment in history and the little-known Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations.
As Jews around the world confront violent antisemitism and Israelis face daily attacks by terrorists on multiple fronts, our second season explores how Jews have lived throughout the region for generations–despite hardship, hostility, and hatred–then sought safety and new possibilities in their ancestral homeland.
I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore untold family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people and the Middle East.
The world has ignored these voices. We will not. This is The Forgotten Exodus.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: Every June, Hen Mazzig, who splits his time between London and Tel Aviv, heads to Israel to show his Pride. His Israeli pride. His LGBTQ+ pride. And his Mizrahi Jewish pride. For that one week, all of those identities coalesce.
And while other cities around the world have transformed Pride into a June version of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Israel is home to one of the few vibrant LGBTQ communities in the Middle East. Tel Aviv keeps it real.
HEN: For me, Pride in Israel, in Tel Aviv, it still has this element of fighting for something. And that it’s important for all of us to show up and to come out to the Pride Parade because if we’re not going to be there, there’s some people with agendas to erase us and we can't let them do it.
MANYA: This year, the Tel Aviv Pride rally was a more somber affair as participants demanded freedom for the more than 100 hostages still held in Gaza since October 7th.
On that day, Hamas terrorists bent on erasing Jews from the Middle East went on a murderous rampage, killing more than 1,200, kidnapping 250 others, and unleashing what has become a 7-front war on Israel.
HEN: In the Israeli DNA and the Jewish DNA we have to fight to be who we are. In every generation, empires and big forces tried to erase us, and we had to fight. And the LGBTQ+ community also knows very well how hard it is.
I know what it is to be rejected for several parts of my identity. And I don't want anyone to go through that. I don't want my children to go through that. I'm fighting for my ancestors, but I'm also fighting for our future generation.
MANYA: Hen Mazzig is an international speaker, writer, and digital influencer. In 2022, he founded the Tel Aviv Institute, a social media laboratory that tackles antisemitism online. He’s also a second-generation Israeli, whose maternal grandparents fled Iraq, while his father’s parents fled Tunisia – roots that echo in the family name: Mazzig.
HEN: The last name Mazzig never made sense, because in Israel a lot of the last names have meaning in Hebrew.
So I remember one of my teachers in school was saying that Mazzig sounds like mozeg, which means pouring in Hebrew. Maybe your ancestors were running a bar or something? Clearly, this teacher did not have knowledge of the Amazigh people.
Which, later on I learned, several of those tribes, those Amazigh tribes, were Jewish or practiced Judaism, and that there was 5,000 Jews that came from Tunisia that were holding both identities of being Jewish and Amazigh.
And today, they have last names like Mazzig, and Amzaleg, Mizzoug. There's several of those last names in Israel today. And they are the descendants of those Jewish communities that have lived in the Atlas Mountains.
MANYA: The Atlas Mountains. A 1,500-mile chain of magnificent peaks and treacherous terrain that stretch across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, separating the Sahara from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coastline.
It’s where the nomadic Amazigh have called home for thousands of years. The Amazigh trace their origins to at least 2,000 BCE in western North Africa. They speak the language of Tamazight and rely on cattle and agriculture as their main sources of income.
But textiles too. In fact, you’ve probably heard of the Amazigh or own a rug woven by them. A Berber rug.
HEN: Amazigh, which are also called Berbers. But they're rejecting this term because of the association with barbarians, which was the title that European colonialists when they came to North Africa gave them.
There's beautiful folklore about Jewish leaders within the Amazigh people. One story that I really connected to was the story of Queen Dihya that was also known as El-Kahina, which in Arabic means the Kohen, the priest, and she was known as this leader of the Amazigh tribes, and she was Jewish.
Her derrogaters were calling her a Jewish witch, because they said that she had the power to foresee the future. And her roots were apparently connected to Queen Sheba and her arrival from Israel back to Africa. And she was the descendant of Queen Sheba. And that's how she led the Amazigh people.
And the stories that I read about her, I just felt so connected. How she had this long, black, curly hair that went all the way down to her knees, and she was fierce, and she was very committed to her identity, and she was fighting against the Islamic expansion to North Africa.
And when she failed, after years of holding them off, she realized that she can't do it anymore and she's going to lose. And she was not willing to give up her Jewish identity and convert to Islam and instead she jumped into a well and died.
This well is known today in Tunisia. It’s the [Bir] Al-Kahina or Dihya’s Well that is still in existence. Her descendants, her kids, were Jewish members of the Amazigh people.
Of course, I would like to believe that I am the descendant of royalty.
MANYA: Scholars debate whether the Amazigh converted to Judaism or descended from Queen Dihya and stayed.
Lucette Valensi is a French scholar of Tunisian history who served as a director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, one of the most prestigious institutions of graduate education in France. She has written extensively about Tunisian Jewish culture.
Generations of her family lived in Tunisia. She says archaeological evidence proves Jews were living in that land since Antiquity.
LUCETTE VALENSI: I myself am a Chemla, born Chemla. And this is an Arabic name, which means a kind of belt. And my mother's name was Tartour, which is a turban [laugh].
So the names were Arabic. So my ancestors spoke Arabic. I don't know if any of them spoke Berber before, or Latin. I have no idea. But there were Jews in antiquity and of course, through Saint Augustin.
MANYA: So when did Jews arrive in Tunisia?
LUCETTE: [laugh] That’s a strange question because they were there since Antiquity. We have evidence of their presence in mosaics of synagogues, from the times of Byzantium.
I think we think in terms of a short chronology, and they would tend to associate the Jews to colonization, which does not make sense, they were there much before French colonization. They were there for millennia.
MANYA: Valensi says Jews lived in Tunisia dating to the time of Carthage, an ancient city-state in what is now Tunisia, that reached its peak in the fourth century BCE. Later, under Roman and then Byzantine rule, Carthage continued to play a vital role as a center of commerce and trade during antiquity.
Besides the role of tax collectors, Jews were forbidden to serve in almost all public offices. Between the 5th and 8th centuries CE, conditions fluctuated between relief and forced conversions while under Christian rule.
After the Islamic conquest of Tunisia in the seventh and early eighth centuries CE, the treatment of Jews largely depended on which Muslim ruler was in charge at the time.
Some Jews converted to Islam while others lived as dhimmis, or second-class citizens, protected by the state in exchange for a special tax known as the jizya.
In 1146, the first caliph of the Almohad dynasty, declared that the Prophet Muhammad had granted Jews religious freedom for only 500 years, by which time if the messiah had not come, they had to convert.
Those who did not convert and even those who did were forced to wear yellow turbans or other special garb called shikra, to distinguish them from Muslims.
An influx of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal arrived in the 14th Century. In the 16th Century, Tunisia became part of the Ottoman Empire, and the situation of Jews improved significantly. Another group who had settled in the coastal Tuscan city of Livorno crossed the Mediterranean in the 17th and 18th centuries to make Tunisia their home.
LUCETTE: There were other groups that came, Jews from Italy, Jews from Spain, of course, Spain and Portugal, different periods. 14th century already from Spain and then from Spain and Portugal. From Italy, from Livorno, that's later, but the Jews from Livorno themselves came from Spain.
So I myself am named Valensi. From Valencia. It was the family name of my first husband. So from Valencia in Spain they went to Livorno, and from Livorno–Leghorn in English–to Tunisia.
MANYA: At its peak, Tunisia’s Jewish population exceeded 100,000 – a combination of Sephardi and Mizrahi.
HEN: When we speak about Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, specifically in the West, or mainly in the West, we're referring to them as Sephardi.
But in Tunisia, it's very interesting to see that there was the Grana community which are Livorno Jews that moved to Tunisia in the 1800s, and they brought the Sephardi way of praying.
And that’s why I always use the term Mizrahi to describe myself, because I feel like it encapsulates more of my identity. And for me, the Sephardi title that we often use on those communities doesn't feel accurate to me, and it also has the connection to Ladino, which my grandparents never spoke.
They spoke Tamazight, Judeo-Tamazight, which was the language of those tribes in North Africa. And my family from my mother's side, from Iraq, they were speaking Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic.
So for me, the term Sephardi just doesn't cut it. I go with Mizrahi to describe myself.
MANYA: The terms Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi all refer to the places Jews once called home.
Ashkenazi Jews hail from Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Germany, Poland, and Russia. They traditionally speak Yiddish, and their customs and practices reflect the influences of Central and Eastern European cultures.
Pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Holocaust led many Ashkenazi Jews to flee their longtime homes to countries like the United States and their ancestral homeland, Israel.
Mizrahi, which means “Eastern” in Hebrew, refers to the diaspora of descendants of Jewish communities from Middle Eastern countries such as: Iraq, Iran, and Yemen, and North African countries such as: Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco. Ancient Jewish communities that have lived in the region for millennia long before the advent of Islam and Christianity. They often speak dialects of Arabic.
Sephardi Jews originate from Spain and Portugal, speaking Ladino and incorporating Spanish and Portuguese cultural influences. Following their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, they settled in regions like North Africa and the Balkans. In Tunisia, the Mizrahi and Sephardi communities lived side by side, but separately.
HEN: As time passed, those communities became closer together, still quite separated, but they became closer and closer. And perhaps the reason they were becoming closer was because of the hardship that they faced as Jews.
For the leaders of Muslim armies that came to Tunisia, it didn't matter if you were a Sephardi Jew, or if you were an Amazigh Jew. You were a Jew for them.
MANYA: Algeria’s invasion of Tunisia in the 18th century had a disproportionate effect on Tunisia’s Jewish community. The Algerian army killed thousands of the citizens of Tunis, many of whom were Jewish. Algerians raped Jewish women, looted Jewish homes.
LUCETTE: There were moments of trouble when you had an invasion of the Algerian army to impose a prince. The Jews were molested in Tunis.
MANYA: After a military invasion, a French protectorate was established in 1881 and lasted until Tunisia gained independence in 1956. The Jews of Tunisia felt much safer under the French protectorate.
They put a lot of stock in the French revolutionary promise of Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Soon, the French language replaced Judeo-Arabic.
LUCETTE: Well, under colonization, the Jews were in a better position. First, the school system. They went to modern schools, especially the Alliance [Israélite Universelle] schools, and with that started a form of Westernization.
You had also schools in Italian, created by Italian Jews, and some Tunisian Jews went to these schools and already in the 19th century, there was a form of acculturation and Westernization.
Access to newspapers, creation of newspapers. In the 1880s Jews had already their own newspapers in Hebrew characters, but Arabic language.
And my grandfather was one of the early journalists and they started having their own press and published books, folklore, sort of short stories.
MANYA: In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded France and quickly overran the French Third Republic, forcing the French to sign an armistice agreement in June. The armistice significantly reduced the territory governed by France and created a new government known as the Vichy regime, after the central French city where it was based.
The Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis, establishing a special administration to introduce anti-Jewish legislation and enforce a compulsory Jewish census in all of its territories including Tunisia.
Hen grew up learning about the Holocaust, the Nazis’ attempt to erase the Jewish people. As part of his schooling, he learned the names of concentration and death camps and he heard the stories from his friends’ grandparents.
But because he was not Ashkenazi, because his grandparents didn’t suffer through the same catastrophe that befell Europe, Hen never felt fully accepted.
It was a trauma that belonged to his Ashkenazi friends of German and Polish descent, not to him. Or so they thought and so he thought, until he was a teenager and asked his grandmother Kamisa to finally share their family’s journey from Tunisia. That’s when he learned that the Mazzig family had not been exempt from Hitler’s hatred.
In November 1942, Tunisia became the only North African country to come under Nazi Germany’s occupation and the Nazis wasted no time.
Jewish property was confiscated, and heavy fines were levied on large Jewish communities. With the presence of the Einsatzkommando, a subgroup of the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, the Nazis were prepared to implement the systematic murder of the Jews of Tunisia. The tide of the war turned just in time to prevent that.
LUCETTE: At the time the Germans came, they did not control the Mediterranean, and so they could not export us to the camps. We were saved by that. Lanor camps for men in dangerous places where there were bombs by the Allies. But not for us, it was, I mean, they took our radios. They took the silverware or they took money, this kind of oppression, but they did not murder us.
They took the men away, a few families were directly impacted and died in the camps. A few men. So we were afraid. We were occupied. But compared to what Jews in Europe were subjected to, we didn't suffer.
MANYA: Almost 5,000 Jews, most of them from Tunis and from certain northern communities, were taken captive and incarcerated in 32 labor camps scattered throughout Tunisia. Jews were not only required to wear yellow stars, but those in the camps were also required to wear them on their backs so they could be identified from a distance and shot in the event they tried to escape.
HEN: My grandmother never told me until before she died, when she was more open about the stories of oppression, on how she was serving food for the French Nazi officers that were occupying Tunisia, or how my grandfather was in a labor camp, and he was supposed to be sent to a death camp in Europe as well. They never felt like they should share these stories.
MANYA: The capture of Tunisia by the Allied forces in May 1943 led the Axis forces in North Africa to surrender. But the country remained under French colonial rule and the antisemitic legislation of the Vichy regime continued until 1944. Many of the Vichy camps, including forced labor camps in the Sahara, continued to operate.
Even after the decline and fall of the Vichy regime and the pursuit of independence from French rule began, conditions for the Mazzig family and many others in the Tunisian Jewish community did not improve.
But the source of much of the hostility and strife was actually a beacon of hope for Tunisia’s Jews. On May 14, 1948, the world had witnessed the creation of the state of Israel, sparking outrage throughout the Arab world. Seven Arab nations declared war on Israel the day after it declared independence.
Amid the rise of Tunisian nationalism and its push for independence from France, Jewish communities who had lived in Tunisia for centuries became targets. Guilty by association. No longer welcome. Rabbinical councils were dismantled. Jewish sports associations banned. Jews practiced their religion in hiding. Hen’s grandfather recounted violence in the Jewish quarter of Tunis.
HEN: When World War Two was over, the Jewish community in Tunisia was hoping that now that Tunisia would have emancipation, and it would become a country, that their neighbors and the country itself would protect them.
Because when it was Nazis, they knew that it was a foreign power that came from France and oppressed them. They knew that there was some hatred in the past, from their Muslim neighbors towards them.
But they also were hoping that, if anything, they would go back to the same status of a dhimmi, of being a protected minority. Even if they were not going to be fully accepted and celebrated in this society, at least they would be protected, for paying tax. And this really did not happen.
MANYA: By the early 1950s, life for the Mazzig family became untenable. By then, American Jewish organizations based in Tunis started working to take Jews to Israel right away.
HEN: [My family decided to leave.] They took whatever they had left. And they got on a boat. And my grandmother told me this story before she passed away on how they were on this boat coming to Israel.
And they were so happy, and they were crying because they felt that finally after generations upon generations of oppression of living as a minority that knows that anytime the ruler might turn on them and take everything they have and pull the ground underneath their feet, they are going to come to a place where they are going to be protected. And maybe they will face hate, but no one will hate them because they're Jewish.
And I often dream about my grandmother being a young girl on this boat and how she must have felt to know that the nightmare and the hell that she went through is behind her and that she was coming home.
MANYA: The boat they sailed to Israel took days. When Hen’s uncle, just a young child at the time, got sick, the captain threatened to throw him overboard. Hen’s grandmother hid the child inside her clothes until they docked in Israel. When they arrived, they were sprayed with DDT to kill any lice or disease, then placed in ma’abarot, which in Hebrew means transit camps. In this case, it was a tent with one bed.
HEN: They were really mistreated back then. And it's not criticism. I mean, yes, it is also criticism, but it's not without understanding the context. That it was a young country that just started, and those Jewish communities, Jewish refugees came from Tunisia, they didn't speak Hebrew. They didn't look like the other Jewish communities there. And while they all had this in common, that they were all Jews, they had a very different experience.
MANYA: No, the family’s arrival in the Holy Land was nothing like what they had imagined. But even still, it was a dream fulfilled and there was hope, which they had lost in Tunisia.
HEN: I think that it was somewhere in between having both this deep connection to Israel and going there because they wanted to, and also knowing that there’s no future in Tunisia. And the truth is that even–and I'm sure people that are listening to us, that are strong Zionists and love Israel, if you tell them ‘OK, so move tomorrow,’ no matter how much you love Israel, it's a very difficult decision to make.
Unless it's not really a decision. And I think for them, it wasn't really a decision. And they went through so much, they knew, OK, we have to leave and I think for the first time having a country, having Israel was the hope that they had for centuries to go back home, finally realized.
MANYA: Valensi’s family did stay a while longer. When Tunisia declared independence in 1956, her father, a ceramicist, designed tiles for the residence of President Habib Bourguiba. Those good relations did not last.
Valensi studied history in France, married an engineer, and returned to Tunisia. But after being there for five years, it became clear that Jews were not treated equally and they returned to France in 1965.
LUCETTE: I did not plan to emigrate. And then it became more and more obvious that some people were more equal than others [laugh]. And so there was this nationalist mood where responsibilities were given to Muslims rather than Jews and I felt more and more segregated.
And so, my husband was an engineer from a good engineering school. Again, I mean, he worked for another engineer, who was a Muslim. We knew he would never reach the same position. His father was a lawyer. And in the tribunal, he had to use Arabic. And so all these things accumulated, and we were displaced.
MANYA: Valensi said Jewish emigration from Tunisia accelerated at two more mileposts. Even after Tunisia declared independence, France maintained a presence and a naval base in the port city of Bizerte, a strategic port on the Mediterranean for the French who were fighting with Algeria.
