Chanukah in Baghdad

Adam L. Silverman, PhD*

COL Lang asked me to find a suitable Chanuka story to post here at SST to complement the Christmas stories that he and his sister post for us for the holidays.  When I came across the one below, I was pretty sure I find the right one for the SST community.  It originally appeared in the Miami Herald (but no link as I couldn't find it online) and is about a US Army JAG, the descendant of Iraqi Jews, celebrating Chanukah in the Palace in Baghdad in December 2003.  That unlikely turn of events is enough to invoke the Chanukah invocation nais gadol - a great miracle.  And that is what is at the heart of Chanuka, a minor, non-biblical holiday built around a small scale violent insurrection to retake the Jewish Temple and resanctify it: a great miracle, because the events the holiday commemorates should not have been able to happen.  So a Happy Chanukah, a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Happy and Healthy New Year to all of the SST community.  And to MAJ Carr, whose piece I found at Aish.com, where they reprinted it (and hopefully he won't mind that we're putting it up here for the SST community as it really should be seen outside of just Jewish American website readers), a Happy Chanukah to you and your family as well.

Elan S. Carr's Chanukah in Baghdad

(image of then 1LT Carr lighting a Chanikiyah (Chanukah Menorah) in the Palace)

An American Jewish soldier of Iraqi descent lights the Menorah in Saddam Hussein's palace.

Banu hoshekh legharesh -- "We have come to banish darkness." Thus begins a famous Chanukah song, and no phrase better encapsulates the holiday's deeper meanings. This year, as a United States soldier serving in Iraq, I and several of my colleagues lit a Chanukah lamp and uttered those words in a place that had never before heard them: the former presidential palace of Saddam Hussein, in the capital city of a new and free Iraq.

One is hard-pressed to imagine a holiday whose themes are more resonant with the events unfolding here: A spectacular military victory, the defeat of a despot, the re-sanctification of what had been desecrated. Truly, the banishment of darkness.

Chanukah commemorates the rededication of Jerusalem's Temple in 165 BCE. Israel was then ruled by Syria's Hellenist king, Antiochus IV, a brutal megalomaniac who gave himself the title Epiphanes -- "god manifested." In a campaign of merciless persecution, he murdered members of the priesthood, outlawed Jewish rituals, and desecrated the Holy Temple.

The priestly Maccabee family led a daring revolt and defeated the Hellenist armies. After recapturing the Temple, Jewish partisans rededicated the place by kindling its sacred Menorah. To this day, Jews celebrate the relighting of that ancient Menorah, to remember the victorious freedom fighters whose courage stemmed from an abiding faith that God will cause good to triumph over evil, and light to banish even the darkest of hours.

For too many years, the people of Iraq have suffered horrors that defy imagination. Like Antiochus, Saddam thought himself to be like a god, or at least like those demigods of Mesopotamian history, Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi, with whom his boundless vanity inclined him regularly to equate himself. "Epiphanes" indeed -- Saddam dispensed licentious pleasure and horrible pain, life and death, with the nonchalance of one who thought himself above humanity itself.

I myself have seen some of the evidence of his horrors, and I am sickened by them. I have met Iraqis who lost their closest relatives to Saddam's killing machines. I have walked the halls of the decadent monuments he built for himself while his people wasted away for want of food and freedom. I have visited Saddam's execution chambers at the notorious Abu Ghreib prison. I saw the ceiling hooks that were used to torture prisoners. I saw the prison's infamous "medical wing," used for human experimentation. And most shattering of all, I saw the desperate messages scratched on the walls of hideous cells next to the death chambers. Some of those messages appear to have been scribbled in excrement.

I shuddered as I imagined the suffering endured by the forgotten victims of that terrible place -- the excruciating physical pain, the agony over loved ones left behind, the devastating sounds of executions conducted only a few feet from their cells. I could almost hear the screams of torture and soft whimpers of despair echo along the walls' unforgiving concrete.

GRANDFATHER IN PRISON

Perhaps I am especially prone to feel empathy for Iraq's prisoners of conscience, for my grandfather was one of them. He and other leaders of the once large Iraqi Jewish community were arrested, paraded through the streets in leg irons, and summarily jailed. But my grandfather was comparatively fortunate, for he was imprisoned many years before Saddam took the country to new depths of depravity. And after serving the prison sentence given him, my grandfather was released.

Many of Saddam's prisoners were not so lucky. Many Iraqis unfortunate enough to be deemed ethnically or religiously undesirable, or who displayed the intolerable audacity of free thought, entered Saddam's prisons with the knowledge that they would never again see their loved ones. And in the twisted reality of the former Iraq, they may well have hoped never again to see their loved ones, for Saddam's regime was known to torture children in front of their parents. Whereas my grandfather was able to assuage his suffering by rejoining the people he loved most in this world, the victims of Saddam's apparatus of death could only console themselves by scrawling desperate messages on the walls of their cells.

LIGHT IN THE PALACE

It is the defeat of this sort of profanity that Chanukah celebrates. It was Antiochus' consummate ungodliness -- all the more so when contrasted with the sacred Temple worship that he prevented and defiled -- that the Jews succeeded in vanquishing. But what can be more ungodly, what more profane, than torture, mass murder, and genocide? Such evil had been a staple of life in Iraq. But not any more. We have come to banish darkness.This Chanukah in Baghdad, in a large and lavish building, the gentle glow of a Chanukah lamp shimmered throughout a cavernous room. One of the objects caught in its radiance is a gilded chair that used to serve as the tyrant's throne, and the palace in which it sits used to be the capital building of his reign of terror. Today, the chair is empty, and the palace houses the apparatus of Iraqi reconstruction.

