JCRC leads campaign for Jewish refugees
By Julie Masis
The Jewish Advocate
An Iraqi-Jewish refugee arriving in Israel in 1951.Initiative brings recognition to Jews forced out of Middle East and North Africa
Following an international conference in Jerusalem last month, the Jewish community is stepping up their efforts to educate people about Jews who fled the Middle East and North Africa since the 1940s.
While some may automatically think of Palestinians when they hear the phrase "refugees from the Middle East," Director of Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston Israel Action Center Seth Brysk said that U.N. statistics show that there were more Jews than Palestinians displaced as a result of the conflict in the Middle East.
Now Jewish communities throughout the world – including Boston – are aiming to publicize the stories of these Jewish refugees, so that if the issue of compensating Palestinian refugees is laid on the negotiating table, the plight of Jewish refugees will be taken into account too.
"This campaign is not about denying the rights of the Palestinians," Brysk said. "Rather this campaign is that no attention has been paid to Jewish refugees."
Since the 1940s, 856,000 Jews were forced to leave 10 Arab countries, while only 728,000 Palestinians were displaced during the same time period, Brysk added.
Throughout history, Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa – such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon – were destroyed and Arab governments confiscated Jewish property.
Today, people of Middle Eastern and North African descent account for nearly half of Israel's Jewish population – yet their stories remain largely untold.
"We're appalled that the international community recognizes only one refugee population who were victims of the Middle East conflict," said Stanley Urman, the executive director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, a New York organization. "In fact there were two: Palestinians and Jews."
Delegates from 10 countries met in Israel to launch the International Rights and Redress Campaign, which aims to register Jewish refugees from Muslim lands in the next 18 months. Israel's government announced that it would allocate funds to ensure the registration of Jewish refugees living in Israel, while two resolutions on the floor of the U.S. Congress propose that declarations relating to Middle East refugees must include a reference to the rights of Jewish, Christian and other minority refugees.
Boston's JCRC is also working to register Jewish refugees in the area by having them fill out cards indicating their country of origin and any communal or private property that they lost when forced to leave their homelands. Although Boston does not have a large Sephardic population, it is home to some refugees from Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
To spread the word, Brysk delivered a lecture about Jewish refugees at Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline last Friday and a documentary film called "Forgotten Refugees" was screened at Somerville Theater last week.
Caroline Ganjei – who fled Iran in 1979 when she was 15 years old – is encouraging members of Temple Beth Abraham, a Sephardic congregation in Brookline, to fill out the refugee registration cards that will be archived by the Israeli Ministry of Justice.
"It's challenging," Ganjei said, noting it is difficult to get Jews to complete the forms. "People don't want to talk about their past. I think it's really time for us to break the silence and talk about our stories…If we don't preserve this history, it's going to be gone."