In 1961, Tunisian forces blockaded the naval base and warned France to stay out of its airspace. What became known as the Bizerte Crisis lasted for three days.
LUCETTE: There were critical times, like what we call “La Crise de Bizerte.” Bizerte is a port to the west of Tunis that used to be a military port and when independence was negotiated with France, the French kept this port, where they could keep an army, and Bourguiba decided that he wanted this port back. And there was a war, a conflict, between Tunisia and France in ‘61.
And that crisis was one moment when Jews thought: if there is no French presence to protect us, then anything could happen. You had the movement of emigration.
Of course, much later, ‘67, the unrest in the Middle East, and what happened there provoked a kind of panic, and there were movements against the Jews in Tunis – violence and destruction of shops, etc. So they emigrated again. Now you have only a few hundred Jews left.
MANYA: Valensi’s first husband died at an early age. Her second husband, Abraham Udovitch, is the former chair of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Together, they researched and published a book about the Jewish communities in the Tunisian island of Djerba. The couple now splits their time between Paris and Princeton. But Valensi returns to Tunisia every year. It’s still home.
LUCETTE: When I go, strange thing, I feel at home. I mean, I feel I belong. My Arabic comes back. The words that I thought I had forgotten come back.
They welcome you. I mean, if you go, you say you come from America, they're going to ask you questions. Are you Jewish? Did you go to Israel? I mean, these kind of very brutal questions, right away. They’re going there. The taxi driver won't hesitate to ask you: Are you Jewish? But at the same time, they’re very welcoming. So, I have no trouble.
MANYA: Hen, on the other hand, has never been to the land of his ancestors. He holds on to his grandparents’ trauma. And fear.
HEN: Tunisia just still feels a bit unsafe to me. Just as recent as a couple of months ago, there was a terror attack. So it's something that’s still occurring.
MANYA: Just last year, a member of the Tunisian National Guard opened fire on worshippers outside El Ghriba Synagogue where a large gathering of Jewish pilgrims were celebrating the festival of Lag BaOmer. The synagogue is located on the Tunisian island of Djerba where Valensi and her husband did research for their book.
Earlier this year, a mob attacked an abandoned synagogue in the southern city of Sfax, setting fire to the building’s courtyard. Numbering over 100,000 Jews on the eve of Israel’s Independence in 1948, the Tunisian Jewish community is now estimated to be less than 1,000.
There has been limited contact over the years between Tunisia and Israel. Some Israeli tourists, mostly of Tunisian origin, annually visit the El Ghriba synagogue in Djerba. But the government has largely been hostile to the Jewish state.
In the wake of the October 7 attack, the Tunisian parliament began debate on a law that would criminalize any normalization of ties with Israel. Still, Hen would like to go just once to see where his grandparents lived. Walked. Cooked. Prayed.
But to him it’s just geography, an arbitrary place on a map. The memories, the music, the recipes, the traditions. It’s no longer in Tunisia. It’s elsewhere now – in the only country that preserved it.
HEN: The Jewish Tunisian culture, the only place that it's been maintained is in Israel. That's why it's still alive. Like in Tunisia, it's not really celebrated. It's not something that they keep as much as they keep here.
Like if you want to go to a proper Mimouna, you would probably need to go to Israel, not to North Africa, although that's where it started. And the same with the Middle Eastern Jewish cuisine. The only place in the world, where be it Tunisian Jews and Iraqi Jews, or Yemenite Jews, still develop their recipes, is in Israel.
Israel is home, and this is where we still celebrate our culture and our cuisine and our identity is still something that I can engage with here.
I always feel like I am living the dreams of my grandparents, and I know that my grandmother is looking from above and I know how proud she is that we have a country, that we have a place to be safe at.
And that everything I do today is to protect my people, to protect the Jewish people, and making sure that next time when a country, when an empire, when a power would turn on Jews we’ll have a place to go to and be safe.
MANYA: Tunisian Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who, in the last century, left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.
Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.
Many thanks to Hen for sharing his story. You can read more in his memoir The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto.
Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn’t have the answers to my questions because they’d never asked. That’s why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to ask those questions. Find your stories.
Atara Lakritz is our producer. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer.
Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Nicole Mazur, Sean Savage, and Madeleine Stern, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible.
You can subscribe to The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more at AJC.org/theforgottenexodus.
The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC.
You can reach us at theforgottenexodus@ajc.org. If you've enjoyed this episode, please be sure to spread the word, and hop onto Apple Podcasts or Spotify to rate us and write a review to help more listeners find us.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: In Israel, America, Italy, wherever they landed, these Jews forged new lives for themselves and future generations. American Jewish Committee will explore the lessons we can learn from this pivotal moment of Jewish history in a new limited series called The Forgotten Exodus.
HEN: And they took whatever they had left. And they got on a boat coming to Israel. To a place where they are going to be protected.
MANYA: Whether they landed in Israel or elsewhere in the diaspora, these Jews forged new lives for themselves and future generations. Join Hen Mazzig, Adiel Cohen, and others as we remember The Forgotten Exodus.
“Modern Middle Eastern Underscore”: Publisher: All Pro Audio LLC (611803484); Composer: Alan T Fagan (347654928)
“Persian Fantasy Tavern”: Publisher: N/A; Composer: John Hoge
“Adventures in the East”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI) Composer: Petar Milinkovic (BMI), IPI#00738313833.
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Episode Transcript:
ROYA HAKAKIAN: In 1984, when my mother and I left and my father was left alone in Iran, that was yet another major dramatic and traumatic separation. When I look back at the events of 1979, I think, people constantly think about the revolution having, in some ways, blown up Tehran, but it also blew up families. And my own family was among them.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in Arab nations and Iran in the mid-20th century. This series, brought to you by American Jewish Committee, explores that pivotal moment in Jewish history and the rich Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations as some begin to build relations with Israel. I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience. This is The Forgotten Exodus.
Today’s episode: Leaving Iran
MANYA: Outside Israel, Iran has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East. Yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2022. Though there is no official census, experts estimate about 10,000 Jews now live in the region previously known as Persia.
But since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Jews in Iran don’t advertise their Jewish identity. They adhere to Iran’s morality code: women stay veiled from head to toe and men and women who aren’t married or related stay apart in public. They don’t express support for Israel, they don’t ask questions, and they don’t disagree with the regime. One might ask, with all these don’ts, is this a way of living a Jewish life? Or a way to live – period?
For author, journalist, and poet Roya Hakakian and her family, the answer was ultimately no. Roya has devoted her life to being a fact-finder and truth-teller. A former associate producer at the CBS news show 60 Minutes and a Guggenheim Fellow, Roya has written two volumes of poetry in Persian and three books of nonfiction in English, the first of which was published in 2004 – Journey From the Land of No, a memoir about her charmed childhood and accursed adolescence growing up Jewish in Iran under two different regimes.
ROYA: It was hugely important for me to create an account that could be relied on as a historic document. And I did my best through being very, very careful about gathering, interviewing, talking to, observing facts, evidence, documents from everyone, including my most immediate members of my family, to do what we, both as reporters, but also as Jews, are called to do, which is to bear witness.
No seemed to be the backdrop of life for women, especially of religious minorities, and, in my own case, Jewish background, and so I thought, what better way to name the book than to call it as what my experience had been, which was the constant nos that I heard. So, Land of No was Iran.
MANYA: As a journalist, as a Jew, as a daughter of Iran, Roya will not accept no for an answer. After publishing her memoir, she went on to write Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, a meticulously reported book about a widely underreported incident. In 1992 at a Berlin restaurant, a terrorist attack by the Iranian proxy Hezbollah targeted and killed four Iranian-Kurdish exiles. The book highlighted Iran’s enormous global footprint made possible by its terror proxies who don’t let international borders get in the way of silencing Iran’s critics.
Roya also co-founded the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, an independent non-profit that reports on Iran’s human rights abuses. Her work has not prompted Ayatollah Khameini to publicly issue a fatwa against her – like the murder order against Salman Rushdie issued by his predecessor. But in 2019, one of her teenage sons answered a knock at the door. It was the FBI, warning her that she was in the crosshairs of the Iranian regime’s operatives in America.
Most recently, Roya wrote A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious about the emotional roller coaster of arriving in America while still missing a beloved homeland, especially one where their community has endured for thousands of years.
ROYA: I felt very strongly that one stays in one's homeland, that you don't just simply take off when things go wrong, that you stick around and try to figure a way through a bad situation. We came to the point where staying didn't seem like it would lead to any sort of real life and leaving was the only option.
MANYA: The story of Jews in Iran, often referred to as Persia until 1935, is a millennia-long tale. A saga of suffering, repression, and persecution, peppered with brief moments of relief or at least relative peace – as long as everyone plays by the rules of the regime.
SABA SOOMEKH: The history of Jews in Iran goes back to around 2,700 years ago. And a lot of people assume that Jews came to Iran, well at that time, it was called the Persian Empire, in 586 BCE, with the Babylonian exile. But Jews actually came a lot earlier, we’re thinking 721-722 BCE with the Assyrian exile which makes us one of the oldest Jewish communities.
MANYA: That’s Dr. Saba Soomekh, a professor of world religions and Middle Eastern history and the author of From the Shahs to Los Angeles: Three Generations of Iranian Jewish Women between Religion and Culture. She also serves as associate director of American Jewish Committee in Los Angeles, home to America’s largest concentration of Persian Jewish immigrants. Saba’s parents fled Iran in 1978, shortly before the revolution, when Saba and her sister were toddlers. She has devoted her career to preserving Iranian Jewish history.
Saba said Zoroastrian rulers until the 7th Century Common Era vacillated between tolerance and persecution of Jews. For example, according to the biblical account in the Book of Ezra, Cyrus the Great freed the Jews from Babylonian rule, granted all of them citizenship, and permitted them to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their Temple.
The Book of Esther goes on to tell the story of another Persian king, believed to be Xerxes I, whose closest adviser called Haman conspires to murder all the Jews – a plot that is foiled by his wife Queen Esther who is Jewish herself. Esther heroically pleads for mercy on behalf of her people – a valor that is celebrated on the Jewish holiday of Purim.
But by the time of the Islamic conquest in the middle of the 7th Century Common Era, the persecution had become so intense that Jews were hopeful about the new Arab Muslim regime, even if that meant being tolerated and treated as second-class citizens, or dhimmi status. But that status had a different interpretation for the Safavids.
SABA: Really things didn't get bad for the Jews of the Persian Empire until the 16th century with the Safavid dynasty, because within Shia Islam in the Persian Empire, what they brought with them is this understanding of purity and impurity. And Jews were placed in the same category as dogs, pigs, and feces. They were seen as being religiously impure, what's referred to as najes.
MANYA: Jews were placed in ghettos called mahaleh, where they wore yellow stars and special shoes to distinguish them from the rest of the population. They could not leave the mahaleh when it rained for fear that if water rolled off their bodies into the water system, it would render a Shia Muslim impure. For the same reason, they could not go to the bazaars for fear they might contaminate the food. They could not look Muslims in the eye. They were relegated to certain artisanal professions such as silversmithing and block printing – crafts that dirtied one’s hands.
MANYA: By the 19th century, some European Jews did make their way to Persia to help. The Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Paris-based network of schools founded by French Jewish intellectuals, opened schools for Jewish children throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including within the mahalehs in Persia.
SABA: They saw themselves as being incredibly sophisticated because they were getting this, in a sense, secular European education, they were speaking French. The idea behind the Allianz schools was exactly that. These poor Middle Eastern Jews, one day the world is going to open up to them, their countries are going to become secular, and we need to prepare them for this, not only within the context of hygiene, but education, language.
And the Allianz schools were right when it came to the Persian Empire because who came into power was Reza Pahlavi, who was a Francophile. And he turned around and said, ‘Wow! Look at the population that speaks French, that knows European philosophy, etc. are the Jews.’ He brought them out of the mahaleh, the Jewish ghettos, and said ‘I don't care about religion. Assimilate and acculturate. As long as you show, in a sense, devotion, and nationalism to the Pahlavi regime, which the Jews did—not all Jews—but a majority of them did.
MANYA: Reza Pahlavi took control in 1925 and 16 years later, abdicated his throne to his son Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1935, Persia adopted a new name: Iran. As king or the Shah, both father and son set Iran on a course of secularization and rapid modernization under which Jewish life and success seemed to flourish. The only condition was that religious observance was kept behind closed doors.
SABA: The idea was that in public, you were secular and in private, you were a Jew. You had Shabbat, you only married a Jew, it was considered blasphemous if you married outside of the Jewish community. And it was happening because people were becoming a part of everyday schools, universities.
But that's why the Jewish day schools became so important. They weren't learning Judaism. What it did was ensure that in a secular Muslim society, that the Jewish kids were marrying within each other and within the community.
It was, in a sense, the Golden Age. And that will explain to you why, unlike the early 1950s, where you had this exodus of Mizrahi Jews, Arab Jews from the Arab world and North Africa, you didn't really have that in Iran.
MANYA: In fact, Iran provided a safe passage to Israel for Jewish refugees during that exodus, specifically those fleeing Iraq. The Pahlavi regime considered Israel a critical ally in the face of pan-Arab fervor and hostility in the region. Because of the Arab economic boycott, Israel needed energy sources and Iran needed customers for its oil exports.
A number of Israelis even moved to Tehran, including farmers from kibbutzim who had come to teach agriculture, and doctors and nurses from Hadassah Hospital who had come to teach medicine.
El Al flew in and out of Tehran airport, albeit from a separate terminal. Taking advantage of these warm relations between the two countries, Roya recalls visiting aunts, uncles, and cousins in Israel.
ROYA: We arrived, and my mom and dad did what all visiting Jews from elsewhere do. They dropped to their knees, and they started kissing the ground. I did the same, and it was so moving. Israel was the promised land, we thought about Israel, we dreamed about Israel. But, at the same time, we were Iranians and, and we were living in Iran, and things were good.
This seems to non-Iranian Jews an impossibility. But I think for most of us, it was the way things were. We lived in the country where we had lived for, God knows how many years, and there was this other place that we somehow, in the back of our minds thought we would be going to, without knowing exactly when, but that it would be the destination.
MANYA: Relations between the Shah and America flourished as well. In 1951, a hugely popular politician by the name of Mohammad Mosaddegh became prime minister and tried to institute reforms. His attempts to nationalize the oil industry and reduce the monarchy’s authority didn’t go over well. American and British intelligence backed a coup that restored the Shah’s power. Many Iranians resented America’s meddling, which became a rallying cry for the revolution. U.S. officials have since expressed regret for the CIA’s involvement.
In November 1977, President Jimmy Carter welcomed the Shah and his wife to Washington, D.C., to discuss peace between Egypt and Israel, nuclear nonproliferation, and the energy crisis.
As an extension of these warm relations, the Shah sent many young Iranians to America to enhance their university studies, exposing them to Western ideals and values.
Meanwhile, a savvy fundamentalist cleric was biding his time in a Paris basement. It wouldn’t be long before relations crumbled between Iran and Israel, Iran and the U.S,. and Iran and its Jews.
Roya recalls the Hakakian house at the corner of Alley of the Distinguished in Tehran as a lush oasis surrounded by fragrant flowers, full of her father’s poetry, and brimming with family memories. Located in the heart of a trendy neighborhood, across the street from the Shah’s charity organization, the tall juniper trees, fragrant honeysuckle, and gold mezuzah mounted on the door frame set it apart from the rest of the homes.
Roya’s father, Haghnazar, was a poet and a respected headmaster at a Hebrew school. Roya, which means dream in Persian, was a budding poet herself with the typical hopes and dreams of a Jewish teenage girl.
ROYA: Prior to the revolution, life in an average Tehran Hebrew Day School looked very much like life in a Hebrew Day School anywhere else. In the afternoons we had all Hebrew and Jewish studies. We used to put on a Purim show every year. I wanted to be Esther. I never got to be Esther. We had emissaries, I think a couple of years, from Israel, who came to teach us how to do Israeli folk dance.
MANYA: There were moments when Roya recalls feeling self-conscious about her Jewishness, particularly at Passover. That’s when the family spent two weeks cleaning, demonstrating they weren’t najes, or dirty Jews. The work was rewarded when the house filled with the fragrance of cumin and saffron and Persian dishes flowed from the kitchen, including apple and plum beef stew, tarragon veal balls stuffed with raisins, and rice garnished with currants and slivers of almonds.
When her oldest brother Alberto left to study in America, a little fact-finding work on Roya’s part revealed that his departure wasn’t simply the pursuit of a promising opportunity. As a talented cartoonist whose work had been showcased during an exhibition in Tehran, his family feared Alberto’s pen might have gone too far, offending the Pahlavi regime and drawing the attention of the Shah’s secret police.
Reports of repression, rapid modernization, the wide gap between Tehran’s rich and the rest of the country’s poor, and a feeling that Iranians weren’t in control of their own destiny all became ingredients for a revolution, stoked by an exiled cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini who was recording cassette tapes in a Paris basement and circulating them back home.
SABA: He would just sit there and go on and on for hours, going against the Shah and West toxification. And then the recordings ended up in Iran. He wasn't even in Iran until the Shah left.
MANYA: Promises of democracy and equality galvanized Iranians of all ages to overthrow the Shah in February 1979. Even the CIA was surprised.
