Category: Iraq

A family history on the Jews of Kurdistan (sic)

By SHELDON KIRSHNER, Staff Reporter

Wednesday, 08 April 2009

Walter Fischel, an American academic, visited the Jews of Kurdistan in the 1940s. “Such Jews,” he exclaimed with a sense of wonder. “Men virile and wild-looking. Women wearing embroidered turbans, earrings, bracelets, even ring-noses, and with symbols tattooed into their faces…”

Roughly 25,000 Jews lived in Kurdistan back then, 18,000 in Iraq and the rest in Iran, Syria and Turkey.

Largely illiterate but famous as gifted storytellers and speaking the ancient language of Aramaic, Kurdish Jews were found in some 200 Muslim villages and towns throughout the Middle East on the eve of Israel’s establishment.

Ariel Sabar, an American journalist, has more than a passing knowledge of this exotic Jewish community, most of whose members immigrated to Israel in the early 1950s.

Sabar, in My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin Books), produces a family history and a portrait of Kurdish Jews in this richly documented volume.

As the title suggests, the book turns on his father, Yona, a linguist, researcher and professor of Hebrew at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Born in the northern Iraqi town of Zakho, in the heart of Iraq’s Kurdish region, but raised in Israel, Yona Sabar has published more than 90 monographs and two books on Aramaic – a nearly extinct language today – and the folklore of Kurdish Jews.

Despite his father’s international reputation as a scholar, Sabar did not appreciate his accomplishments and was even ashamed of him.

“I swore horribly in front of him, ridiculed him behind his back and took pains to avoid him, to be nothing like him,” he readily admits.

Sabar, who was born in Los Angeles, wanted to be part of what he describes as “the California mainstream,” and since his father rejected that ethos, father and son, like oil and water, did not mix.

“When we collided, it wasn’t pretty,” he writes in this frank and pungent memoir. “I threw tantrums and unleashed hailstorms of four-letter words. He stewed privately over how any son could behave that way toward his father, then consoled himself with the hypothesis that this was how children were in America.”

The cultural clash he alludes to forms but a segment of the core of My Father’s Paradise. In the final pages, Sabar comes to terms with him as he reclaims his heritage and visits Zakho.

The Jews of Zakho lived among 26,000 Kurdish Muslims and were concentrated in the mahala Juheeya, the oldest district, on an island on the Habur River. “Their mud-brick houses lined narrow alleys that zigzagged down to the river,” Sabar writes.

Since they were so isolated, they spoke Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Middle East until Arab armies from Arabia conquered Mesopotamia in the 17th century.

By all accounts, Jews and Kurds lived in harmony until Israel’s creation in 1948. To the Jews of Zakho, Sabar observes, Zionism represented, among other things, hopes for a better life and unease over the breakdown of Jewish-Muslim relations.

The first Jews to make aliyah were the have-nots – the small peddlers, the porters, the beggars. “Most carried only the rags on their backs and perhaps a single clay bowl,” says Sabar.

Once Sabar’s family was ready to leave in 1951, the Iraqi government passed a law that cancelled the citizenship and froze all the assets and property of departing Jews.

Sabar’s father was 13 years old when he and his parents and siblings left the country of their ancestors.

“The end arrived suddenly,” Sabar writes. “A line of motor coaches rolled into town early one April morning, and word went out that the time had come. Under a sky still full of stars, Jewish families, anxious and bleary, dragged suitcases and children out front doors and into cramped alleys that led to the main street.”

Hundreds of Kurds bid farewell to their Jewish neighbours, but the atmosphere was very different in Baghdad. “At the airport, angry mobs pressed against the barricades, hurling curses.”

Life was hard for Sabar’s family in Jerusalem, particularly for his grandmother: “Her relatives bought her a washing machine and stove, but the controls confounded her… She trudged off to night classes to learn Hebrew, but quit in frustration after two years, scarcely able to distinguish the letters of the alphabet. She had never learned to read or write her mother tongue. Why did people think she could master a second language?”

