The recording took place at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda
In…(19)62, the revolution happened, which was between…nationalists and Baathists. They were at the same time. And then…they were, in truth, the revolution happened…Abdul Salam Arif, who was Abdul Karim Qasim’s friend in (19)58 , but he flipped on (betrayed) him. They were…Nasserist nationalists.
A few months later he also, Abdul Salam Arif revolted against the Baathists and he became…on the side of the nationalists. But the period of persecution against the Jews had started.
What, for example? They made us all come and present ourselves…identity…which said our nationality was revoked. And they issued us with a yellow identity (document). Just the Jews.
Jews then couldn’t travel between (19)63 and (19)64, they couldn’t travel. Travel was forbidden from them. And all the things that…the restrictions from before were reintroduced as they were.
But…nobody was killed. Just restrictions and many things, also in university and so on.
In (19)67, the Six Day War happened. The situation became very bad for Jews. They (the government) started arresting a lot, putting them in jail. They cut their phone lines from their homes. They revoked their rights to go to university. They expelled them from their jobs, expelled from the social clubs…things started becoming worse and worse.
In )19(68, the revolution of the Baathists happened and things started becoming much worse. From the start of (19)68 many from Basra were arrested. They did a trial in…January. And they threw them (in jail) on account of being spies for Israel and arrested them. They did a sham trial and arrested nine-ten of the Jews and hung their corpses in Tahrir Square.
After that many others were killed. They started taking them from houses and not returning them…corpses. Between (19)69 and (19)75/73 more than around fifty people were killed from among the Jews. Either executions or they killed them in their homes, or took them and didn’t bring them back. So that period was worse…the worst period for the Jews living in that time.
But we didn’t have any opportunity to leave, to get away from this topic (persecution in Iraq). In (19)70, in the beginning of (19)70, there was…all the years beforehand, a war between the Kurds and the central sultanate, the government. A kind of […] happened, and…the war operations stopped, and northern Iraq opened.
So one, two started leaving by way of the north and escaping to Iran. And in this way, they started encouraging the masses to escape by way of the Kurds in the north, and from there to Iran. And from Iran, most came to Israel or went to other places like America, or Canada, England and such if they had, for example, a visa.
So during (19)70-71, about 70 percent of the remaining Jews, who were…we were about 3,000 people, if you go back in history…most of the Jews, 95%, left in (19)51 and (19)50. So about…125,000 of the 135,000 who were there, left in (19)51 and (19)50. So that 10,000…some of them say between 8,000 and 12(000)…let’s say approximately 9,000 or 8,000.
What we know is that bit by bit their number decreased. There were…we had statistics in (19)57, there were 5,000 people. Between (19)57 and (19)64, when the history was basically closed, […] 3,500. So we were between 3,000 and 3,500 in (19)70 when they started escaping by way of the north. In the beginning of (19)75, there remained about 400 people in Iraq. And bit by bit they also left. In 2003, there were approximately 50 people. Now there are only three Jews.