SABA: I think a lot of people didn't believe it. Because number one, the Shah, the son, was getting the most amount of military equipment from the United States than anyone in the Middle East and in the Persian Gulf. And the idea was: you protect us in the Gulf, and we will give you whatever you need. So they never thought that a man with a beard down to his knee was able to overthrow this regime that was being propped up and supported by America, and also the Europeans.
Khomeini comes in and represents himself as a person for everyone. And he was brilliant in the way he spoke about it. And the reason why this revolution was also successful was that it wasn't just religious people who supported Khomeini, there was this concept you had, the men with the turbans, meaning the religious people, and the you know, the bow ties or the ties, meaning the secular man, a lot of them who were sent by the Shah abroad to Europe and America to get an education, who came back, saw democracy there, and wanted it for their country.
MANYA: Very few of the revolutionaries could predict that Tehran was headed in the opposite direction and was about to revert to 16th Century Shia Islamic rule. For almost a year, Tehran and the rest of the nation were swept up in revolutionary euphoria.
Roya recalls how the flag remained green, white, and red, but an Allah insignia replaced its old sword-bearing lion. New currency was printed, with portraits bearing beards and turbans. An ode to Khomeini became the new national anthem.
While the Shah had escaped on an Air France flight, corpses of his henchmen graced the front pages of newspapers alongside smiling executioners. All celebrated, until the day one of the corpses was Habib Elghanian, the Jewish philanthropist who supported all of Iran’s Hebrew schools. Charged and convicted as a Zionist spy.
Elders in the community remembered the insurmountable accusations of blood libel during darker times for Iran’s Jews. But younger generations like Roya’s, who had not lived through the eras of more ruthless antisemitism and persecution, continued to root for the revolution, regardless of its victims.
Meanwhile, Roya’s Jewish day school was taken over by a new veiled headmistress who replaced Hebrew lessons with other kinds of religious instruction, and required robes and headscarves for all the students.
ROYA: In the afternoons, from then on, we used to have lessons in a series of what she called: ‘Is religion something that you inherit, or is it something that you choose?’ And so I think the intention, clearly, was to convince us that we didn't need to inherit our religions from our parents and ancestors, that we ought to consider better choices.
MANYA: But when the headmistress cut short the eight-day Passover break, that was the last straw for Roya and her classmates. Their revolt got her expelled from school.
Though Jews did not universally support Khomeini, some saw themselves as members of the Iranian Communist, or Tudeh Party. They opposed the Shah and the human rights abuses of his monarchy and cautiously considered Khomeini the better option, or at least the lesser of two evils. Alarmed by the developments such as Elghanian’s execution and changes like the ones at Roya’s school, Jewish community leaders traveled to the Shia holy city of Qom to assure the Supreme Leader of their loyalty to Iran.
SABA: They did this because they wanted to make sure that they protected the Jewish community that was left in Iran. Khomeini made that distinction: ‘I am not against Jews, I'm against Zionists. You could be Jewish in this country. You cannot be a Zionist in this country.’
MANYA: But that wasn’t the only change. Right away, the Family Protection Law was reversed, lifting a law against polygamy, giving men full rights in divorce and custody, and lowering the marriage age for girls to nine. Women were banned from serving as judges, and beaches and sports events were segregated by gender.
But it took longer to shut down universities, albeit for only two years, segregate public schools by gender, and stone to death women who were found to have committed adultery. Though Khomeini was certainly proving that he was not the man he promised to be, he backed away from those promises gradually – one brutal crackdown at a time. As a result, the trickle of Jews out of Iran was slow.
ROYA: My father thought, let's wait a few years and see what happens. In retrospect, I think the overwhelming reason was probably that nobody believed that things had changed, and so drastically. It seemed so unbelievable. I mean, a country that had been under monarchy for 2,500 years, couldn't simply see it all go and have a whole new system put in place, especially when it was such a radical shift from what had been there before. So I think, in many ways, we were among the unbelievers, or at least my father was, we thought it could never be, it would not happen.
My father proved to be wrong, nothing changed for the better, and the conditions continued to deteriorate. So, so much catastrophe happened in those few years that Iran just simply was steeped into a very dark, intense, and period of political radicalism and also, all sorts of economic shortages and pressures. And so the five years that we were left behind, that we stayed back, changed our perspective on so many things.
MANYA: In November 1979, a group of radical university students who supported the Iranian Revolution, took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, seized hostages, and held them for 444 days until President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on January 20, 1981. During the hostages’ captivity, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. The conflict that ensued for eight years created shortages on everything from dairy products to sanitary napkins. Mosques became distribution centers for rations.
ROYA: We stood in line for hours and hours for eggs, and just the very basic things of daily life. And then it became also clear that religious minorities, including Jews, would no longer be enjoying the same privileges as everyone else.
There were bombings that kept coming closer and closer to Tehran, which is where we lived. It was very clear that half of my family that was in the United States could not and would not return, because they were boys who would have been conscripted to go to war. Everything had just come apart in a way that was inconceivable to think that they would change for the better again.
MANYA: By 1983, new laws had been passed instituting Islamic dress for all women – violations of which earned a penalty of 74 lashes. Other laws imposed an Islamic morality code that barred co-ed gatherings. Roya and her friends found refuge in the sterile office building that housed the Jewish Iranian Students Association. But she soon figured out that the regime hadn’t allowed it to remain for the benefit of the Jewish community. It functioned more like a ghetto to keep Jews off the streets and out of their way. Even the activities that previously gave her comfort were marred by the regime. Poetry books were redacted. Mountain hiking trails were arbitrarily closed to mourn the deaths of countless clerics.
SABA: Slowly what they realize, when Khomeini gained power, was that he was not the person that he claimed to be. He was not this feminist, if anything, all this misogynistic rule came in, and a lot of people realize they, in a sense, got duped and he stole the revolution from them.
MANYA: By 1984, the war with Iraq had entered its fourth year. But it was no longer about protecting Iran from Saddam Hussein. Now the Ayatollah wanted to conquer Baghdad, then Jerusalem where he aspired to deliver a sermon from the Temple Mount. Meanwhile, Muslim soldiers wounded in the war chose to bleed rather than receive treatment from Jewish doctors. Boys as young as 12 – regardless of faith – were drafted and sent on suicide missions to open the way for Iranian troops to do battle.
SABA: They were basically used as an army of children that the bombs would detonate, their parents would get a plastic key that was the key to heaven. And the bombs would detonate, and then the army would come in Iranian army would come in. And so that's when a lot of the Persian parents, the Jewish parents freaked out. And that's when they were like: we're getting out of here.
MANYA: By this time, the Hakakian family had moved into a rented apartment building and Roya was attending the neighborhood school. Non-Muslim students were required to take Koran classes and could only use designated water fountains and bathrooms. As a precaution, Roya’s father submitted their passports for renewal. Her mother’s application was denied; Roya’s passport was held for further consideration; her father’s was confiscated.
One night, Roya returned home to find her father burning her books and journals on the balcony of their building. The bonfire of words was for the best, he told her. And at long last, so was leaving. With the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Roya and her mother, Helen, fled to Geneva, and after wandering in Europe for several months, eventually reunited with her brothers in the United States.
Roya did not see her father again for five years. Still unable to acquire a passport, he was smuggled out of Iran into Pakistan, on foot.
ROYA: My eldest brother left to come to America in the mid-70s. There was a crack in the body of the family then. But then came 1979, and my two other brothers followed. And so we were apart for all those very, very formative years. And then, in 1984, when my mother and I left and my father was left alone in Iran, that was yet another major dramatic and traumatic separation. So, you know, it's interesting that when I look back at the events of 1979, I think, people constantly think about the revolution having, in some ways, blown up Tehran, but it also blew up families. And my own family was among them.
MANYA: While her father’s arrival in America was delayed, Roya describes her arrival in stages. She first arrived as a Jewish refugee in 1985 and found her place doing what she had always done – writing in Persian – rebuilding a body of work that had been reduced to ashes.
ROYA: As a teen I had become a writer, people were encouraging me. So, I continued to do it. It was the thing I knew how to do. And it gave me a sense of grounding and identity. So, I kept on doing it, and it kind of worked its magic, as I suppose good writing does for all writers. It connected me to a new community of people who read Persian and who appreciated what I was trying to do. And I found that with each book that I write, I find a new tribe for myself.
MANYA: She arrived again once she learned English. In her first year at Brooklyn College, she tape-recorded her professors to listen again later. She eventually took a course with renowned poet Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry was best known for its condemnation of persecution and imperial politics and whose 1950s poem “Howl” tested the boundaries of America’s freedom of speech.
ROYA: When I mastered the language enough to feel comfortable to be a writer once more, then I found a footing and through Allen and a community of literary people that I met here began to kind of foresee a possibility of writing in English.
MANYA: There was also her arrival to an American Jewish community that was largely unaware of the role Jews played in shaping Iran long before the advent of Islam. Likewise, they were just as unaware of the role Iran played in shaping ancient Jewish life. They were oblivious to the community’s traditions, and the indignities and abuses Iranian Jews had suffered, continue to suffer, with other religious minorities to keep those traditions alive in their homeland.
ROYA: People would say, ‘Oh, you have an accent, where are you from?’ I would say, ‘Iran,’ and the Jews at the synagogue would say, ‘Are there Jews in Iran?’
MANYA: In Roya’s most recent book A Beginner’s Guide to America, a sequel of sorts to her memoir, she reflects on the lessons learned and the observations made once she arrived in the U.S. She counsels newcomers to take their time answering what might at first seem like an ominous or loaded question. Here’s an excerpt:
ROYA: “In the early days after your arrival, “Where are you from?” is above all a reminder of your unpreparedness to speak of the past. You have yet to shape your story – what you saw, why you left, how you left, and what it took to get here. This narrative is your personal Book of Genesis: the American Volume, the one you will sooner or later pen, in the mind, if not on the page. You must take your time to do it well and do it justice.”
MANYA: No two immigrants’ experiences are the same, she writes. The only thing they all have in common is that they have been uprooted and the stories of their displacement have been hijacked by others’ assumptions and agendas.
ROYA: I witnessed, as so many other Iranian Jews witness, that the story of how we came, why we came, who we had been, was being narrated by those who had a certain partisan perspective about what the history of what Jewish people should be, or how this history needs to be cast, for whatever purposes they had. And I would see that our own recollections of what had happened were being shaded by, or filtered through views other than our own, or facts other than our own.
MANYA: As we wrap up this sixth and final episode of the first season of The Forgotten Exodus, it is clear that the same can be said about the stories of the Jewish people. No two tales are the same. Jews have lived everywhere, and there are reasons why they don’t anymore. Some fled as refugees. Some embarked as dreamers. Some forged ahead without looking back. Others counted the days until they could return home. What ties them together is their courage, perseverance, and resilience–whether they hailed from Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, or parts beyond. These six episodes offer only a handful of those stories–shaped by memories and experiences.
ROYA: That became sort of an additional incentive, if not burden for me to, to be a witness for several communities, to tell the story of what happened in Iran for American audiences, to Jews, to non-Iranian Jews who didn't realize that there were Jews in Iran, but also to record the history, according to how I had witnessed it, for ourselves, to make sure that it goes down, as I knew it.
MANYA: Iranian Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who in the last century left their homes in the Middle East to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.
Many thanks to Roya for sharing her family’s story and for helping us wrap up this season of The Forgotten Exodus. If you’re listening for the first time, check out our previous episodes on Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Sudan. Go to ajc.org/theforgottenexodus where you’ll also find transcripts, show notes, and family photos. There are still so many stories to tell. Stay tuned in coming months.
Does your family have roots in North Africa or the Middle East? One of the goals of this series is to make sure we gather these stories before they are lost. Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn't have the answers to my questions because they never asked. That's why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to find more of these stories.
Call The Forgotten Exodus hotline. Tell us where your family is from and something you'd like for our listeners to know such as how you've tried to keep the traditions and memories alive. Call 212.891.1336 and leave a message of 2 minutes or less. Be sure to leave your name and where you live now. You can also send an email to theforgottenexodus@ajc.org and we'll be in touch.
Tune in every Friday for AJC’s weekly podcast about global affairs through a Jewish lens, People of the Pod, brought to you by the same team behind The Forgotten Exodus.
Atara Lakritz is our producer, CucHuong Do is our production manager. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Sean Savage, Ian Kaplan, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name, for making this series possible. And extra special thanks to David Harris, who has been a constant champion for making sure these stories do not remain untold.
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Episode Transcript:
ALEXANDRA HERZOG: Oftentimes, I asked him, would you want to go visit Sudan? If you could, would you? And you know, he would tell me, ‘Well, I have this image in my head. And I want to keep it that way.’ And I think that it was so loaded for him in terms of memories, in terms of, you know, vibrancy of life and I think he wanted to keep it as this frozen image.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in Arab nations and Iran in the mid-20th century. This series, brought to you by American Jewish Committee, explores that pivotal moment in Jewish history and the rich Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations as some begin to build relations with Israel. I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience.
This is The Forgotten Exodus.
Today’s episode: Leaving Sudan
MANYA: When Diana Krief and her 95-year-old mother Flore Eleini look back on their family’s life in Sudan, they conjure dark memories.
Flore remembers enjoying afternoon tea outside with her mother-in-law when soldiers armed with bayonets stormed the garden.
FLORE ELEINI: Life was normal, life was good. And then, little by little. it deteriorated. We were the very, very last Jews to stay in the Sudan. And then, after the Six Day War, of course, they came, you know, in the street, they were shouting, kill, kill, kill, kill the Jews, kill, kill, kill the Jews. And one day, I thought it was our end.
MANYA: Her daughter Diana remembers soldiers raiding their house and posters of decapitated Jews outside their home.
DIANA KRIEF: It's actually by others that I came to know that I was Jewish, that I was a Jew, you know, born in a Jewish family. They used to come in front of the house with posters of Jews in the Mediterranean Sea with their heads cut off, and blood everywhere. That’s the first time I had actually seen the land of Israel. I didn't know that we had a land before.
And it was “itbah” the whole time. And even when we would put the radio on, they would sing“itbah itbah al yahud.” That means “slaughter, slaughter the Jews”. And this always stayed in my memory.
MANYA: In 1968, Flore and Diana were among the last Jews to flee Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan. They followed a path to Geneva blazed by Flore’s cousin, Nessim Gaon, a financier and philanthropist born and raised in Sudan who had moved from Khartoum to Switzerland a decade earlier.
Gaon, who died in May 2022 at the age of 100, was a legend in modern Jewish history. As a longtime president of the World Sephardi Federation, he worked to raise the profile of Sephardic Jews around the world and level the playing field for them in Israel – where Arabic speaking Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were often looked down upon.
On the contrary, Gaon believed they offered Israel a gift – a link between the Jewish state and their former homes in the Arab world. Gaon himself offered a shining example. He persuaded his dear friend, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to meet with Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, which led to the historic 1979 accord between Israel and Egypt – the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab nation.
ALEXANDRA: For him when Israel was built, it really was like a miracle. He really, truly believed in the possibilities that Israel could offer. He also realized that Sephardic Jews could play a role in creating a bridge between Israel and the Arab countries, and that they would be able to help in creating peace or at least creating dialogue between some of those countries. And that's really what he did in his conversations with Anwar el-Sadat and Menachem Begin.
MANYA: That’s Gaon’s oldest grandchild, Dr. Alexandra Herzog, who now serves as the deputy director of Contemporary Jewish Life for American Jewish Committee. As her last name indicates, her mother Marguerite, Gaon’s daughter, married into the Herzog dynasty. Alexandra’s paternal grandfather was former Israeli president Chaim Herzog, and her uncle Isaac Herzog, is the Israeli president today.
But in addition to that proud legacy, Alexandra is especially proud of the impact her maternal grandfather made in helping Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews – a slight majority of Israel’s Jewish population, but a significant majority of its Jewish poor – thrive, succeed, and lead in the Jewish state.
Gaon was the driving force behind Project Renewal, an initiative launched in the 1970s to rehabilitate some of Israel’s most distressed neighborhoods and improve education and social services there. He developed a bar mitzvah program that provided the education, ceremony, and gifts for thousands of underprivileged boys. And tens of thousands of young Sephardi leaders from impoverished neighborhoods received university scholarships.
ALEXANDRA: A lot of the people who came out of this program are actually mayors or members of the Knesset – important people in Israel who actually have, as a ripple effect, a strong impact on the lives of other people as well.
MANYA: The history of Sudan’s once tiny and tight-knit Jewish community is limited to the late 19th and early 20th centuries – a brief window when it was safe to be Jewish in that Northeast African country. But the Sudanese diaspora’s connection to that country runs unusually deep.
Sudan, Egypt’s neighbor to the south, was much more than a waystation during the age of migration. It was a land of possibilities. Even if their forefathers spent centuries elsewhere, their descendants today often identify with the fleeting generations spent in Sudan.
DAISY ABBOUDI: If you speak to people who were there, and you say, where are you from, they will say, Sudan, in a very proud, but definitive way.
MANYA: That’s Daisy Abboudi, a London-based oral historian of Sudanese Jewish history, who began her career by interviewing her own grandparents.
DAISY: Sudanese is very much part of their identity and their descendants kind of focus on Sudan. And I know, there's this kind of phenomena from around the Middle East – a kind of nostalgia of looking back. There’s kind of an inherited nostalgia that exists as well. But it's particularly strong in Sudan for a country where people didn't have thousands of years of roots. And I'm kind of always wondering, why? Why has it got this pull?