Sabar’s father, Yona, was more adaptable. A good student, he graduated from the Hebrew University with a BA in Hebrew and Arabic. Nevertheless, he felt that Kurdish Jews were patronized by the Ashkenazi elite, and he wondered whether he could pursue a scholarly career in Israel.

He was thus only too pleased to accept a scholarship from Yale University, where he plumbed the depths of Aramaic and met his wife.

In 1972, a year before Sabar was born, he was offered a position at the University of California. And there he thrived.

“The Promised Land had been a disappointment,” Sabar writes in a reference to Israel. “It had broken his father and his grandfather. It had humiliated and infantilized his mother. A generation of Kurdish Jews had been spit on by a society that should have known better.”

Yona Sabar’s success as an up-and-coming scholar did not spoil him, but his plain, unpretentious mien, his cheap clothes and his malapropisms in English alienated his insecure son.

“I didn’t know it as a boy, but he was almost single-handedly turning the field of Neo-Aramaic from a marginal curiosity to one commanding serious and growing attention at major academic conferences,” Sabar adds.

After Sabar himself became a father, he learned to value his father and his achievements and quit his job so that he could explore the lost world of Iraqi Kurdish Jews on a spiritual journey.

Having convinced his father to accompany him, the pair set off. They arrived in Zakho after Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was unseated by the United States and its allies.

To Sabar, the purpose of the trip was crystal clear: “We could repair our relationship over cups of cardamom tea at cafés by the Habur River. We could walk together through the streets of the old Jewish neighbourhood, summoning the spirits of our ancestors… He would at last see me for the better son I had become.”

And so, as Sabar relates in this intriguing book, father and son finally bonded.

Source: www.cjnews.com, 08 April 2009

April 24, 2009
Enduring voices [Editor’s Column]

Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief
April 9, 2009

I was exchanging e-mails recently with a reader about a column I wrote defending endogamy — that is, marriage between two Jews. “A bigot is one strongly loyal to one’s own social group, yet irrationally and prejudicially intolerant or disdainful of others,” he wrote. “If this paper’s chief editor is not a bigot — as he hopes — after reading this [column], I’m left wondering what he thinks he is.”

I don’t think I am intolerant of anything, unless you count lactose.

But his question continues to nag at me: Why does any culture value its own transmission, and can I justify the Jewish obsession with continuity in an era of multiple identities and, the flip side, violent tribalism?

In my defense, I quoted the work of K. David Harrison, a linguist who studies dying languages. According to his Enduring Voices Project, “Nearly 80 percent of the world’s population speaks only one percent of its languages. When the last speaker of a language dies, the world loses the knowledge that was contained in that language.”

By extension, Judaism is a culture with a rich language — not just Hebrew or Yiddish but a language of ritual, of social norms, of worship, of behaviors that order its practitioners’ world — in short, a rich system of knowledge. To dedicate oneself to preserving that shows no disdain for other cultures. Consider: When colonial powers try to wipe away traces of an indigenous culture, we call it ethnic cleansing. When Jews seek other Jews in order to live as rich a Jewish life as possible, some call it bigotry.

Soon after this exchange I came upon Ariel Sabar’s beautiful new book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. Sabar’s father, Yona, is the world’s preeminent expert on Neo-Aramaic, the language he grew up speaking in the Jewish quarter of Zakho, a Kurdish market town in northern Iraq. The book traces Yona’s journey from Kurdistan to Israel to southern California, where he is a professor at UCLA.

The book is an American-born, journalist son’s attempt to reconnect with a father he once dismissed as an awkward, hopelessly uncool immigrant. But it is also a rumination on language and Jewish culture, and the ways, and worth, of trying to preserve both.