As my colleagues and I remember the Maccabee bravery of yesteryear and the re-sanctification of the Temple, we pray also for the brave and indefatigable people of Iraq, who day by day are rekindling their flames of hope and re-sanctifying their great land. They are banishing the darkness, and we wish them Godspeed.

* Adam L. Silverman is the Culture and Foreign Language Advisor at the US Army War College (USAWC).  The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of USAWC and/or the US Army.

Comments

[William R. Cumming]

How many followers of the Islamic faith fought and died for the USA during the 9 years "WAR"?

[Charles I]

Ahhh, very mixed sentiments apropos of the death of Christoper Hitchens, who would surely cheer the freedom to light the Menorah in the absence of Saddam.

I join in that.

"But what can be more ungodly, what more profane, than torture, mass murder, and genocide?"

Isn't that the plot of the Old Testament itself?

[turcopolier]

Charles I

I am unaware of actual restrictions on Jewish religious observance in Iraq in Saddam's era. Someone will tell us. I went to Mass regularly in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War. pl

[Fred]

"We have come to banish darkness." My first thought upon reading this was I wonder if they feel that way on the other side of the check-points in Gaza and the West Bank? My second is that given the current make up of the Iraqi government the sentiments expressed were premature. Meanwhile at home ....

[Green Zone Cafe]

Several, you can look some of them up on the unofficial Arlington Cemetery website

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/jmahearn.htm

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/hsmkhan.htm

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ayman-taha.htm

[Green Zone Cafe]

I met MAJ Carr (he was a 1LT back then). He's a good guy with an interesting family history, from out of the 250,000 Jews that used to live in Baghdad. Ah, what that cosmopolitan city must have been like!

[Charles I]

Nor am I. Your personal example seems atypical on the face of it, remarkable.

But did the Pope officiate in Saddam's Palace in his presence? Or a Jew light the Menorah in the Palace with Saddam whilst swapping old Scud stories? What is remarkable? Simply struck by The-Butler-In-The-Abby angle of the celebration pictured above.

[Charles I]

For our Info

The Jews of Iraq
By Mitchell Bard

1948 Jewish population: 150,000
2004: Approximately 351
2008: Less than 10

. . . Only one synagogue continues to function in Iraq, “a crumbling buff-colored building tucked away in an alleyway” in Bataween, once Baghdad’s main Jewish neighborhood. According to the synagogue’s administrator, “there are few children to be bar-mitzvahed, or couples to be married. Jews can practice their religion but are not allowed to hold jobs in state enterprises or join the army.”8 The rabbi died in 1996 and none of the remaining Jews can perform the liturgy and only a couple know Hebrew. The last Jewish wedding was held in 1980.9

The Iraqi government has refurbished the tombs of Ezekiel the Prophet and Ezra the Scribe, which are also considered sacred by Muslims. Jonah the Prophet’s tomb has also been renovated. Saddam Hussein also assigned guards to protect the holy places during his reign. Each year, hundreds of Muslim pilgrims flock to the holy sites to pay hommage to these prophets.

In 2004, approximately 35 Jews were living in Baghdad, but by 2008, the once-thriving community of Jews living in the Iraqi capital has dwindled to below 10, not enough to hold a minyan (the requesite 10 men needed for most religious rituals), and a handful more in the Kurdish-controlled northern parts of Iraq.10 The community still lives in fear, scared even to publicize the exact numbers of Jews remaining in Baghdad, but the Jewish Agency estimates it at about seven. Most of those in Baghdad are elderly, poor and lacking basic needs such as clothing, medication and food, but some remaining are middle class, including two doctors. The one synagogue, the Meir Taweig Synagogue, was closed in 2003, after it became to dangerous to gather out in the open. Among the remaining Jews, one fearful man now in his early 40s describes himself as “the rabbi, slaughterer and one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Iraq.”11

Most traces of Jews living in Iraq are now gone, except for the Prat and Hidekel rivers, the Hebrew names for the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Baghdad’s Jewish quarter, in Taht al-Takia, no longer exists. The end of Saddam Hussein’s regime created hopes of an improvement in the living conditions of Jews, and the return of some of the émigrés. Some hope also existed for rapprochement with Israel. In reality, the instability and sectarian killings in Iraq made the dozen or so remaining Jews there the most vulnerable and terrified group in the country. Most Jews barely leave their homes at all for fear of being kidnapped or executed..12

Despite this life of seclusion and fear, the remaining Jews living in Baghdad simply say they are too old to leave."

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/iraqijews.html

wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Iraq

[turcopolier]

Charles I

"Your personal example seems atypical on the face of it, remarkable." There were churches open all over downtown Baghdad in 1987-88. Latin Catholic, Assyrian, Chaldean, Church of England, etc. The US defense attache was married in an Anglican church there to the daughter of an Argentinian diplomat. Pastors stood in front of their houses of worship to talk to parishioners after services. Charles, I thought you were moe impervious to propaganda than this. pl

[Charles I]

I acknowledge my Christian ignorance, perhaps the lack of oppression rendered your/their freedom unremarkable in this Chanukah story. I completely ignopred the good old wartime pre-sanction days.

More specifically I meant a foreigner during a war, and the story, again, was of an American Soldier celebrating nothing Christian in Saddam's palace post-ouster via a different war against that country. This is the angle that struck me, foreignness, and uniqueness of circumstance. Not may of us are Langs away at war.

My second post confirms I think the likely uniqueness of Chanukah at Saddam's.

Seven months of cottaging have indeed made me soft in the head, adjusting to the traffic let alone reality has been a challenge and my own government has just manufactured a niqab crisis for, er, Christmas.

I shall endeavour to be more realistic until spring.

Anybody has space climate and time, start a good sized vegetable garden and spend a lot of time communing there in body mind and spirit and you shall be nearer to some Greater Thing(s) no matter what.