MANYA: The reason could be embedded in the history of Sudan and the pioneering spirit of the Jews who landed in this rustic pocket of Northeast Africa, where the Blue and White Nile Rivers converged, the constellations shone brightly in the night sky, and the scent of jasmine and gardenia floated in the air.
In the early 19th century, Sudanese and Egyptian residents lived under Ottoman rule. Jews in Egypt – and the few there might have been in Sudan – faced harsh taxes. But that changed toward the end of the 19th century, as the Ottoman Empire fell, and British forces took over Egypt, before moving south. With them came Christian missionaries who intended to “civilize” the tribes there. An opposition and independence movement began to build, led by a self-proclaimed Mahdi, who claimed to be the foretold redeemer of the Islamic nation. The 1966 epic film, Khartoum, depicts the infamous 1884 Siege of Khartoum, in which the Mahdi, portrayed by Hollywood superstar Laurence Olivier, defeated the popular British General Charles Gordon, played by another Hollywood legend of Ten Commandments fame, Charlton Heston.
DAISY: When this independence movement starts, it's led by a man who calls himself the Mahdi, which means the kind of chosen one, and he wins, basically. He conquers Sudan quite quickly and then promptly dies of malaria and his successor takes over. But this period of independence, once it was established, is called the Mahdia, after the Mahdi.
It was an Islamic state, basically in that it was quite extremist. All the non-Muslim people living in Sudan had to convert to Islam. This was a law that was targeted at the missionaries who were there, but of course these Jews that were living there got caught up in that policy.
MANYA: When the British conquered the Mahdi in 1898, that conversion law was revoked, and some converts reverted back to Judaism. The British built a railway line to supply the army and connect Egypt to Khartoum, the capital of the dual British-Egyptian colony. And soon, Sudan became a destination for Jewish families who sought to build economic opportunities from the ground up.
DAISY: It was a kind of a mercantile community, a lot of shops, import-exports, cloth, gum Arabic, hibiscus. A couple of families grew and then traded hibiscus, which was like the main ingredient in cough syrup at the time.
Don't forget, at that time, Sudan was very new – Khartoum especially, in terms of on the map in terms of European consciousness, obviously not new in terms of how long it's actually been there. But it was kind of seen or perceived as this new frontier. It was a bit off the beaten track.
There wasn't the mod cons or luxuries even of the day. So, it was people who were willing to take a little bit of a risk and dive into the unknown who would actually go to Sudan.
MANYA: According to historian Naham Ilan, though the community was deeply traditional, it was largely secular and introduced many of Sudan’s modern conveniences.
Morris Goldenberg from Cairo was the first optician in Khartoum. Jimmy and Toni Cain, refugees from Germany, ran a music hall and cabaret. Jewish students attended private Christian schools.
By 1906, the Jewish community of Egypt invited Rabbi Solomon Malka, a Moroccan rabbi who was ordained in British Mandate Palestine, to lead Sudan’s Jewish community. He was supposed to stay for only a few years, but instead stayed and purchased his own manufacturing plants, producing sesame oil and macaroni. His son Eli would later write the foundational history of the community titled Jacob’s Children in the Land of the Mahdi: Jews of the Sudan.
DAISY: When Rabbi Malka came, he was the shochet, he was the mohel, he was the rabbi. He was everything, it was a one-man band. The community was already kind of focused in Khartoum in 1928 when the synagogue was built. The club was built in 1947. I think the peak in terms of numbers of the community was early to mid-1950s. And that was about 250 families. So even at its peak, it was a very small community.
MANYA: Community is the key word. Everyone knew each other, looked out for each other, and when Israel was created in 1948, they raised money to help some of their fellow Jews seek opportunities in that new frontier. Those who left weren’t fleeing Sudan – not yet.
That shift didn’t happen for at least another decade. When things did start to turn, Nessim Gaon would lead the exodus. He had seen what could happen when Jews ignored warning signs and stayed where they were unwelcome for too long.
Gaon’s family arrived in the early 20th Century when his father got a job working as a clerk for the British governor of Port Sudan. Gaon was born in Khartoum in 1922.
ALEXANDRA: As for a lot of Sephardi families, they basically moved with opportunities and changes of power in different countries. So they went from Spain, to Italy, back to Spain. And then they went into the Arab lands. So I know that they went into Iraq, then they went into Turkey. And they spent quite some time actually in Turkey, until they finally went to Sudan and Egypt.
MANYA: As a young man, Gaon left to attend the London School of Economics. Shortly after he returned, he encountered British officers recruiting soldiers to fight for Winston Churchill’s campaign against the Nazis.
ALEXANDRA: He just went in, signed up, and the next day, he was sent to the front. His family was not so excited about that. And he was actually under age, he wasn't really supposed to be able to sign up at that time. But when they figured out his age, you know, in the army, it was already too late. He just felt that he needed to be useful and do something. And that's what he did.
MANYA: Though he knew about the uneasy life for Jews in Sudan preceding his family’s arrival there, what Gaon witnessed during World War II while stationed in places like Iraq ensured he would never take for granted his safety as a Jew.
ALEXANDRA: Even though he never spoke about all of the things that he saw in great detail, he did a lot after the war, to help survivors go to Israel. It was very important to him to try to help those who had survived to actually go into a place of safety. He knew what it meant to be a Jew in danger.
MANYA: Gaon and his future wife of 68 years, Renee [Tamman], exchanged letters every day when he was away at war and kept every single one. And after his return, from that point on, they never spent more than three days apart.
The couple soon began to build their family. But because of rudimentary medical care in Sudan, it was difficult. Three of their children died before their daughter Marguerite was born in 1956. They were buried in Khartoum’s Jewish cemetery.
Sudan became independent in 1956. But the ties to Egypt ran deep. Later that year, when French, British, and Israeli forces attacked Egypt over Gamel Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, the anti-Jewish tensions trickled south.
DAISY: The Suez Crisis, in the end of 1956, kind of spikes a bit of antisemitism. There is a talk in the newspapers about antisemitism, Zionist things, plots. There were a few things that made life slightly more difficult, but not in a very impactful way on daily life.
MANYA: There were other signs too. When the winner of the Miss Khartoum beauty pageant was discovered to be Jewish, she lost her crown. When Jews had matza imported from London for Passover, it had to be packaged in plain boxes without a Magen David. Given what Gaon had witnessed in World War II, that was enough to leave. He, his wife, and only daughter at the time went to Geneva.
ALEXANDRA: That was a blooming community, they were happy, they were together. And they were able to create and expand on their Jewish life. And I think that, at some point, when it became clear, when they saw the signs of that antisemitism coming their way again, they just felt like, “OK, we've seen this before, not just in Sudan, but also from the history of the Holocaust. And we need to take proactive measures, and make sure that we're safe.
MANYA: When they left, Gaon and his wife told no one. They packed only enough bags for a vacation. They even left the doors unlocked and food in the refrigerator so no one dropping by their home would get suspicious.
ALEXANDRA: My grandmother always told us how some part of her broke a little when they just left the house. They really pretended that they were just going out and they would come back. They would tell us how hard it was when they turned and they looked at the house the last time and they knew that they had left most of their things. That they had a whole history there. That they had children there who were still going to be there and it was really difficult. And so, they took everything [with] them, left to Switzerland, and made a life there.
MANYA: The decade that followed was particularly tumultuous in Sudan. The country had its first coup of many, and a military government took over. In 1960, all of the Jews who had left Sudan had their citizenship revoked. Another revolution in 1964 restored civilian rule.
DAISY: It’s at that time, that a lot of the north-south tension kind of comes into things. And there was a lot of violence in that revolution, a lot of rioting. And the violence was tribal, north-south tribalism, a lot of violence against southern tribes, people from the South in Sudan.
But that scared the Jewish community that there would be violence and murders in the streets, and that signaled that this was no longer this stable country that they had been living in. And that's when more people start to leave.
MANYA: By this point, acquiring an exit visa had become difficult for Jews, especially those who owned businesses and properties. Much like Gaon and his wife had left under cover of vacation, people began acquiring tourist visas with return tickets they never used. In the summer of 1967, the Six-Day War became a flashpoint in Khartoum.
DAISY: There was a lot of rhetoric against Jews, in the newspapers, accusations of Zionism, Zionist spies, slurs, the lot. The Jewish young men who didn't know the right people to avoid it, were arrested for the duration of the war, and then released subsequently. And then after the Six Day War, the Arab League Summit, and the declaration of the three Nos. That actually happened in Khartoum, so you can imagine the atmosphere in Khartoum at that time was not pleasant.
MANYA: The Three Nos. No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel. These were the pillars of the Khartoum Resolution, the Arab world’s proclamation denying self-determination for the Jewish people in their biblical homeland. The Arab League Summit convened in Khartoum on August 29, 1967 and the resolution was adopted days later.
Flore recalls how Muslim friends and colleagues suddenly turned on them. Returning home from a trip, her husband Ibrahim’s business partner brought back a framed picture and insisted that Ibrahim read its engraved inscription out loud: “The world will not have peace until the last Jew is put to death by stoning,” it said. Another friend asked Flore one day where she hid the device she used to communicate with Israel, implying she was a spy.
During a visit to Geneva, Ibrahim was warned not to return because there was a price on his head. Flore said their delayed departure was a source of tension between her and her husband, who even for years afterward, couldn’t believe his beloved Sudan had betrayed them. But the time had come for most Jews, including the extended family that Nessim Gaon had left behind, to abandon their homes and fortunes in Sudan and join him.
FLORE: My husband had confidence in them. And we had a lot of problems between my husband and me because of this. Because I said ‘Ibrahim, this is not a country for us.’ He says: ‘You don't know anything. They won't harm us. They won't do that.’ He had confidence, he couldn't believe it. Until my husband became very old. He died at the age of 94. And he always, always, in his heart, he said that they cannot harm us. But he had illusions. He had illusions.
MANYA: The Gaons also could not return. It was simply too dangerous. But in the 1970s, when Nessim Gaon learned vandals might have desecrated the Jewish cemetery in Khartoum, he resolved to retrieve their children and other family members who were buried there. From a distance, he coordinated an airlift for several prominent Sudanese families, including Rabbi Malka’s descendants, to transfer the remains of their loved ones out of Sudan to be reburied in Jerusalem where he knew they would be safer.
It was this sincere belief about the promise of Israel and the promise of peace in the region that led Gaon to encourage and attend a meeting between Menachem Begin and Anwar el-Sadat in 1977.
ALEXANDRA: He saw opportunities there to create a peace with Egypt and he told Menachem Begin we can create peace with the Arab countries. And so Menachem Begin took him to meet with Anwar el-Sadat. They had a meeting and they hit it off right away, because they spoke the same language, they came from the same place.
MANYA: Over the next two years, Gaon worked discreetly in the background to ease both of their minds, find common ground, and reach a consensus. When the two leaders were ready to sign a treaty in 1979, Gaon gave them both the Swiss pens they used to make it official.
ALEXANDRA: They actually called him first thing after signing, and told him: ‘Nessim, it happened. We did it.’ And, you know, it was something that he was very proud of, but that we were not really allowed to talk about in the outside.
He truly believed in the possibilities, in the outcome. That's what he focused on. He wanted to better the lives of people both in Israel and in Egypt, and he cared about, you know, the Sephardi Jews that were part of that narrative as well.
MANYA: Sudan was one of only two Arab nations who supported the accord. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League for ten years and el-Sadat was assassinated in 1981. Still, Gaon never stopped trying to pave the way for more peace negotiations. In fact, much later Israel tapped him to meet privately with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Unfortunately, the outcome was not the same.
ALEXANDRA: We did not really want him to go and meet with Arafat because we were worried. I mean, Arafat had a long history of terrorism and we were a little bit scared. Arafat actually told him that at some point, there was a murder order on his head. They were considering killing my grandfather. And they decided not to, because he realized that he was an Arab like him.
When my grandfather told us about this, we all went like, [gasp], what are you saying? But he was very calm about it. And he said: ‘You know, I, I stood there and Arafat told [me], I knew that you were doing a lot of good things. And you know, you were not doing anything bad towards the Arab populations. And you are very respectful. This is your background as well. And so we decided not to go ahead with it.’ But I think my grandfather found it very difficult to talk to Arafat. And Arafat was not ready to make peace.
MANYA: By this time Gaon had become a grandfather, Alexandra’s Nono – the one who taught her how to whistle and play backgammon. The one who blessed her before long trips. The one who taught her his first language, Arabic. The one who passed down his love for the beauty of Sephardic Jewry and his concern about it being overshadowed and undervalued around the world and in Israel.
ALEXANDRA: He was so idealistic about Israel, and really believed in it and thought it was such an important project. He also was very critical of it in terms of its treatment of Sephardic Jews. He was very sensitive to it, and he really worked hard to change that.
He was a little bit darker skinned. And he came from Sudan, he was born there. So he saw himself really, as a Sephardic Jew who had the opportunity here to educate this new country and to help this new country understand how Sephardic Jews could actually help and be positive agents within the country.
MANYA: He also believed that the Jewish world must acknowledge and respect its own rich diversity for the benefit of everyone – Jewish, non-Jewish, Israeli or Diaspora. As president of the World Sephardi Federation, he traveled the world to encourage others to step up and show that Jewish history is not just an Eastern European, Ashkenazi narrative.
ALEXANDRA: The more you're open to people who come from a different background, the more you also know how to interact with non-Jews and with countries that are maybe antagonistic to you. I think that it was a way for him to sort of bridge conflict to say: if you make an effort within the Jewish people, then you learn how to talk to everybody.
MANYA: Daisy Abboudi said telling the stories of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews is complicated. Are they migrants? Are they refugees? What do they want to be called, and why? And then there’s the ambivalence some Israelis have had about welcoming all Jews, some of whom still feel affection for nations that wish Israel did not exist. In their eyes, it’s a fine line between affection and loyalty.
DAISY: It's not an easily packaged short story. It feeds into so many different kinds of strands and politics and it's such a messy period of history anyway, with colonialism and the end of colonialism and nationalism, and, and, and, and. I think it is too big and too much for people to kind of get their heads around. And so people just don't.
MANYA: But Gaon believed that leveling the playing field and making sure everyone has equal opportunities to education and leadership is where it starts. As part of Project Renewal, he often walked the streets of the most distressed neighborhoods in Israel to hear firsthand what residents there needed and advocated for them. In addition to the scholarships, bar mitzvah programs, and Project Renewal initiative, Gaon also held court at the King David Hotel whenever he traveled to Jerusalem. Sephardi residents would line up around the block to meet the man who invested and believed in them.
ALEXANDRA: Years later, when he was quite influential, he got a letter from the Sudanese government to tell him that they would love it if he took back the nationality. At the time, he decided not to.
He wanted to keep the memories and the life that he had in Sudan and all of the legacy of Sudan without specifically being connected to a government or a political situation that he disagreed with and that was difficult and unpleasant to Jews.
I know that oftentimes, I asked him, would you want to go visit Sudan? If you could, would you? And you know, he would tell me, ‘Well, I have this image in my head. And I want to keep it that way.’ And I think that it was so loaded for him in terms of memories, in terms of, you know, vibrancy of life and what he experienced, and I think he wanted to leave it that way, and not be sort of surprised or sad, or, shocked by the changes possibly. I think he wanted to keep it as this frozen image.
I hope that one day I can go both to Sudan and to Egypt and see those places myself and get a sense of putting the pieces of the puzzle together and getting a sense of what life might have been.
MANYA: It’s unclear when it will be safe for Jews to travel to Sudan again. Between November 1984 and January 1985, Sudanese, Israeli and U.S. officials worked with Gaon and Alexandra’s father, Joel Herzog, to facilitate an airlift of thousands of Ethiopian Jews from refugee camps in Sudan to Israel. Operation Moses, as it was called, ended abruptly in January 1985 as soon as Sudan’s Arab allies caught wind of the joint effort, stranding many Ethiopian Jews there. Some were eventually rescued, but not all.
ALEXANDRA: He not only helped fund the mission, which was very secretive, but he also took care of all of the details of the infrastructure from making sure that they could take a bus, to the plane, to a ship. He really took care of all of the details. And it was important to him because he wanted to make sure that fellow Jews would be in a place of safety.
MANYA: Tribal conflict and civil wars also have continued. Feeling neglected by Khartoum, the largely agrarian South Sudan gained independence in 2011 after two civil wars. Warring factions within the South agreed to a coalition government in 2020.
Meanwhile, since 2003, millions of Darfuri men, women and children from three different ethnic groups have been targeted in what is considered the first genocide of the 21st Century – atrocities that continue today.
In 2019, Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir was pushed out of office by a series of peaceful protests. The following year, Sudan’s fledgling civilian government announced its intentions to join the Abraham Accords as part of a larger effort to engage with the international community and secure international assistance. This included an agreement by the United States to remove Sudan from its state sponsor of terrorism list. But yet another military coup in 2021 derailed any efforts toward diplomacy and that plan was put on hold until a civilian government is restored.
Gaon died before seeing it become a reality.
ALEXANDRA: He really saw Sudan as his home. That was the place that he knew, that he grew up in. And I mean, again, he had gone to London before to study, he still came back to Sudan. You know, he went to war, he came back to Sudan and came with a lot of different layers of understanding of what it meant to be a Jew, in a lot of different countries, a lot of different places.