For perhaps 1,700 years and until the seventh-century rise of Arabic, Aramaic was to the Levant what English is to the modern world: its lingua franca. The language lives on in the Talmud, the Zohar, the traditional wedding ketuba, and other texts. You hear it in the Mourner’s Kaddish and the Kol Nidrei prayer chanted on Yom Kippur eve.

But “lives” is a relative term — Aramaic began disappearing as a living Jewish language with the immigration of Iraq’s small Kurdish-Jewish community to Israel in the 1950s. Like Yona Sabar, Kurdish Jews made a lightning leap from the 18th century to the 20th, and the language barely made the crossing.

Ariel Sabar recreates the lost Jewish world of Zakho, where his hard-working grandparents thrived as dyers and textile merchants. Israel is a shock, and Yona’s parents and grandfather are adrift in the ramshackle tent cities and slums built to accommodate the flood of new immigrants. As Kurds, they occupy perhaps the lowest rung on Israel’s strict ladder of ethnic hierarchy. (One of the book’s heroes is Itzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president, an Ashkenazi Jew who championed the study and preservation of “Oriental” Jewish cultures.)

Out of this world Yona emerges as an unlikely scholar at Hebrew University with a rare distinction: fluency in a language that other scholars know only from the synagogue and dusty manuscripts. He soon lands at Yale and eventually becomes a lionized academic and teacher in Los Angeles. Writes Ariel: “Teaching Aramaic in America, I came to see, was how he sang God’s song in a strange land.”

Ariel, meanwhile, grows up a typical California kid, embarrassed by his father’s eccentricities and distant from his plucked Jewish roots. Ariel marries a non-Jewish woman and, while he pledges to raise their son as a Jew, disappoints the family by refusing to have the boy circumcised.

And here a reader is tempted to cluck his tongue and lament the withering of another branch on the Jewish family tree. But there is something cannier and more surprising going on in My Father’s Paradise. Ariel thinks long and hard about what we owe the past, and the future. He can’t live his father’s life, any more than his father can live in the dusty alleyways of Zakho. But he can tell the story of the Kurdish Jews, of Aramaic, and of his father’s heroic efforts to remember both.

Ariel Sabar made his choices; you and I might make others. His book suggests the various ways we can embrace diversity while adding new chapters to the cultures we inherit.

“Jews had carried a flame into the hills of Kurdistan, and they carried it out, still burning, 2,700 years later,” he writes. “My father touched another candle to it and brought it across continents. I didn’t want it to die with me. If my children ever feel adrift, unsure of who they are, I want that candle to still be burning.”

Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com

Source: www.njjewishnews.com, April 9, 2009

April 24, 2009
Statement on attack on the local Turkmeneli TV staffs: An outcome of unilateral domination in Kerkuk region

At 12 April 2009, the reporter (Mr. Umit Abdulla) and cameraman (Abbas Mohammed Hasan) of the local Turkmeneli TV (TERT) in Kerkuk city were organizing to report a book exhibition in the faculty of Law, Kerkuk University. They were attacked by a group of students from Kurdish student Union. Both the reporter and the cameraman were severely kicked and insulted and the camera was shattered. The Kurdish policemen and the Kurdish soldiers have only watched the offenses without interfering to stop the attackers.

This attack on the local Turkmeneli TV (TERT) staffs in Kerkuk demonstrates clearly the unbalanced oppressive attitude of the Kurdish authorities and even activists in Kerkuk region.

The oil rich Kerkuk region has been controlled since the 2003 occupation by Kurdish political parties supported by Peshmerga militias after occupation. Support of the occupier, resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Kurds and manipulating elections has made the Kurdish parties dominate the political and administration system in the province and remain the only decision-makers at exclusion of the original inhabitants: Turkmen, Arabs and Chaldo-Assyrians.

The security system is completely Kurdified, with the Iraqi army limited and the Kurdish militia distributed throughout the Kerkuk province. This has psychologically suppressed the non-Kurdish communities.

