50 Dinars

Digital collage and photographs

2024

The Jewish community existed in Iraq for 2,700 years, when they were first brought in captivity from Jerusalem after the destruction of the 1st Temple by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE.  Psalm 137 describes the Israelites’ abject sorrow and anger towards their imperial Babylonian captors, asking them to sing songs from Zion.  A verse from Psalm 137 spans the top of the poster translating to, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept remembering Zion.”  Less than 100 years later, King Cyrus of Persia issues a decree allowing the the Jews to return to Zion and rebuild their Temple.  Many stay in Babylon, while Ezra, from a priestly family, leads a group to return to Jerusalem.

2,500 years later, In 1951, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah airlifted around 120,000 Jews from Iraq to Israel, as their situation had deteriorated greatly, facing discrimination, especially following Baghdad’s pogrom, The Farhud, in 1941. Upon their mass exodus, Jewish property would be confiscated and they would be allowed to take only 50 Dinars in currency, and a single suitcase, leaving the community pauperized.  For their first several years in the struggling nascent modern state, they would live in ma’abarot, transit camps, in tents with no running water.

The photo on the lower left corner was taken right after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when Israel would reunite what would be known as “East Jerusalem,” featuring three generations of Babylonian Jewish women, my great-grandmother Lulu, aunts and cousin, marking their first visit to the Western Wall, the same site that was destroyed by their Babylonian captors all those years ago.  After living in Israel for 16 years, they had never been.  From 1948 until 1967, Jews were not permitted to visit their holy sites in the Old City, as it was illegal under the Jordanian occupation.  The section of bricks in the photo above them are from their house in Basra, Iraq, never to be seen again.

The photo on the lower right corner is the last time my grandfather would see the Tomb of Ezra ,where his parents Moshe and Lulu Cohen (in the photo on the left) would take him and his siblings every Shavuot, as Iraqi Jews had a tradition of visiting the tombs of the Prophets in Iraq.  Today, the Tomb of Ezra has no Jewish visitors and is essentially only a mosque and a pilgrimage site for Muslims.  Ironic since the Tomb is built for a man who led the return of the Jews to rebuild the Jerusalem community and the Temple in their indigenous homeland of Israel.

The belly dancer, is from a party held after my Brit Milah, or bris, thrown by my grandparents, celebrating new Jewish life in true Middle-Eastern fashion.  Millenia of Jewish history and a refusal to remain victims but continue onward, from Jerusalem to Babylon, back to Jerusalem, and then for some of us, what would symbolize a different Zion in America, but never to replace the original, where our hearts remain.