MANYA: Alexandra said he carried those layers and lessons with him throughout his life, as well as immense pride that he came from a long lineage of people living in Arab lands. For Nessim Gaon, the Jewish tradition was and always should be a big, diverse, inclusive tent.
ALEXANDRA: One of the memories that really sticks with me is how during the Kohanim prayers at the synagogue, my grandfather would take his tallit, his prayer shawl, and put it on top of all of his children and grandchildren. And my grandmother would do the exact same thing with us in the women's section.
And of course, from time to time I would peek and look at this beautiful tent that was extended above all of my family members. And what was really special to me, was how we knew at that moment that we were being blessed by both my grandparents and that if someone was around and looked completely alone, they were welcomed under our tent.
And this really represents for me, what my grandparents were, they were warm. They were inclusive, loving and generous. And really they extended the tent, our family tent, to all the Jewish people.
MANYA: Sudanese Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who in the last century left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations. Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.
Many thanks to Alexandra, Flore, and Diana for sharing their families’ stories.
Does your family have roots in North Africa or the Middle East? One of the goals of this series is to make sure we gather these stories before they are lost. Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn't have the answers to my questions because they never asked. That's why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to find more of these stories.
Call The Forgotten Exodus hotline. Tell us where your family is from and something you'd like for our listeners to know such as how you've tried to keep the traditions and memories alive. Call 212.891-1336 and leave a message of 2 minutes or less. Be sure to leave your name and where you live now. You can also send an email to theforgottenexodus@ajc.org and we'll be in touch.
Tune in every Friday for AJC’s weekly podcast about global affairs through a Jewish lens, People of the Pod, brought to you by the same team behind The Forgotten Exodus.
Atara Lakritz is our producer, CucHuong Do is our production manager. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Sean Savage, Ian Kaplan, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name, for making this series possible. And extra special thanks to David Harris, who has been a constant champion for making sure these stories do not remain untold.
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“Modern Middle Eastern Underscore”: Publisher: All Pro Audio LLC (611803484); Composer: Alan T Fagan (347654928)
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Episode Transcript:
GIULIETTA BOUKHOBZA: My family was in Libya for many, many years. You were a second-class citizen, but you didn’t know better. You knew that if somebody hits you in the street, you don't go to the police, because the police will take the side of the Arab. They didn't care. You were just a Jew and a Zionist.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in Arab nations and Iran in the mid-20th century. This series, brought to you by American Jewish Committee, explores that pivotal moment in Jewish history and the rich Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations as some begin to build relations with Israel.
I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience.
This is The Forgotten Exodus.
Today’s episode: Leaving Libya.
GIULIETTA: We were all hiding in our houses, all the Jews. And there were news about buildings, that they were burned. We didn’t know at the time that they had killed some families. And my particular family, we were able to leave, actually the famous Quatorze Juillet, the 14th of July, the Bastille Day. So it was freedom for us too, and we ended up, we went to Italy.
MANYA: Until recently, Guilietta Boukhobza never talked about the life she left behind in Libya at the age of 16, and for many years her children rarely inquired. Only recently, her oldest son has started to ask his mother what happened to her family, their family, more than 50 years ago. What prompted her parents to leave everything behind, besides what each family member could fit inside a suitcase?
GIULIETTA: One suitcase. So we were eight children, and a mother and a father. Each one got his suitcase. I don't even remember what we put in it. I have no memory. It’s so funny. I don't remember making the bag. I vaguely remember getting into this kind of truck, arriving at the airport.
I remember arriving in Rome and starting to cry. Because I was saying, and it's true, we were very, very happy to get out of there, but still there is trauma. That you just leave there, you arrive to a train station and you start crying and you say ‘I want to go home.’ What the hell is home? They’ll kill you there.
MANYA: Her father’s favorite wool blanket. A handmade rug her mother treasured. The journals Giulietta had kept since the age of ten. Though she doesn’t remember any of these items going into a suitcase, these are the mementos that over the years have reminded Giulietta of her childhood in Misrata and Tripoli. The contents of those suitcases mattered very little at the time.
GIULIETTA: In my family they came, they almost killed us. I mean, I still remember coming, and we're alive by a miracle so, we are grateful that we were not killed.
MANYA: World events, ignorance about history, and the naïveté that often accompanies that ignorance also propel Giulietta to share her story. She is bewildered and alarmed by the rising tide of antisemitism and anger toward Israel.
Israel is not perfect. Not by any stretch. But neither is America, the country that has given her freedoms and opportunities that she never knew existed for Jews growing up in Libya.
Giulietta has a unique vantage point. She is married to the longtime CEO of American Jewish Committee, David Harris, who has shown her that speaking up and fighting for what you believe is the only option.
In 2017, David wrote Letter from a Forgotten Jew, a column stylistically written from a first-person perspective based on the stories he had heard from Jews that fled Arab countries such as Iraq and Libya. In reality, it was an ode to his wife whose experience had been ignored for too long. Since then, Giulietta has shared pieces of her story and occasionally picks up her own pen to offer her perspective on world events.
GIULIETTA: Now, everything that happened to me I see in a different light. It’s not any more about me. I was just, how do you say, I just happened to be at the wrong time at the wrong place. So, I don't want you to feel bad for me or feel sorry for me. I talk like almost as if it is not me. I'm talking about the third person. And, and I don't even have so much pity for this third person because this third person survived and thrived in a way.
When I look at my story now, I see it in relation to what I see around me – the growing antisemitism, the stupidity of the West, the ignorance towards history, the indifference and almost embarrassment of some Jews who should be proud of who they are and what they achieved.
You almost envy these people who never had the trauma that you have. Now, I feel almost privileged that I had that because I can understand more and see the danger of what can happen when people don't know history or whatever.
MANYA: The Libyan Jewish community goes back thousands of years, to the Third Century before the Common Era, even before Roman times. Of course, it wasn’t called Libya at the time. Over millennia, Jews lived in Cyrenaica, the region next to Egypt, and Tripolitania, the region bordering Tunisia. They lived under Roman, Ottoman, Italian, Spanish, British and, eventually, Libyan rule.
Who was in charge at the time determined Jews’ comfort, their livelihood, and oftentimes their survival. Under some regimes, Jews were treated as a protected minority who paid special taxes and faced certain restrictions.
Under some, they held government positions. And yet under others, they feared for their lives. In fact, after the 18th Century, Jews in Tripoli– when there were still Jews in Tripoli– celebrated two additional Purims to mark their deliverance from two separate attempts to annihilate them.
VIVIENNE ROUMAINI-DENN: Even in the best of times, they lived uneasily. On an individual basis there was that full trust. But at the same time, when there were pogroms, you just never knew when somebody would save you, or kill you. And both happened. You found Arabs who really risked their life to save you and you found others who actually just killed you.
MANYA: That’s filmmaker Vivienne Roumani-Denn, the creator of “The Last Jews of Libya,” a documentary about how her family was forced out of their North African homeland. The documentary was inspired by a manuscript her mother left behind, which Vivienne discovered only after her death.
A librarian by training, Vivienne began conducting oral histories, interviewing dozens of Jewish refugees who once called Libya home. She also created the first website to curate stories and conversations in the Libyan Jewish community.
In 1999, she became the founding director of the Sephardic Library and Archives of the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History in New York. She later served as the federation’s executive director.
Meanwhile, her older brother Maurice Roumani, a professor of politics and international relations, wrote the seminal scholarly work on Libya’s modern Jewish history titled, “The Jews of Libya.”
VIVIENNE: At the end of the Ottoman period, there was a thriving Jewish school. Many Jewish children learned Hebrew so well that they would speak it in the street. It's a nice little glimpse of the Ottoman rule in Libya, which was before anybody is currently living.
MANYA: Indeed, Jewish life flourished in Libya for centuries. Shabbat tables featured chraime, fish simmered in a spicy tomato sauce, and mafrum, vegetables stuffed with meat. In Tripoli, by the 1940s, men could walk to one of 44 synagogues every Saturday morning. The beat of the goblet drum, or darbouka, signaled the impending nuptials of a bride and groom. And when the bride emerged on her wedding day with her hands and head exquisitely painted with henna, she was a sight to behold.
In 1911, the Italians conquered the Ottoman rulers and at first, Jews fared well.
VIVIENNE: Life under Italian rule was calm, and even when fascism first came about, it was almost like just another form of government. But a major change happened when Mussolini aligned himself with Hitler.
MANYA: Benito Mussolini instituted racial laws in 1938 that required Jews to open their stores on Shabbat or face severe punishment. Eventually, Jews were barred from holding government positions. A sfollamento, or process of removing Libya’s Jews, commenced. In 1940, the African campaign of the Second World War was unfolding in the eastern Libyan desert, adjacent to Egypt. The British captured Benghazi twice.
The first time, Jews welcomed them. But Germany pushed the British out. Shortly after, anti-Jewish riots destroyed homes and businesses. When the British were pushed back a second time, many Jews with British passports fled with the British soldiers. Those who stayed were rounded up and sent to detention camps in Italy.
VIVIENNE: Some were later sent to Bergen-Belsen. They all survived. But this is a little-known part of the Holocaust history.
In 1942, Mussolini ordered the expulsion of all Jews in Cyrenaica because of their interaction with the British. Those with French or French protectorate passports were sent to Tunisia and Algeria.
Those without foreign passports, and a small number with Italian passports were sent to an Italian-run detention camp in Giado, in the mountains of Tripolitania. The conditions there were very harsh. Families required to live in cramped quarters, separated only by a sheet. They had lice-borne typhus everywhere. Food was very scarce. The interviewees told me how they had to carve out all these lice from a teeny piece of dried bread. And about one-fourth perished.
MANYA: Giulietta’s father was a young man then and later told stories of time spent in a concentration camp. She believes it was Giado.
The Jews of Giado were liberated after the British conquered Tripolitania in 1943. But two years later, in 1945, brutal pogroms unfolded across Tripoli and other cities across Tripolitania, sparked by soccer fans coming from a stadium about one kilometer from the city’s Jewish quarter. The British did not intervene for three days.
VIVIENNE: The spread throughout Tripolitania was too rapid to have been coincidental. 129 Jews were killed. Some of the descriptions of the atrocities that I recorded in the oral histories are horrifying. I'll never forget one interview, when she opened the door to greet me, in tears. She said, ‘I've waited 50 years for you.’ I've never met that woman before. And she said . . . she just unburdened herself of the most horrific memories.
MANYA: Another pogrom in 1948, a month after Israel declared independence, took fewer Jewish lives because the community was more prepared to defend itself. But both the pogroms in ’45 and ’48 became rallying cries for Israel. Between 1949 and 1951, 95% of Libyan Jews left when aliyah became possible. For those who stayed, like Giulietta’s family, the situation continued to deteriorate.
GIULIETTA: My family was in Libya for many, many years. I don't know how many generations my family was there. But we were there many years.
MANYA: Giulietta was born in 1951, the same year Libya gained its independence. By then, a fierce nationalism expressed through anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish policies had swept the region. At that time, her family lived in Misrata, a coastal city in northwestern Libya where mass riots took place on the day of Libya’s first-ever election.
Giulietta recalls that they were the only Jewish family left in Misrata at that time. The others had gone to Tripoli. The family lived in an apartment at the center of town. The Libyans’ distaste and distrust for Jews was especially evident when King Idris came to visit Misrata.
GIULIETTA: When the king will come, we have all these policemen in our house. And then the shades will be down. And we as children weren’t allowed to see. And I never understood, I never asked my parents, ‘Were they there because we were the only Jewish family, and they didn't trust us? Or were the police there because that was a very good location to see if there were snipers or something against the king?’ If I had to guess, I think because we were Jewish.
MANYA: At the age of eight, Giulietta’s family moved to Tripoli where her father worked in human resources for the Volkswagen corporation. Most of the schools in Libya were still Italian Catholic. Giulietta knew all the prayers, all the sacraments. By then, there were unspoken rules about being Jewish. You kept it quiet, even though people still knew.
GIULIETTA: First of all, you have to realize that when you don't know any different, your abnormal becomes normal. And so, if you ask me about growing up, we went to schools. We went to the beach. Some people were able to travel. The whole family couldn’t leave. You always have to leave somebody there. This kind of blackmail, because they were afraid that you will escape and go to Israel.
So basically life was, let's say normal for us, because we didn't know. For example, you knew you don't advertise the fact that you're Jewish even though we had synagogues.
As an example, even though we went to Italian school with Italian books. Sometimes the books about geography, they will come late because they will arrive from Italy. And why they will arrive late? Because they will have to remove the page if there was a picture of Israel. If in the thing you see in the Middle East there was Egypt, Jordan, etc, Libya, they had to remove it.
MANYA: When a new law in 1961 required a special permit to prove Libyan citizenship, most Jews were denied. Jews could not open businesses unless they had an Arab partner who owned more than half. Jews could not vote.
GIULIETTA: You were a second-class citizen, but you didn’t know better. You just knew not to do things. You knew that if somebody hits you in the street, you don't go to the police, because the police will take the side of the Arab. You thought things were relatively normal, and then they will turn on a dime on you. They didn't care. You were just a Jew and a Zionist.
You went to the movie, and you see the newsreel, and you see they were completely brainwashed by Egypt. And the famous phrase was ‘aleaduu alsuhyuniu’ [in Arabic: العدو الصهيوني] -- the Zionist enemy, the Zionist enemy, the Zionist enemy. We were there generations before them. We never went to Israel, but it was always, this is how they brainwashed you.
Then in ‘67, during the Six Day War, that is where everything exploded, and we had to leave.
MANYA: Tension started to build days before Egypt, Jordan, and Syria began battling Israel. Giulietta remembers young men on the side of the street drawing their hands across their throats when she and her sister walked by. Her school closed and her father started staying home from work.
GIULIETTA: We were on the phone with other Jewish families, and we could hear that things were burning. They killed . . . We didn't know. That's what helped us to keep our sanity. When we left, we knew – that they also killed people.
MANYA: Then one night, the mob arrived at her family’s house. Remember, her father worked in human resources. That detail spared their lives.
GIULIETTA: I remember this group of people coming toward us, we had a garden. They could have been 500. Or they could have been 1,000. Or they could have been just 70. But in my eyes, there were so, so many. And they wanted to burn us alive.
My mother, she knew them. She knew the mentality. So, she pushed my father away, and she went there and basically, she started pleading with them saying ‘What did we do to you? And it happened that the guy that worked for my father, and he was supposed to be fired, my father decided not to fire him. And he turned to them, and he said to them and said, ‘These are good Jews. Let’s don’t kill them.’ Sorry if I laugh. So they took the, how do you say, the match. They put it back and they left.
But we knew we were not safe. The Arabs, the Muslims, these were our enemies. We’re in their country. We are the Jews. They wanted us dead. I never want to think of what would have happened if they got hold of us.
MANYA: The government set a curfew to curb the violence. Still, afraid for their lives, Giulietta’s mother reached out to a Muslim family with whom they were close and asked for help. They agreed to hide the whole family – Giulietta’s mother, father, and eight children.
GIULIETTA: This wonderful man. He sent us his driver, with this big car. And I remember we all dressed as Arabs. I think maybe even my father, he covered himself. And he took us all to that house. And we stayed there for about two weeks.
MANYA: Men occupied one corner of the house, watching television, and listening to BBC, which was reporting on Israel’s victories over the Egyptian Air Force and its capture of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. The women lived in the other wing, listening to Arabic radio, which told a very different story. One day, Giulietta crossed over to the other side of the house to visit her father for a kosher lunch of boiled potatoes, eggs, and tuna, drizzled with olive oil.
GIULIETTA: I said to my father, ‘How are you doing on the other side?’ I said, ‘We are OK. But mama is crying, crying, crying.’ And he said, ‘Why? We are safe.’ I said, ‘Because we're listening to the news, she had brothers in Israel, and the Arab news was saying that every Jew in Israel was killed. That they won the war, and everybody's dying. And he told me, ‘Go to your mother and whisper to her, that this is bullshit, that Israel was the biggest victor in the history, and the Egyptians are running in the desert without shoes.’
MANYA: But after two weeks, Giulietta’s mother became suspicious of their hosts. She still trusted the adults in the family. But not necessarily their teenage sons.
Vivienne Roumani-Denn said older generations of Libyans tended to appreciate what Jews had contributed to society over the years and respect that. Younger Libyans were more easily swept up by the nationalistic and antisemitic fervor, regardless of the nation’s Jewish heritage.
GIULIETTA: My mother told my father, ‘I feel it in my bones, his sons are going to sell us. So, let's go home. We’d rather die in our own home. It’s also dangerous for them.’ So, we went home.
MANYA: Not long after, the King of Libya gave the Jews an impossible choice. They could go to an internment camp where they would supposedly be protected, or each person could pack a bag, take no more than 30 sterling, and abandon their homes, the lives that generations of their family had built in this country – forever.
There were too many tales of families and neighbors accepting so-called offers of protection from authorities, only to be led to their death. Giulietta’s family and thousands of others packed their bags. An Italian airlift transported 6,000 Jews to safety.
GIULIETTA: The reason why we went to Italy is because the Italian ambassador at that time in Libya decided that he had to help the Jews. And there was something for which we could all go to Italy.
I just remember they took us in this kind of truck to the airport. And then from there, we went to Rome and the feeling of freedom when we arrived in Rome. But I heard stories of people who the police wouldn’t take them, or they left them somewhere and they were saved by a miracle. So, you couldn't trust anybody.