The appointment of thousands of Kurds and the enrichment of half a million incoming Kurds with large sums of money, and the granting of large numbers of government contracts to Kurdish contractors who employ Kurdish workers has shifted the economic balance in favour of the Kurdish inhabitants.

Having only recently left behind the tough guerrilla life, after decades in the harsh mountain regions, the Kurdish administration remains characterized by an authoritarian mentality, and lack of meritocracy. This has brought other burdens on the non-Kurdish inhabitants of Kerkuk in the Kurdified governmental offices.

The politicized Kurdish education and information systems have since 1991 taught the Kurdish generations that Kerkuk province is their fatherland which has been usurped by other nations. This increased the animosity of particularly Kurdish youth and convinced them to have the region at any cost.

Under such a biased condition:

ü When the Iraqi government was totally absent in Kerkuk, the non-Kurdish Kerkuk population survived thousands of dramatic human rights violations since the occupation in 2003.

ü The Kurdish political parties prevented the normalization in Kerkuk region and are now hindering the implementation of Article 23 which was, recently, enacted by the Iraqi parliament.

To convince the Kurdish political parties to change their unconstructive attitude in solving of Kerkuk problem, the international community should withhold their support, assistance and cooperation with the Kurdish authorities.

April 23, 2009
Statement on KRG expansion plans

Recent media reports about the political situation in northern Iraq expose an escalating conflict between the KRG and the Iraqi government. Several Kurdish leaders have expressed themselves in the media, going as far as saying there will be a war between Arabs and Kurds if the government continues to assert its authority in areas bordering the Kurdish dominated region.

In their comments Kurdish leaders fail to reflect the true nature of the areas bordering the KRG. In many of these so called disputed areas there are very few Kurds to be found. In the Nineveh plain for example the percentage of Kurds is at best 5 percent. Still, Kurdish leaders insist these areas be annexed to the KRG. In fact, the stretch of land bordering the KRG is mostly dominated by Turkmens and minorities such as Yezidies, Assyrians, Shabaks and Kakais. Instead of acknowledging this fact Kurdish political groups have launched a fierce campaign to describe minorities like Yezidies and Shabaks as Kurds, while carrying out different programs in an attempt to Kurdify these minority populations. While oppressed in the past, Iraq’s Kurdish political parties have grown to become themselves the new oppressors in Iraq- seen from the perspective of minorities.

The Kurdish Peshmerga forces were successful in the help against Saddam Hussein as part of the Iraqi liberation movement, but today we note with sadness the transformation of the Peshmerga into a militia which is used to enforce Kurdish expansion plans in non-Kurdish settlements against the will of the inhabitants of these areas. The Peshmerga is today used to instil fear in minority communities in order to ensure compliance with KRG expansion scheme. Any referendum on the future of so called disputed areas carried out under Peshmerga presence will not be free and fair.

From being a centre of stability the KRG has turned itself into the major source of instability in Iraq today. While most of Iraq is becoming increasingly secure for all Iraqis, including vulnerable non Muslim communities such as Assyrians and Yezidies, the expansion plans of the KRG threatens to destabilize Iraq, its neighbouring countries and severely affect the vulnerable minorities who live in the areas claimed by Kurdish groups.

The undersigned organizations call on the KRG to refrain from all acts of violence and withdraw its forces from all areas outside the KRG. We also call on Kurdish leaders to respect the rights of minorities, to stop interfering in their internal issues and to stop describing Yezidies and Shabaks as Kurds.

We hope the UN and the EU will hear the calls of Iraqi minorities for justice and respect of their rights in Iraq.

April 4, 2009

Assyria Council of Europe
Iraqi Turkmen Human Rights Research Foundation
Yezidi Human Rights Organization
Shabak Democratic Assembly

April 22, 2009
Iraqi Sunnis Turn to Politics and Renew Strength

Jehad Nga for The New York Times Sheik Abdullah Humedi Ajeel al-Yawar, seen with his Arabian horses, mobilized tribes in January to help Sunni Arabs gain control of Nineveh’s provincial council.

