Bagsdad: Jewish heritage shines - Rabbi Isaac's grave is being restored!

Bagsdad: Jewish heritage shines - Rabbi Isaac's grave is being restored!

Baghdad, Irak - In Baghdad, an important piece of Jewish history is restored: the shrine of the Rabbi Isaac Gaon, an important place of the Jewish heritage in Iraq, is currently being recovered. The work is part of a project of the small, but committed Jewish community of the country, which tries to maintain their cultural sites. Until recently, the shrine was in a deplorable condition, overloaded with garbage, with a rusted door and broken windows. The restoration includes noble marble caches and a large tombstone on which the name of the rabbi and his death year, 688, are engraved. Behind the stone there is also a silver menora, a symbol of the Jewish faith that underlines the importance of the place. In the past, the site was literally a garbage dump, and the project is financed by the Jewish community with an estimated cost of $ 150,000, such as Al Jazera reported.

Khalida Elyahu, the chairwoman of the Jewish Community in Iraq, emphasized that increased support from the Iraqi authorities is necessary to restore further neglected sites. The Jewish community of Iraq has decreased significantly and today only counts a few members. In fact, there is only a functioning synagogue in Baghdad, but without rabbi.

The history of the Jewish community in Iraq

Jewish history in Iraq is deeply rooted and extends into the Babylonian captivity in 586 BC. BC when Jews were dragged from the Kingdom of Juda by Nebuchadnezzar II. Babylonia, which was considered an intellectual center of Judaism, housed a flowering Jewish community for over a thousand years. One of the important personalities of this time was Rabbi Isaac himself, who acted as an important finance officer and possibly as head of a Jewish academy. However, his religious views or details about his life are less well known, which makes his figure a mystery in historiography.

In the heyday under the Ottoman Empire, Jews made up about 40 percent of the population of Baghdad. However, the Situation changed dramatically after the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Over 120,000 Jews lived in Iraq at the time, but almost all fled as a result of persecution and conflicts in the following decades. In particular, the Farhud pogrom in 1941 and discriminatory measures against the Jewish population meant that most Jews left their fortune behind and went into exile. Today fewer than 100 Jews live in Iraq, and the Jewish community has shrunk, as wikipedia documented.

The last rabbi of Baghdad, Rabbi Emad Levy, recently described his life as a form of "prison being" because of his fear of violence. In view of the serious location, there are only about 50 synagogues and Jewish sites in Iraq, most of which are used in ruins or as storage rooms. Nevertheless, there is hope for a renaissance of the Jewish heritage in Iraq, not least thanks to the efforts of committed parishioners such as Elyahu.