MANYA: The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS, encouraged them to go to the States. Her father wanted to go to Israel. Her mother wanted to stay in Italy. That’s what they did.
GIULIETTA: Every country that took the Libyan Jews, and I can say that with a lot of pride, we just added to the country. We either opened businesses, or, you understand? We were never parasites. They accepted us, but we never relied on them. At the contrary, we added whatever it was to business to, to whatever. And we are always grateful. I mean, to me, Italy is one of my most favorite countries, I will always be grateful.
MANYA: With only a fourth-grade education, Giulietta’s mother became an Arabic-Italian translator for hospitals and doctors across Rome. But her father struggled. Educated at Alliance Israel Francaise, French-run Jewish schools across the Middle East, he was erudite and ambitious.
GIULIETTA: My father basically, I never saw him as a worker. He was a man that was always reading and studying languages. He was a dreamer in a way.
When he got to Italy, he tried to find a job and he couldn't. It was terrible to see that. But it was not easy. My father was never able to become who he was basically. He always felt like a failure.
He was an idealist. He loved, he wanted to go to Israel all his life. He always used to say ‘I’d rather die young in the land of Israel than old anywhere else’ and he died old somewhere else. But you know, in life, you cannot always have what you … He’s buried in Israel, yeah.
MANYA: While her father dreamed of going to Israel, her mother dreamed of going back home to Libya. Even though she worked hard to settle the family and become part of the fabric of Italian society, Italy was only a temporary refuge.
In fact, Giulietta’s parents did go back, in 1969, hoping to reclaim some of the possessions they had left behind. While they were there, King Idris was overthrown in a military coup led by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Giulietta’s parents were prisoners in their former home for about a year before they could return to their new home in Rome. They recovered very little. Gaddafi confiscated all Jewish property.
GIULIETTA: My mother thought eventually she'll go back to Libya. That was always her home. That was her country. That was her house. Maybe in the last 10 years before she died, she realized there was no hope and she saw all the, forgive me, the bestiality, all the things of terrorism and she said ‘[I could] never go back there.’ But she always dreamed of going back.
MANYA: Instead, Libya has lived on in their everyday lives – their recipes, their superstitions, and their deepest memories. To this day, guests at Giulietta’s Shabbat and holiday tables eat rice, couscous, chraime, mafrum, and a special dish of white beans called lubya.
When Giulietta’s sons or daughters-in-law send her photographs of grandchildren, she responds with the emojis of a fish and a hand, to ward off the evil eye. The hand, or hamsa, is a symbol originated by Muslims, but embraced and redefined by the Mizrahi Jews who once lived among them.
And when Giulietta’s mother was in the final stage of Alzheimer’s, that ruthless disease that strips one’s memories, Giulietta would turn on Umm Kulthum, a popular Egyptian singer who, despite being a raging antisemite, was beloved by Arabs and Jews.
GIULIETTA: You will hardly meet any Arab, any Jew, from North Africa or the Middle East who doesn't know Umm Kulthum. The only thing that she would remember, and I would put on Umm Kulthum. And I will tell her, I pretend to say ‘Mama, I cannot understand Arabic. Can you translate it to me?’ And she would translate the words, which were always: You are my life. You are my eyes, I love you. You know, the melodrama of songs.
MANYA: Roumani-Denn said for Jews in Libya, the antisemitism, no matter how rabid, no matter how pervasive, did not steal the love and sense of belonging we all have, or long for in the place we call home.
VIVIENNE: You know, it's home. It's not home, you were never made to feel at home. But it was . . . there were some really good times. Every time I interviewed anybody, they said, ‘Life was good. They hated us.’ And I said, ‘Isn't there a contradiction here?’ And the thing is, you know, … life in Libya revolved around family and faith, and extended family and friends. So, there was all this warmth on the one hand.
MANYA: Giulietta has no desire to return to the land she once called home. When she thinks about what she misses most, it’s her childhood. She left that behind when she boarded the plane to Italy, and it would not be waiting for her if she went back. It’s gone.
GIULIETTA: The country can go to hell. Sorry. I have no interest. No sympathy. Where can they give you back the money? The place is bankrupt. They don't even have . . . they're going to give it to the Jews? Some people are still fighting, ‘it’s our money.’ Some people left so much, so much. But that happened also to the Jews all over the world.
MANYA: She also knows now what was missing from that childhood. Leaving Libya introduced her to liberties she never knew existed for Jews. And for women. She wouldn’t want to return to a life without rights and freedom. Wherever they landed in Italy, the States, or Israel, she, her parents, and her seven siblings encountered new opportunities and seized them.
After two years of freedom in Rome, Giulietta’s younger sister Liliana at the age of 16 moved to Israel to finish high school and become a lone soldier. A soldier in the Israel Defense Forces with no family in Israel to support them, only their comrades and their countrymen.
GIULIETTA: It was horrible to be kicked out, we lost all our money. And we all say it was the best thing that happened to us. It was the best thing that happened to us, being kicked out, because finally we have what we never had before.
MANYA: Landing in Italy when she did not only introduced her to unexpected freedoms. In 1975, her cousin introduced her to a co-worker at HIAS, an American son of Holocaust survivors who had landed in Rome after being expelled from the Soviet Union for helping persecuted Jews. He became Giulietta’s husband and the CEO of AJC, David Harris. In 1979, they moved to the States where David became CEO 11 years later. In that role, he has expanded the organization’s reach in the Arab world.
Meanwhile, Giulietta taught Italian and raised their three sons in the kind of home she could not have growing up in Libya – one that was openly and proudly Jewish. Inspired by his wife’s journey, David has sought justice for Jews around the world by urging nations to fight antisemitism with more than just words and ceremonies to remember the Holocaust. He has encouraged them to see the fuller picture of Jews after the Holocaust, including those forced from their homes in Arab nations and Iran, the crucial role Israel has played for thousands of refugees, and the hope it offers for millions of others, should the need ever arise.
GUILIETTA: I feel blessed, because he understood. He understood. I mean, it’s his job. He went to Russia. He went to Rome. He helped the Russian Jews to come. He studied our history.
And to be honest with you, a lot of American Jews, they live in a bubble. It’s like if being born in freedom, and in a democracy, they cannot envision anything that is different than what they have.
MANYA: They cannot envision a world where Jews had to celebrate life cycle events quietly, could not travel or pursue their dreams, or feared for their lives. They cannot envision a world without Israel, or worse, they can, and they believe the world would be better for it. They don’t understand why Israel exists, what purpose it served for millions of Jews, thousands from across the Arab world, including Libya. But Giulietta knows why Israel exists.
GIULIETTA: When you come from this country, and things happen to you like [they] happened to me, to the Egyptian Jews, to the Iraqi Jews, even to the Russian Jews. We see something which is sad: that people who lived in freedom lost the ability to think rationally.
MANYA: There are no more Jews left in Libya. The Great Synagogue in Tripoli has been boarded up. When in 2011, a Libyan Jew returned from exile and broke through the boards to go inside, armed vigilantes surrounded the site. He was lucky to leave alive.
Giulietta remembers no matter how discreet Libyan Jews were about their Judaism, they never missed a High Holiday service at that synagogue and the men went there every Saturday morning. Bar mitzvahs were done quietly, unlike in the States where her three sons’ bar mitzvahs weren’t a concern.
GIULIETTA: I see my oldest son, who is 42, who every now and then he says, ‘Mom, can you please tell me how it happened, what happened?’ And it’s funny they ask, because today, when I knew you were coming, I said, there are so many questions I didn't ask my parents.
MANYA: I asked Giulietta why her family stayed in Libya after the pogroms of ’45 and ’48. Many of her aunts, uncles, cousins fled Tripoli for Israel before she was even born. Why did her parents move to Tripoli and try to stay?
GIULIETTA: I wouldn't know how to answer because you think they will always be alive, you think, and then they disappear, and you realize there are things you don’t know.
I never asked. I think, I think, they thought … I never asked.
MANYA: Libyan Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who in the last century left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations. Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.
Many thanks to Giulietta for sharing her story.
Does your family have roots in North Africa or the Middle East? One of the goals of this series is to make sure we gather these stories before they are lost. Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn't have the answers to my questions because, like Giulietta, they never asked. That's why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to find more of these stories.
Call The Forgotten Exodus hotline. Tell us where your family is from and something you'd like for our listeners to know such as how you've tried to keep the traditions alive and memories alive as well. Call 212.891-1336 and leave a message of 2 minutes or less. Be sure to leave your name and where you live now. You can also send an email to theforgottenexodus@ajc.org and we'll be in touch.
Tune in every Friday for AJC’s weekly podcast about global affairs through a Jewish lens, People of the Pod,brought to you by the same team behind The Forgotten Exodus.
Atara Lakritz is our producer, CucHuong Do is our production manager. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Sean Savage, Ian Kaplan, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible. And extra special thanks to David Harris, who has been a constant champion for making sure these stories do not remain untold.
You can follow The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can sign up to receive updates at AJC.org/forgottenexodussignup.
The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC.
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ANDRÉ ACIMAN: I've lived in New York for 50 years. Is it my home? Not really. But Egypt was never going to be my home. It had become oppressive to be Jewish.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in Arab nations and Iran in the mid-20th century. This series, brought to you by American Jewish Committee, explores that pivotal moment in Jewish history and the rich Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations as some begin to build relations with Israel. I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience.
This is The Forgotten Exodus. Today's episode: leaving Egypt.
Author André Aciman can’t stand Passover Seders. They are long and tedious. Everyone gets hungry long before it’s time to eat. It’s also an unwelcome reminder of when André was 14 and his family was forced to leave Egypt – the only home he had ever known. On their last night there, he recounts his family gathered for one last Seder in his birthplace.
ANDRÉ: By the time I was saying goodbye, the country, Egypt, had essentially become sort of Judenrein.
MANYA: Judenrein is the term of Nazi origin meaning “free of Jews”. Most, if not all of the Jews, had already left.
ANDRÉ: By the time we were kicked out, we were kicked out literally from Egypt, my parents had already had a life in Egypt. My mother was born in Egypt, she had been wealthy. My father became wealthy. And of course, they had a way of living life that they knew they were abandoning. They had no idea what was awaiting them. They knew it was going to be different, but they had no sense. I, for one, being younger, I just couldn't wait to leave. Because it had become oppressive to be Jewish. As far as I was concerned, it was goodbye. Thank you very much. I’m going.
MANYA: André Aciman is best known as the author whose novel inspired the Oscar-winning film Call Me By Your Name – which is as much a tale of coming to terms with being Jewish and a minority, as it is an exquisite coming of age love story set in a villa on the Italian Riviera.
What readers and moviegoers didn’t know is that the Italian villa is just a stand-in. The story’s setting– its distant surf, serpentine architecture, and lush gardens where Elio and Oliver’s romance blooms and Elio’s spiritual awakening unfolds – is an ode to André’s lost home, the coastal Egyptian city of Alexandria.
There, three generations of his Sephardic family had rebuilt the lives they left behind elsewhere as the Ottoman Empire crumbled, two world wars unfolded, a Jewish homeland was born, and nationalistic fervor swept across the Arab world and North Africa. There, in Alexandria, his family had enjoyed a cosmopolitan city and vibrant Jewish home. Until they couldn’t and had to leave.
ANDRÉ: I would be lying if I said that I didn't project many things lost into my novels. In other words, to be able to re-experience the beach, I created a beach house. And that beach house has become, as you know, quite famous around the world. But it was really a portrait of the beach house that we had lost in Egypt.
And many things like that, I pilfer from my imagined past and dump into my books. And people always tell me, ‘God, you captured Italy so well.’
Actually, that was not Italy, I hate to tell you. It was my reimagined or reinvented Egypt transposed into Italy and made to come alive again.
MANYA: Before he penned Call Me By Your Name, André wrote his first book, Out of Egypt, a touching memoir about his family’s picturesque life in Alexandria, the underlying anxiety that it could always vanish and how, under the nationalization effort led by Egypt’s President Gamel Abdel Nassar, it did vanish. The memoir ends with the events surrounding the family’s last Passover Seder before they say farewell.
ANDRÉ: This was part of the program of President Nasser, which was to take, particularly Alexandria, and turn it into an Egyptian city, sort of, purified of all European influences. And it worked.
As, by the way, and this is the biggest tragedy that happens to, particularly to Jews, is when a culture decides to expunge its Jews or to remove them in one way or another, it succeeds. It does succeed. You have a sense that it is possible for a culture to remove an entire population. And this is part of the Jewish experience to accept that this happens.
MANYA: Egypt did not just expunge its Jewish community. It managed to erase Jews from the nation’s collective memory. Only recently have people begun to rediscover the centuries of rich Jewish history in Egypt, including native Egyptian Jews dating back millennia.
In addition, Egypt became a destination for Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th Century. And after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, a wave of more Jews came from the Ottoman Empire, Italy, and Greece. And at the end of the 19th Century, Ashkenazi Jews arrived, fleeing from European pogroms.
DEBORAH STARR: The Jewish community in Egypt was very diverse. The longest standing community in Egypt would have been Arabic speaking Jews, we would say now Mizrahi Jews.
MANYA: That’s Deborah Starr, Professor of Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature and Film at Cornell University. Her studies of cosmopolitan Egypt through a lens of literature and cinema have given her a unique window into how Jews arrived and left Egypt and how that history has been portrayed. She says Jews had a long history in Egypt through the Islamic period and a small population remained in the 19th century. Then a wave of immigration came.
DEBORAH: We have an economic boom in Egypt. Jews start coming from around the Ottoman Empire, from around the Mediterranean, emigrating to Egypt from across North Africa. And so, from around 5,000 Jews in the middle of the 19th century, by the middle of the 20th century, at its peak, the Egyptian Jews numbered somewhere between 75 and 80,000. So, it was a significant increase, and you know, much more so than just the birth rate would explain.
MANYA: André’s family was part of that wave, having endured a series of exiles from Spain, Italy, and Turkey, before reaching Egypt.
DEBORAH: Egypt has its independence movement, the 1919 revolution, which is characterized by this discourse of coexistence, that ‘we’re all in this together.’ There are images of Muslims and Christians marching together.
Jews were also supportive of this movement. There’s this real sense of a plurality, of a pluralist society in Egypt, that’s really evident in the ways that this movement is characterized.
The interwar period is really this very vibrant time in Egyptian culture, but also this time of significant transition in its relationship to the British in the various movements, political movements that emerge in this period, and movements that will have a huge impact on the fate of the Jews of Egypt in the coming decades.
MANYA: One of those movements was Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish state in the biblical homeland of the Jews. In 1917, during the First World War, the British government occupying Egypt at the time, issued a public statement of support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, still an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. That statement became known as the Balfour Declaration.
DEBORAH: There was certainly evidence of a certain excitement about the Balfour Declaration of 1917. A certain amount of general support for the idea that Jews are going to live there, but not a whole lot of movement themselves.
But we also have these really interesting examples of people who were on the record as supporting, of seeing themselves as Egyptians, as part of the anti-colonial Egyptian nationalism, who also gave financial support to the Jewish project in Palestine. And so, so there wasn't this sense of—you can't be one or the other. There wasn't this radical split.
MANYA: Another movement unfolding simultaneously was the impulse to reclaim Egypt’s independence, not just in legal terms – Egypt had technically gained independence from the British in 1922 – but suddenly what it meant to be Egyptian was defined against this foreign colonial power that had imposed its will on Egypt for years and still maintained a significant presence.
DEBORAH: We also see moves within Egypt, toward the ‘Egyptianization’ of companies or laws that start saying, we want to, we want to give priority to our citizens, because the economy had been so dominated by either foreigners or people who were local but had foreign nationality. And this begins to disproportionately affect the Jews.
Because so many of the Jews, you know, had been immigrants a generation or two earlier, some of them had either achieved protected status or, you know, arrived with papers from, from one or another of these European powers.
MANYA: In 1929, Egypt adopted its first law giving citizenship to its residents. But it was not universally applied. By this time, the conflict in Palestine and the rise of Zionism had shifted how the Egyptian establishment viewed Jews.
DEBORAH: Particularly the Jews who had lived there for a really long time, some of whom were among the lower classes, who didn't travel to Europe every summer and didn't need papers to prove their citizenship, by the time they started seeing that it was worthwhile for them to get citizenship, it was harder for Jews to be approved. So, by the end, we do have a pretty substantial number of Jews who end up stateless.
MANYA: Stateless. But not for long. In 1948, the Jewish state declared independence. In response, King Farouk of Egypt joined four other Arab nations in declaring war on the newly formed nation. And they lost.
The Arab nations’ stunning defeat in that first Arab-Israeli War sparked a clandestine movement to overthrow the Egyptian monarchy, which was still seen as being in the pocket of the British. One of the orchestrators of that plot, known as the Free Officers Movement, was Col. Gamel Abdel Nassar. In 1952, a coup sent King Farouk on his way to Italy and Nassar eventually emerged as president. The official position of the Nassar regime was one of tolerance for the Jews. But that didn’t always seem to be the case.
DEBORAH: Between 1948 and ‘52, you do have a notable number of Jews who leave Egypt at this point who see the writing on the wall. Maybe they don't have very deep roots in Egypt, they've only been there for one or two generations, they have another nationality, they have someplace to go.