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and STEPHEN FARRELL Published: April 17, 2009

RABIA, Iraq – Sheik Abdullah Humedi Ajeel al-Yawar says there is no hidden reason why he still flies the three-starred flag of the old Iraqi government from the towers and guard posts of his ranch near the Syrian border.

Multimedia

Interactive Graphic

Iraq’s Fault Line

The New York Times

The Sunni political class has regained strength in Rabia.

It is a practical matter, he explained. The Iraqi government has yet to come up with a permanent new design, so why change the flags until they do?

But the sight of the flag and the confidence oozing from northern Iraq’s new Arab rulers send an unavoidable message: The old order has returned.

In the first years after the invasion, Sunni Arabs, the minority that long ran Iraq and who make up the majority in the northwest, mostly stayed away from politics. Many joined or supported the insurgency as the American-allied Kurds took power by default, giving them a political and military ascendance out of all proportion to their numbers in Nineveh Province.

But in the prelude to Nineveh’s provincial council elections in January, the tribes of the countryside led by the nationally ambitious Sheik Abdullah, and the urban Sunni Arab elite led by a polished businessman from Mosul whose brother already sits in Parliament, came back with a vengeance.

Riding a wave of resentment against the Kurds – and openly trumpeting influence with insurgents – they came to control Iraq’s second most populous province, thus overseeing not only regional decision-making, but also the coffers and patronage that go with it.

The return of this Sunni political class, some of them suspected of ties with Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, has come via the ballot box. But it prompts crucial questions: whether enfranchisement quickens ethnic healing, or whether the Sunni victors’ hard edge against the Kurds sets up future ethnic conflict.

So far it does not look good. At the first Nineveh provincial council meeting on Sunday, the victorious Sunni list, Al Hadba, with 19 of 37 seats, froze the second-place Kurdish list out of all official positions.

In return the Kurds, controlling 12 seats, threatened to boycott the council and even refuse to accept government services in areas where they dominate.

The dispute has implications far beyond the northern fault line. Three hundred miles south in Baghdad, the central government led by Iraq’s majority Shiite Arabs must decide which presents the biggest threat: the political ambitions of Mr. Hussein’s once ruling Sunni Arab minority, or the territorial ambitions of the Kurdish minority who claim that some northern areas administered by Baghdad should rightfully be added to their three provinces, two of which border Nineveh.

With national elections in less than 12 months, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has competing centrist and Islamist constituencies, must also decide how far he can take reconciliation with the former ruling Sunnis. Tension rose last week when one of Mr. Hussein’s former top deputies called for the toppling of Mr. Maliki’s government and for the outlawed Baath Party to retake control.

American officials here see reasons for optimism, that people who might have used violence in the past have turned to politics. Lt. Col. Guy Parmeter, commander of the American forces in the center of Nineveh, said he felt that fighting among Al Hadba and opposing groups was now less likely.

“I think that any conflict between them, they’re going to stay in the dialogue phase,” he said.

American officials acknowledged that Al Hadba was heavily influenced by the Baath Party. Three potential Hadba candidates were disqualified for past associations with the party, and the list’s leaders assert that former Baathists should be included in the government, while conceding that the party should remain banned. Sheik Abdullah points out that the tribes, the source of his support, pre-date the country, never mind one party.

Others, and not only Kurds, are wary of Nineveh’s new rulers. More than one Sunni Arab sheik accused Al Hadba of being in league with violent extremists.

“When the election was in Mosul four years ago, when somebody went to vote, the Islamic State of Iraq cut off his hand,” said Sheik Massoud Suleiman al-Sadoon, a tribal leader in Zumar. “Why this time did all the bad men say ‘Vote for Al Hadba?’ ”

In his office in Mosul, Al Hadba’s leader, Atheel al-Nujaifi – just before he was installed as Nineveh’s governor – spoke of a willingness to make overtures to insurgents, or as he put it, people “who oppose the political system and might commit some kind of violence,” although he drew the line at reaching out to religious extremists and criminals.

