Lyn Julius
Shlomo Hillel and the Aliyah from Iraq
Summary
Shlomo Hillel died in Israel on the 8th of February 2021. He was aged 97. He was many things during his long life—undercover agent, kibbutznik, member of Knesset, government minister, ambassador, but his life’s passion was to help ingather Jews from the diaspora to Israel no matter how challenging or illegal. He may not be widely known outside the Iraqi Jewish world, but he will always be remembered for his part in the mass aliyah, or immigration, to Israel of the Iraqi Jews.
Lyn Julius
Lyn Julius was born in the UK and educated at the French Lycée in London and the University of Sussex. The daughter of Jewish refugees from Iraq, she is a journalist and founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (www.harif.org). Lyn blogs daily at Point of No Return (www.jewishrefugees.org.uk). Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Huffington Post, Jewish News, and Jerusalem Post. She has a regular column in the Times of Israel and JNS News. Her book Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight has been translated in to Norwegian, Portuguese and Arabic, and a Hebrew version is in progress.
Well, 95% of the Jews actually left for Israel in 1950, 1951 and only 5,000 Jews stayed behind. And actually things did improve for that community. In fact, they were probably those who had most to lose by leaving. Perhaps they were the wealthier ones. In the mid ‘50s conditions were actually quite good. And in fact, they were able to come and go from Iraq. And you know, obviously the people who’d gone to Israel were rather resentful of those who’d stayed on in Iraq, because things were very bad in Israel. There was rationing. A lot of the refugees had to stay in tents or ma'abarot. But everything changed for the 5,000 who did remain in Iraq in 1958 when the king was actually beheaded in a coup. And in fact, the whole government was killed. Nuri Said’s body was dragged through the streets of Baghdad and it was absolutely terrible, a very bloody coup. And some Iraqi Jews left at that point. Others decided to stay on. But by the 1960s, they were actually not able to leave. And this was the case until in fact 1970 when as I mentioned, about 2,000 Jews did, were smuggled illegally through the north of Iraq, through Kurdistan. And today there are three Jews left in the whole country.
That’s a very good question, Ellie. I think the answer is at the time there were several communities at risk, and in fact at the same time as the Iraqi Jews arrived in the early 1950s, the Romanian Jews were at risk. And in fact, you found that Iraqis and Romanians, you know, were together in the same refugee camps, the same ma'abarot in Israel. So there was always, you know, there were other communities that were in danger.
Well, the last Jew, there were still three Jews there. You know, after the 2,000 Jews were smuggled out in 1970, there remained about a few hundred. Then when the Americans invaded in 2003, they found about 36 Jews there. And so the numbers kept dwindling and dwindling until now, you know, I mean you could say the community is extinct.