About a third of the Jews who leave Egypt in the middle of the 20th century go to Europe, France, particularly. To a certain extent Italy. About a third go to the Americas, and about a third go to Israel. And among those who go to Israel, it's largely those who end up stateless. They have no place else to go because of those nationality laws that I mentioned earlier, have no choice but to go to Israel.
MANYA: Those who stayed became especially vulnerable to the Nassar regime’s sequestration of businesses. Then in 1956, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, a 120-mile-long waterway that connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea – that same waterway that created opportunities for migration in the region a century earlier.
DEBORAH: The real watershed moment is the 1956 Suez conflict. Israel, in collaboration with France, and Great Britain attacks Egypt, the conflict breaks out, you know, the French and the British come into the war on the side of the Israelis. And each of the powers has their own reasons for wanting, I mean, Nasser's threatening Israeli shipping, and, threatening the security of Israel, the French and the British, again, have their own reasons for trying to either take back the canal, or, just at least bring Nassar down a peg.
MANYA: At war with France and Britain, Egypt targeted and expelled anyone with French and British nationality, including many Jews, but not exclusively.
DEBORAH: But this is also the moment where I think there's a big pivot in how Jews feel about being in Egypt. And so, we start seeing larger waves of emigration, after 1956. So, this is really sort of the peak of the wave of emigration.
MANYA: André’s family stayed. They already had endured a series of exiles. His father, an aspiring writer who copied passages by Marcel Proust into his diary, had set that dream aside to open a textile factory, rebuild from nothing what the family had lost elsewhere, and prepare young André to eventually take over the family business. He wasn’t about to walk away from the family fortune – again.
DEBORAH: André Aciman’s story is quite, as I said, the majority of the Jewish community leaves in the aftermath of 1956. And his family stays a lot longer. So, he has incredible insights into what happens over that period, where the community has already significantly diminished.
MANYA: Indeed, over the next nine years, the situation worsened. The Egyptian government took his father’s factory, monitored their every move, frequently called the house with harassing questions about their whereabouts, or knocked on the door to issue warrants for his father’s arrest, only to bring him in for more interrogation. As much as André’s father clung to life in Egypt, it was becoming a less viable option with each passing day.
ANDRÉ: He knew that the way Egypt was going, there was no room for him, really. And I remember during the last two years, in our last two years in Egypt, there wAs constantly references to the fact that we were going to go, this was not lasting, you know, what are we going to do? Where do we think we should go? And so on and so forth. So, this was a constant sort of conversation we were having.
MANYA: Meanwhile, young André encountered a level of antisemitism that scarred him deeply and shaped his perception of how the world perceives Jews.
ANDRÉ: It was oppressive in good part because people started throwing stones in the streets. So, there was a sense of ‘Get out of here. We don't want you here.’
MANYA: It was in the streets and in the schools, which were undergoing an Arabization after the end of British rule, making Arabic the new lingua franca and antisemitism the norm.
ANDRÉ: There's no question that antisemitism was now rooted in place. In my school, where I went, I went to a British school, but it had become Egyptian, although they taught English, predominantly English, but we had to take Arabic classes, in sort of social sciences, in history, and in Arabic as well. And in the Arabic class, which I took for many years, I had to study poems that were fundamentally anti-Jewish. Not just anti-Israeli, which is a big distinction that people like to make, it doesn't stick. I was reading and reciting poems that were against me.
And the typical cartoon for a Jew was a man with a beard, big tummy, hook nose, and I knew ‘This is really me, isn't it? OK.’ And so you look at yourself with a saber, right, running through it with an Egyptian flag. And I'll never forget this. This was, basically I was told that this is something I had to learn and accept and side with – by the teachers, and by the books themselves.
And the irony of the whole thing is that one of the best tutors we had, was actually the headmaster of the Jewish school. He was Jewish in very sort of—very Orthodox himself. And he was teaching me how to recite those poems that were anti-Jewish. And of course, he had to do it with a straight face.
MANYA: One by one, Jewish neighbors lost their livelihoods and unable to overcome the stigma, packed their bags and left. In his memoir, André recalls how prior to each family’s departure, the smell of leather lingered in their homes from the dozens of suitcases they had begun to pack. By 1965, the smell of leather began to waft through André’s home.
ANDRÉ: Eventually, one morning, or one afternoon, I came back from school. And my father said to me, ‘You know, they don't want us here anymore.’ Those were exactly the words he used. ‘They don't want us here.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, they've expelled us.’
And I was expelled with my mother and my brother, sooner than my father was. So, we had to leave the country. We realized we were being expelled, maybe in spring, and we left in May. And so, for about a month or so, the house was a mess because there were suitcases everywhere, and people. My mother was packing constantly, constantly. But we knew we were going to go to Italy, we knew we had an uncle in Italy who was going to host us, or at least make life livable for us when we arrived.
We had obtained Italian papers, obtained through various means. I mean, whatever. They're not exactly legitimate ways of getting a citizenship, but it was given to my father, and he took it. And we changed our last name from Ajiman, which is how it was pronounced, to Aciman because the Italians saw the C and assumed it was that.
My father had some money in Europe already. So that was going to help us survive. But we knew my mother and I and my brother, that we were now sort of functionally poor.
MANYA: In hindsight, André now knows the family’s expulsion at that time was the best thing that could have happened. Two years later, Israel trounced Egypt in the Six-Day War, nearly destroying the Egyptian Air Force, taking control of the Gaza Strip and the entire Sinai Peninsula, as well as territory from Egypt’s allies in the conflict, Syria and Jordan. The few remaining Jews in Egypt were sent to internment camps, including the chief rabbis of Cairo and Alexandria and the family of one of André’s schoolmates whose father was badly beaten.
After three years in Italy, André’s family joined his mother’s sister in America, confirming once and for all that their life in Egypt was gone.
ANDRÉ: I think there was a kind of declaration of their condition. In other words, they never overcame the fact that they had lost a way of life. And of course, the means to sustain that life was totally taken away, because they were nationalized, and had their property sequestered, everything was taken away from them. So, they were tossed into the wild sea.
My mother basically knew how to shut the book on Egypt, she stopped thinking about Egypt, she was an American now. She was very happy to have become a citizen of the United States.
Whereas my father, who basically was the one who had lost more than she had, because he had built his own fortune himself, never overcame it. And so, he led a life of the exile who continues to go to places and to restaurants that are costly, but that he can still manage to afford if he watches himself. So, he never took cabs, he always took the bus. Then he lived a pauper’s life, but with good clothing, because he still had all his clothing from his tailor in Egypt. But it was a bit of a production, a performance for him.
MANYA: André’s father missed the life he had in Egypt. André longs for the life he could’ve had there.
ANDRÉ: I was going to study in England, I was going to come back to Egypt, I was going to own the factory. This was kind of inscribed in my genes at that point. And of course, you give up that, as I like to say, and I've written about this many times, is that whatever you lose, or whatever never happened, continues to sort of sub-exist somewhere in your mind. In other words, it's something that has been taken away from you, even though it never existed.
MANYA: But like his mother, André moved on. In fact, he says moving on is part of the Jewish experience. Married with sons of his own, he now is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, teaching the history of literary theory. He is also one of the foremost experts on Marcel Proust, that French novelist whose passages his father once transcribed in his diaries. André’s own novels and anthologies have won awards and inspired Academy Award-winning screenplays. Like Israel opened its doors and welcomed all of those stateless Egyptian Jews, America opened doors for André. Going to college in the Bronx after growing up in Egypt and Italy? That introduced him to being openly Jewish.
ANDRÉ: I went to Lehman College, as an undergraduate, I came to the States in September. I came too late to go to college, but I went to an event at that college in October or November, and already people were telling me they were Jewish.
You know, ‘I'm Jewish, and this and that,’ and, and so I felt ‘Oh, God, it's like, you mean people can be natural about their Judaism? And so, I began saying to people, ‘I'm Jewish, too,’ or I would no longer feel this sense of hiding my Jewishness, which came when I came to America. Not before. Not in Italy. Not in Egypt certainly.
But the experience of being in a place that was fundamentally all Jewish, like being in the Bronx in 1968, was mind opening for me, it was: I can let everything down, I can be Jewish like everybody else. It's no longer a secret. I don't have to pretend that I was a Protestant when I didn't even know what kind of Protestant I was.
As a person growing up in an antisemitic environment. You have many guards, guardrails in place, so you know how not to let it out this way, or that way or this other way. You don't speak about matzah. You don't speak about charoset. You don't speak about anything, so as to prevent yourself from giving out that you're Jewish.
MANYA: Though the doors had been flung open and it felt much safer to be openly Jewish, André to this day cannot forget the antisemitism that poisoned his formative years.
ANDRÉ: I assume that everybody's antisemitic at some point. It is very difficult to meet someone who is not Jewish, who, after they've had many drinks, will not turn out to be slightly more antisemitic than you expected. It is there. It's culturally dominant. And so, you have to live with this. As my grandmother used to say, I'm just giving this person time until I discover how antisemitic they are. It was always a question of time.
MANYA: His family’s various displacements and scattered roots in Spain, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, and now America, have led him to question his identity and what he calls home.
ANDRÉ: I live with this sense of: I don't know where I belong. I don't know who I am. I don't know any of those things. What’s my flag? I have no idea. Where's my home? I don't know. I live in New York. I've lived in New York for 50 years. Is it my home? Not really. But Egypt was never going to be my home.
MANYA: André knew when he was leaving Egypt that he would one day write a book about the experience. He knew he should take notes, but never did. And like his father, he started a diary, but it was lost. He started another in 1969.
After completing his dissertation, he began to write book reviews for Commentary, a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism and politics founded and published, at the time, by American Jewish Committee.
The editor suggested André write something personal, and that was the beginning of Out of Egypt. In fact, three chapters of his memoir, including The Last Seder, appeared in Commentary before it was published as a book in 1994.
André returned to Egypt shortly after its release. But he has not been back since, even though his sons want to accompany him on a trip.
ANDRÉ: They want to go back, because they want to go back with me. Question is, I don't want to put them in danger. You never know. You never know how people will react to . . . I mean, I'll go back as a writer who wrote about Egypt and was Jewish. And who knows what awaits me? Whether it will be friendly, will it be icy and chilly. Or will it be hostile? I don't know. And I don't want to put myself there.
In other words, the view of the Jews has changed. It went to friendly, to enemy, to friendly, enemy, enemy, friendly, and so on, so forth. In other words, it is a fundamentally unreliable situation.
MANYA: He also doesn’t see the point. It’s impossible to recapture the past. The pictures he sees don’t look familiar and the people he used to know with affection have died. But he doesn’t want the past to be forgotten. None of it. He wants the world to remember the vibrant Jewish life that existed in Cairo and Alexandria, as well as the vile hatred that drove all but a handful of Jews out of Egypt.
Cornell Professor Deborah Starr says for the first time in many years, young Egyptians are asking tough questions about the Arabization of Egyptian society and how that affected Egyptian Jews. Perhaps, Israel and Zionism did not siphon Jewish communities from the Arab world as the story often goes. Perhaps instead, Israel offered a critical refuge for a persecuted community.
DEBORAH: I think it's really important to tell the stories of Mizrahi Jews. I think that, particularly here we are speaking in English to an American audience, where the majority of Jews in North America are Ashkenazi, we have our own identity, we have our own stories. But there are also other stories that are really interesting to tell, and are part of the history of Jews in the 20th and 21st centuries. They're part of the Jewish experience. And so that's some of what has always motivated me in my research, and looking at the stories of coexistence among Jews and their neighbors in Egypt.
MANYA: Professor Starr says the rise of Islamist forces like the Muslim Brotherhood has led Egyptians to harken back toward this period of tolerance and coexistence, evoking a sense of nostalgia.
DEBORAH: The people are no longer living together. But it's worth remembering that past, it's worth reflecting on it in an honest way, and not, to look at the nostalgia and say: oh, look, these people are nostalgic about it, what is it that they're nostalgic for? What are some of the motivations for that nostalgia? How are they characterizing this experience? But also to look kind of critically on the past and understand, where things were working where things weren't and, and to tell the story in an honest way.
MANYA: Though the communities are gone, there has been an effort to restore the evidence of Jewish life. Under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, Egypt’s president since 2014, there have been initiatives to restore and protect synagogues and cemeteries, including Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria, Maimonides’ original yeshiva in old Cairo, and Cairo’s vast Jewish cemetery at Bassatine. But André is unmoved by this gesture.
ANDRÉ: In fact, I got a call from the Egyptian ambassador to my house here, saying, ‘We're fixing the temples and the synagogues, and we want you back.’ ‘Oh, that's very nice. First of all,’ I told him, ‘fixing the synagogues doesn't do anything for me because I'm not a religious Jew. And second of all, I would be more than willing to come back to Egypt, when you give me my money back.’ He never called me again.
MANYA: Anytime the conversation about reparations comes up, it is overshadowed by the demand for reparations for Palestinians displaced by the creation of Israel, even though their leaders have rejected all offers for a Palestinian state. André wishes the Arab countries that have attacked Israel time and again would invest that money in the welfare of Palestinian refugees, help them start new lives, and to thrive instead of using them as pawns in a futile battle.
He will always be grateful to HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, for helping his family escape, resettle, and rebuild their lives.
ANDRÉ: We’ve made new lives for ourselves. We’ve moved on, and I think this is what Jews do all the time, all the time. They arrive or they’re displaced, kicked out, they refashion themselves.
Anytime I can help a Jew I will. Because they've helped me, because it's the right thing to do for a Jew. If a Jew does not help another Jew, what kind of a Jew are you? I mean, you could be a nonreligious Jew as I am, but I am still Jewish.
And I realize that we are a people that has historically suffered a great deal, because we were oppressed forever, and we might be oppressed again. Who knows, ok? But we help each other, and I don't want to break that chain.
MANYA: Egyptian Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who in the last century left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations. Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.
Many thanks to André for sharing his story. You can read more in his memoir Out of Egypt and eventually in the sequel which he’s working on now about his family’s life in Italy after they left Egypt and before they came to America.
Does your family have roots in North Africa or the Middle East? One of the goals of this series is to make sure we gather these stories before they are lost. Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn't have the answers to my questions because they had never asked. That's why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to find more of these stories.
Call The Forgotten Exodus hotline. Tell us where your family is from and something you'd like for our listeners to know such as how you've tried to keep the traditions alive and memories alive as well. Call 212.891-1336 and leave a message of 2 minutes or less. Be sure to leave your name and where you live now. You can also send an email to theforgottenexodus@ajc.org and we'll be in touch.
Atara Lakritz is our producer, CucHuong Do is our production manager. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Sean Savage, Ian Kaplan, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible. And extra special thanks to David Harris, who has been a constant champion for making sure these stories do not remain untold.
You can follow The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can sign up to receive updates at AJC.org/forgottenexodussignup.
The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC.
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BENNY GAMLIELI/ZE’EV TZUBARI: During thousands of years, the Jewish people used to dream, that the Messiah would come, to go to Israel, to go to the Holy Land, to see the city of Jerusalem. It was a dream during thousands of years.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left, or were driven from their homes in Arab nations and Iran in the mid-20th century. This series, brought to you by American Jewish Committee, explores that pivotal moment in Jewish history and the rich Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations, as some begin to build relations with Israel.
I’m your host, Manya Brachear Pashman.
Join us as we explore family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience. This is The Forgotten Exodus.
Today’s episode: Leaving Yemen.
[Video clip of Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics Windsurfing RS:X event]
MANYA: That is the sound of Israeli Windsurfer Shahar Tzubari in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, coming up from behind to earn the bronze medal. At the same time, he was electrifying his country by winning Israel’s only medal in those Olympic Games, he was also fulfilling his mandatory military service to help defend the Jewish state. Two generations before him also served in the Israeli military, including his grandfather who fought to defend Israel against attacks from its Arab neighbors just days after shepherding his family on foot across Yemen to board a plane and make the new Jewish state their new home.
SHAHAR TZUBARI: I just know about the past, of my parents and my grandparents. And I know, they fought for this country. And they fought for independence. And for me, I’m here, and I represent basically what they fought for.
MANYA: Shahar, who now coaches Israel’s women’s windsurfing team, is a second-generation Israeli whose grandparents and generations before them lived in Yemen. Their journey to the Jewish state resembles that of tens of thousands of Yemeni Jews, who came to Israel from Yemen between 1948 and 1949 as part of a mass exodus commonly called Operation Magic Carpet.
In fact, Yemeni Jews, or Teimanim, are believed to be one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world outside of Israel, existing there even before the destruction of the First Temple. Yemeni Jews spoke a particular dialect of Hebrew and maintained many original religious traditions and others shaped over the centuries by the influence of Maimonides and Kabbalah. Hundreds of Jewish settlements were scattered across Yemen, where Jews primarily served as silversmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, shoemakers, and tailors.
But that population started to shift in the 19th Century, what historians call the “age of migration,” driven largely by economic shifts. When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, movement between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean suddenly became much easier. That was true not only for imported and exported goods, but transportation of people too.
ARI ARIEL: Most of the time, the story is told starting with Magic Carpet, because that's the big migration. But it's really a much older story.
MANYA: That’s Ari Ariel, a Middle East historian at the University of Iowa who focuses on Jewish communities in the Arab world and Mizrahi communities, those who immigrated from Arab countries to Israel and elsewhere in the Diaspora.