The lack of violence on election day, he explained, was not only a result of a security lockdown. His party contacted “influential people,” he said, to ensure that votes would be cast peacefully.

The Kurds mutter that Al Hadba’s proximity to extremists could render irrelevant its stated intentions to rule broadly. The party’s constituency, they allege, will force it to uphold the extreme elements of its leaders’ rhetoric.

“They have to balance their position between the reality of the Iraqi government, and to take orders from the darkness, from the groups who voted for them, who asked people to vote for them,” said Khasro Goran, the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Mosul.

Kurdish political leaders argue further that the alliance of Arab tribal and urbane elite is a marriage of convenience arising from their shared antipathy to the Kurds.

Mr. Nujaifi says that he has nothing against the Kurds and that he is not opposed to a federal solution to the question of Kurdish territorial claims. But he and Sheik Abdullah are unequivocal on one point: in an Arab-majority province with long-simmering land disputes, there is and will be no Kurdish land in Nineveh. But the coalition’s dynamic appears more complex than mere opposition to Kurdish expansionism.

The near uniformity of the Sunni Arab vote in the north also comes from a sense, shared across ragged desert towns and mountain villages, that Kurdish rule failed in Nineveh – badly.

Towns, only recently free of Sunni extremist control, have some of the worst rates of connection to the water network in Iraq, according to the United Nations. Electricity is lacking in most of the province, and unemployment is high.

The severity of the problems is one reason Americans say Al Hadba will be forced to put pragmatism, and political survival, over ideology.

Sheik Abdullah is frank about his readiness to further his already nascent ambitions into other provinces and dissolve Al Hadba if it does not deliver improvements. And Mr. Nujaifi’s campaign focused on installing competent administrators.

Iraqis from the north, those from Mosul in particular, have long had a reputation for hardened survival instincts.

“There isn’t a lot of change in Mosul society,” Mr. Nujaifi explained. “After we think that these problems are over, this society will return again as before. And that’s our image.”

Atheer Kakan contributed reporting.

April 20, 2009
Abbas visits Iraq’s Kurdish region

Mahmud Abbas (L) shakes hands with Massud Barzani

ARBIL, Iraq (AFP) — Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Monday met Kurdish regional government leader Massud Barzani in a visit aimed at cementing ties between the two largest stateless peoples in the Middle East. (!!)

“We did not need any invitation to visit this brotherly nation and we have felt for a long time that the doors were always open to us without even needing to make an appointment,” Abbas said at a joint news conference.

“The honourable president Barzani was not even told of our visit until 24 hours beforehand and he said ‘Ahlan wa Sahlan,’” Abbas said, using the common Arabic form of greeting.

Barzani for his part praised Abbas for being the first “president” to visit the autonomous region in northern Iraq.

“We are used to our Palestinian brothers always being in the forefront of aiding our people in the past and present,” he said. “This visit will cement the relationship between our two peoples with their similar suffering.

“Just as he is the first president to visit the region we expect and we hope that the Palestinian consulate will be the first consulate to open in Arbil.”

Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority, an entity created by the 1993 Oslo autonomy accords that governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Abbas’s forces were driven out of the Gaza Strip by the Islamist Hamas movement in June 2007.

Barzani is the president of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The Kurds, numbering between 25 and 35 million people, are concentrated in a region overlapping Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria and have never had a state.

Abbas’s trip came one week after he held talks with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, in Baghdad, in what was the first visit to Iraq by a Palestinian leader since the 2003-US led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

Saddam was a vocal patron of the Palestinians under Abbas’s predecessor Yasser Arafat but ruled the Kurds with an iron fist, brutally crushing Kurdish rebellions in the 1980s and killing an estimated 182,000 people.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved

Source: www.google.com/hostednews/afp, 13 April 2009

April 14, 2009