Why Canada’s Museum For Human Rights Should Have An Exhibit On Mizrahi Jewish Refugees

Prominent Middle East scholar Yaakov Meron wrote in The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands, “There was a deliberate policy on the part of the Arab League countries to drive out the Jews.” 

Heykel Pasha, an Egyptian delegate, declared on November 24, 1947, “If the UN decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews. If a Jewish state were established, no one can prevent the disorders. Riots would break out in Palestine, would spread throughout all of the Arab states and it might lead to a war between two races.”  

Immediately after the Partition Plan was adopted by the UN, anti-Jewish massacres soon became the norm across the Arab world, thus leading to their mass exodus from the region. 

Flora Cohen, a Moroccan Jewish refugee, stressed: “A terrorist came to the city of Wadzem (Oued Zem). They went into a number of Jewish homes and did a pogrom. They really tortured them. In Tadla, there was a murderer with an ax who went after Jewish people. It was written all over the news.” 

Flora recalled that she almost lost her brother as well during this period and that the “Jews were afraid to go out.”      

Alevin Peretz, who was born in Algeria, added: “Algeria belonged to France. One day in 1960, it was decided that Algeria would be a Muslim country. When the Muslims got citizenship, the Jews disappeared. There was a lot of antisemitism in Algeria after the French left.” 

Peretz would suffer greatly because of this: “They murdered my father on the way to synagogue. I was six and a half. It was a trauma. There was a great fear. Before that, they killed my uncle.” 

Mazal Elijah, a Jewish refugee from Iraq, proclaimed that around the time Israel became an independent state, the situation dramatically deteriorated in Baghdad as well:

“Jews went to synagogue and got beaten up. The Arabs went from home to home, trying to flood the homes. It was forbidden for girls to go out, lest they get raped. Children would get kidnapped. The Arabs behaved like terrorists.” 

“And after we moved to Israel, the Arabs stole everything from us, leaving us with nothing but the clothes on our backs,” Elijah recounted. “I grew up in a tent as a refugee, for everything was stolen from us.  In the ma’aborot, we played with rags as a substitute for dolls.”