His own family left Yemen for Israel in the 1930s. Professor Ariel has spent the last decade trying to piece together that lineage and the history of Yemeni Jews. He notes that between 1872 and 1881, Ottomans retook parts of Yemen where they had previously ruled centuries before. They also ruled over Palestine.
But that wasn’t the only significant transition. In fact, just in the span of five decades leading up to 1922, monumental transitions unfolded. The Ottoman Empire fell apart. Yemen became independent, both Jewish and Arab national movements arose, and the British, who obtained a mandate over Palestine in 1922, expressed support for a Jewish national home – Israel.
ARI: So, there are big economic changes. More and more imported goods start to enter Yemen, and Yemeni Jews, who are craftsmen, largely, and small-scale merchants, really can't compete. So, you have documents complaining about the price of imported shoes and other kinds of imported things.
So, in 1911, the Zionist movement, for the first time sends an emissary to Yemen, because they want Yemeni Jews to move to Palestine. And here, there's also an economic factor. For the Jewish nation to redeem itself, Jews have to fulfill all economic roles.
What that means is they really want Jewish farmers. So, they send a guy named Shmuel Yavnieli. He goes and he walks, he goes around to different villages. It's kind of an intrigue story. He goes from village to village trying to get Yemeni Jews to move.
When he writes back to Jerusalem, he makes it pretty clear, the only Jews who he thinks he's going to be able to get to move to Palestine are the ones who aren't doing so well economically. And that if the Zionist movement agrees to pay for, say, their transportation or housing, or things of that nature, that they may move, and he is successful at doing that.
From my perspective, as a historian, that's important, too, because from that point, pretty much most Yemeni Jews who leave Yemen are going to Palestine. That's not true initially. So in the earlier periods, you have lots of Yemeni Jews going to East Africa, to India, to Egypt, a small number to the U.S., actually. So you get these movements. But once it's directed by a state, or I guess, a state like structure, in the case of the Zionist movement, at this point, the flow becomes much clearer to Palestine.
MANYA: The Tzubari family’s initial departure from Yemen – aunts, uncles, cousins – is part of that larger story of migration. But Shahar’s grandparents came amid the events of the mid-20th Century that sparked the most significant exodus. Within a three-month period, nearly 50,000 Yemeni Jews, including Shahar’s grandparents and great grandparents, poured out of Yemen and made Israel their new home. This is their story as told to me by Shahar and his father Ze’ev Tzubari.
Ze’ev Tzubari’s parents were born in southwestern Yemen. For generations they had been dairy farmers. Before they left in 1949 through Operation Magic Carpet, they lived in Ta'iz, once known as the nation’s cultural capital.
ZE’EV AND BENNY, TRANSLATOR: [speaking Hebrew]:
ZE’EV: In Yemen?
BENNY: Yes, you remember what they did?
ZE’EV: They had, what I remember, goats, cattle, they had cattle.
BENNY: In Ta’iz?
ZE’EV: In Ta’iz, there, we had cattle.]
MANYA: Ze’ev spoke to me in Hebrew, and a family friend, Benny Gamlieli, translated. Here’s Benny.
BENNY: By the way, my parents as well came through this project by Alaska [Airlines] and brought, as I said, over 50,000-55,000 Jewish people from Yemen came through this project. You know this Aliyah, that we call the Magic Carpet.
MANYA: Operation Magic Carpet was the nickname for a joint venture of the Israeli government, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency, to transport Jews from Yemen to Israel. Its official name was Operation Kanfei Nesharim, which, translated from Hebrew means “On the Wings of Eagles”, referring to the passage in Exodus: “how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to me…”
BENNY: So during thousands of years, the Jewish people used to dream, that the Messiah will come, to go to Israel, to go to the Holy Land, to see the city of Jerusalem. It was a dream during thousands of years.
MANYA: There are a number of theories about why the exodus from Yemen took place at this moment in time and the circumstances surrounding it. Ze’ev’s translator, Benny, said Jews and Muslims lived side by side. But being Jewish wasn’t easy. Since the seventh century, Jews in Yemen were considered second class, which varied in meaning from ruler to ruler. Since 1910, the imam of Yemen had an agreement with the Ottomans to take care of the Jews.
But that did not prevent the Yemeni government from imposing heavy taxes or applying an even more troubling interpretation. Known as the Orphan’s Decree, Jewish children under the age of 12 who lost a parent could be handed over to a Muslim family and converted to Islam – ostensibly for their protection.
In 1924, the King of Yemen restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Then, in November 1947, after the Holocaust sent a wave of European Jewish immigrants seeking refuge in their biblical homeland, the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish state.
Days later, rioters targeted Jewish homes and businesses in Aden. That pogrom killed an estimated 82 Jews. Historians debate what role that pogrom played but because the migration had been building up to this point, Professor Ariel does not believe anti-Jewish violence was a driving force behind what came next.
In 1948, the King of Yemen, the imam, opened the window for three months for Jews to leave under two conditions: leave everything behind, and teach the Yemeni Muslims your trades in order to maintain the economy.
With only three months, Jews seized the opportunity.
ARI: It's not entirely clear why he gives permission at that point. But there are different stories. One is that maybe a Yemeni Rabbi tells him a story about a dream, that this is kind of fate and that Yemeni Jews are supposed to . . . because the Imami its legitimacy is religious, and it understands these kinds of movements. So, the idea of a Messianic movement is kind of appealing to the Muslim side of this as well, in a sense.
There's another story that he's paid. There's some sort of element of bribe because people are given money for the number of Jews that leave Yemen.
MANYA: But that moment was also a time of political strife in Yemen that – as most times of political strife do – threatened the welfare of the Jewish community. After the riots in Aden, Jews already had good reason to worry.
Then in 1948, the imam of Yemen, who had agreed to take care of the Jews, was assassinated. If Jews saw their fortunes aligned with the imam, now they had even more reason for concern.
ARI: It's about a moment of political instability and about the changing nature of government and society in Yemen, which pushes some Jews to leave because they've been so aligned with the imam.
MANYA: Jews came from hundreds of towns and villages throughout Yemen, some walking for weeks and months to reach Aden, where between June 1949 and September 1950 more than 380 flights took off for Tel Aviv. Those Kanfei Nesharim, eagles’ wings, were provided by Alaska Airlines.
BENNY: Alaska Airlines was the only company who agreed to do the journey. And you know what they did to absorb as much as they can in one plane? They took off all the seats and they filled them like sardines.
MANYA: For the harrowing mission, the airline stationed flight and maintenance crews throughout the Middle East and outfitted newly acquired war-surplus twin-engine planes, with extra fuel tanks to guarantee a non-stop 3,000-mile flight.
British officials warned pilots that if they had to stop along the way, those angry about the establishment of Israel, would surely kill the passengers and crew. To reassure the Yemeni passengers boarding the one-way flights from Aden to Tel Aviv, the airline painted the outstretched wings of an eagle above each airplane hatch. Planes were shot at, the airport in Tel Aviv was bombed. But miraculously, no lives were lost.
BENNY: For three months it was a crazy situation. And the government cannot say, ‘Oh, we have no room for you.’ That's why they built tents.”
MANYA: Tents. A temporary tent city, or a ma’abara in Hebrew, was where Ze’ev’s parents and grandparents lived when they first arrived in Israel.
ZE’EV: [in Hebrew: Five meters by five meters, that in each corner of the tent was a family. Here’s a family, here’s a family, here’s a family . . .]
BENNY: Five meters by five meters one square. And in each tent, four different families, each corner of the tent was settled by a family.
MANYA: Ze’ev’s family shared a tent with other families from Yemen. That wasn’t always the case. Sometimes each corner would be occupied by families from four different countries. Another tent could have Olim Chadashim, the Hebrew term for new immigrants, from Romania, Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt.
BENNY: Impossible to describe that terrible situation, that years, the beginning of the State of Israel, of course, until the government, you know, start to build, to establish cities and to try to absorb as much as they can, Olim Chadashim, you know, Jewish from all over the world.
MANYA: In 1952, Ze’ev was born in one of those 5-meter-by-5-meter tents. But his father Natan did not know right away that Ze’ev had been born. He was already fighting for the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade, the troops that had defended the Jewish state from the Arab nations that attacked Israel as soon as it declared independence.
ZE’EV: My father was in the army. Yeah. He didn't know that I was born.
BENNY: He knew it later because he was busy in the army in one of the missions, one of his job, whatever, as a young fighter, so it took it took a few weeks, (ZE’EV: a few weeks) to find his father to let him know that ‘You’re lucky because the boy was born . . . now you have a son.’
That was the beginning of the war. It's funny to say the beginning and the end – no beginning and no end. War, all the time.
The minute when the Prime Minister David Ben Gurion declared about this young state of Israel, declared our independent country, at the same time – booming and shooting from the four different countries, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, attacked Israel. So we have 10 months of fighting, 24 hours a day.
So his father Natan, he went to the army and by the way, in the army, he didn't get money, let me tell you, but you know what, he got? Uniform and food. That's enough, I can survive. You know, you know what I mean? As long as they feed him, and bring him some uniform, clothes, thank God, everything is okay. Every second, day was, you know, problems, shooting, whatever along the border. So, we have to protect the young country that starts to build itself.
MANYA: Natan returned after the birth of his son. The government moved the families to cabins where Ze’ev’s sister was born, and eventually to an apartment where his younger brother was born and raised.
Natan connected with an older brother who had come a decade earlier and found work building roads and planting trees – literally laying the foundation for and cultivating the nation of Israel.
ZE’EV: Ok, so after that we [in Hebrew: . . . good, let’s speak in Hebrew. We studied at the schools, and my mother would always say ‘I work like a donkey for you, only so you should learn and exceed your parents.’ She used to work for an Ashkenazi family, they owned a pharmacy . . . Yes.]
MANYA: His mother found a job working as a nanny for the family of an Ashkenazi pharmacist.
BENNY: She found, his mother, the way they treat the children, how much they spend, because they have money. And it's mainly for education, mainly for studies. Because of the study. She said, ‘I'll do my best for my children as well.’
MANYA: While progress has been made in closing the education and income gap between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in Israel, it was difficult from the start. At that time, many Ashkenazim, Jews from Europe, had more financial resources and they were well-educated. Meanwhile, Mizrahim, including Jews from Yemen, left everything behind and did not have the same level of education.
But Ze’ev’s mother saw no reason why her family could not follow the same path as the Ashkenazi family for whom she worked. She and Natan set out to forge a bright future for their children.
BENNY: And she said, she talked to her children. And she said ‘Listen guys, we are poor people. But I work 24 hours a day just because of one reason. I want you to study. I want you to be well-educated. I'll do my best. I sacrificed my life for you, for the three of you, and your father as well.’ So, their parents work, as I said, so hard to earn money to promise them a good education.
And she found, because she learned from the Ashkenazi family, she said, why not to do the same for my children and that's why he describes the very hard difficult situation at that time, that how many hours a day they miss their mother because she was out working trying to get more money to promise them a good education in Tel Aviv at that time.
MANYA: Ze’ev understood and appreciated what his mother and father provided and did what they asked of him. He studied and took care of his brother and sister while his parents worked. At the age of 16, he entered a special military academy in Haifa, then, like his father Natan, served his time in the Israeli Defense Forces.
When he got out, he found a job working for a utility company on the Sinai Peninsula, which at that time, prior to the Israeli Egyptian peace treaty, was under Israeli control.
BENNY: The peninsula of Sinai, it's a huge area, it's a desert, but with a beautiful golden seashore from Eilat to Sharm El Sheikh. 250 kilometers, which is like, 150-60 miles length to the south, and the southern city of that peninsula, called Sharm El Sheikh.
And a lot of young people went there, mixed with the Bedouins, to find a job and he earned a lot of money because as long as you work far away from the center, from the country, you have a chance to earn much more. So let's say, a double salary a month. Gave him a chance to help his family in southern Tel Aviv and the old place that he used to live, his parents.
MANYA: But in addition to earning money to send back to his family, Ze’ev also took advantage of that beautiful golden seashore and took up a hobby – windsurfing. He married an Ashkenazi woman, the daughter of a German businessman who left Germany before the Holocaust.
Instead of returning to the HaTikva neighborhood, what was then a high crime area in Tel Aviv, Ze’ev and his wife moved to Eilat and when he became a father, Ze’ev took Shahar and his sister Tal to the shore of the Red Sea every day in hopes they too would fall in love with the ocean. And they did.
SHAHAR: I started windsurfing as well at the age of 6-7. Basically, she was windsurfing for fun as I was windsurfing for fun. And when I got to the age where I had to decide, I decided to go for a special athlete program in the army, because I was good. And I wanted to go to the Olympics, and I wanted to continue with the sport.
MANYA: Because Shahar grew up in Eilat, away from where his father’s family remained, his exposure to Yemeni customs and culture was limited.
SHAHAR: So I kind of knew the roots of my father. And every time we went there, we went to the market, and I saw my cousins, and they were going to the synagogue with my grandparents. And we did the kiddush, and eating Yemeni food and connecting more to the roots of the Yemen side of my family, and hearing the stories and sharing the stories. But in a way, I was a bit disconnected, because I was living in Eilat.
So, like, less connected to the Yemen side, but my family name Tzubari and the roots. Also my appearance, it's more Yemeni. So when I became more known, the connection with the Yemen side became stronger and stronger.
MANYA: Shahar lost his grandparents this past year. But before they passed away, he made a point to listen to their stories.
SHAHAR: We tried to observe many of the history and their story about coming to Israel. And it's fascinating that when they were young, at the age of 10, or 12, they walked so many miles to come here, because they had hope. They didn't know what to expect, but they had hope. That they come here, and everything will be better.
MANYA: He appreciates how far the family has come since his grandparents and great-grandparents arrived in Israel and lived in that 5-meter by 5-meter tent.
SHAHAR: Basically, it's a funny story. Because where my father was born and raised, or where my grandparents first lived when they came to Israel, now it's the most expensive place in Tel Aviv. And the parents of my wife are living in this neighborhood, in the penthouse.
MANYA: Shahar also recognizes the role he plays in his family’s and nation’s progress, and how intertwined the history of his family is with the future of the Jewish nation. He realizes now that protecting Israel, defending the Jewish state, is part of growing up Israeli. It’s not the diversion he once resented.
SHAHAR: So when I was young, I felt like it's kind of stalking me. But now I'm older, and I have athletes, which are also soldiers, because now I'm a coach, and I see all the positive things, because sometimes athletes think that they are the center of the world. And it's not so true because they are living in a system, doesn't matter which system it is– it’s the Federation, it’s the Olympic committee. You always have a boss, and you're always in a system.
And I think that the journey that I pass in the IDF, it's a good journey to build yourself and realizing and taking everything out there . . . and realizing that, okay, I might be the best athlete in the world, but I still have responsibilities. So it gave me a lot of tools and abilities for life.
MANYA: In March 2021, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels deported the last three Jewish families living in Yemen, marking the end of that country’s 2,600-year-old Jewish community within its borders. I asked Shahar if he would ever want to go to Yemen to trace his family’s footsteps, once it’s safe for Jews and Israelis.
SHAHAR: For me, it's a pity that, of course, this is life and politics, but I can't go there because I'm an Israeli, and I have an Israeli passport. And if I had another passport, I could go … Yeah, it’s a shame.
I have this thing that I really want to visit all the Arab countries, not only Yemen, because as an Israeli, learning about the conflict . . . in the end, I think that all the Arab nations, we are very similar. And we are neighbors, and you know, as neighbors, we have the same temperament. And we share many of the values of the family, and being together. For me, I think being able to visit those places, it's a dream come true.
MANYA: Just as military service and family history have shaped Shahar, windsurfing has given him perspective too. The waters of Eilat can be soothing, serene, utterly breathtaking. But storms churn up fierce waves for which the strongest surfer is no match. And that’s when Shahar really likes to be on the water. A fearless determination that goes back generations.
[Video clip from after the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics Windsurfing RS:X event]
Moments after he sailed across the finish line in Beijing and claimed that bronze medal, Shahar plunged into the water. A reporter shoved a cell phone into his hand to film Shahar sharing the victory with his family back in Israel.
Nearly 60 years later, another leg of the journey from Ta’iz was complete, another dream fulfilled.
SHAHAR: If you think about it … just to, one day, to wake up, take all your belongings and move. It's a brave act. In hard times, or not even in hard times, just sometimes when I do represent my country as an athlete, so I think about those moments, and it makes me feel pride that my grandparents or my family look at me and say ‘OK, it was worth it.’
MANYA: Yemeni Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who in the last century left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations. Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.
Does your family have roots in North Africa or the Middle East? One of the goals of this series is to make sure we gather these stories before they are lost. Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn't have the answers to my questions because they had never asked. That's why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to find more of these stories.
Call The Forgotten Exodus hotline. Tell us where your family is from and something you'd like for our listeners to know such as how you've tried to keep the traditions and memories alive. Call 212.891-1336 and leave a message of 2 minutes or less. Be sure to leave your name and where you live now. You can also send an email to theforgottenexodus@ajc.org and we'll be in touch.
Many thanks to Shahar and his father Ze’ev for sharing their family’s story. And thank you to Benny Gamlieli for translating Ze’ev from Hebrew.
Atara Lakritz is our producer, CucHuong Do is our production manager. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Sean Savage, Ian Kaplan, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible. And extra special thanks to David Harris, who has been a constant champion for making sure these stories do not remain untold.
You can subscribe to The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more at AJC.org/theforgottenexodus.
The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC.
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