Jews feel abused in land of 'Babylon'

BAGHDAD, Iraq — "Next year," they say, "in Jerusalem."

The rallying cry of centuries of Jews is a fading echo this Passover in Baghdad, among a disappearing, dispirited remnant of an ancient and important Jewish community.

"Somebody used to know how to make 'seder' " — the traditional Passover dinner — "but not me," a sad young woman, at 37 one of youngest Iraqi Jews in Baghdad, said Thursday, first day of the seven-day holiday commemorating the Jews' flight to freedom from Egypt.

The woman, a dentist named Khalida Fuad Eliahu, is herself desperate to flee.

"I just want to go," she said. "I don't want to live here."

But she doesn't want to escape to Jerusalem, with its persistent bloodshed. "I have lived through one, two, three wars in Iraq. I don't want a fourth war."

Some might think this third war in Iraq, the toppling of the Saddam Hussein government, opens a new window for the 40 to 60 Jews in Baghdad.

Sasson Saleh pondered the question in his dark single room up the street from the Jews' small synagogue.

"It means a lot for Iraqis, but not for Jews," said Saleh, sharp features still handsome at 90. "It doesn't matter whether Saddam rules us or another man rules us. They" — Iraq's Muslims — "don't care for us."

In Israel these days, Iraqi Jewish immigrants speak wistfully of returning to this Arab homeland, which fought in repeated wars against the Jewish state.

"They'll never come back," Saleh said, speaking fluent English honed as a civil servant in Iraq's long-ago British colonial administration.

What of Baghdad's Jews? Will they leave now that they're freer to do so?

"They're too old," he said. "I think in five years, at the most, there will be no Jews left in Baghdad."

If so, it will sound the knell for a community that stretches back millennia, to the "Babylonian captivity" of 10,000 Jews seized from the conquered kingdom of Judah and brought here in 597 B.C.

Some of their descendants soon returned to their homeland, but many remained here on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, down the generations, and by the mid-20th century they numbered some 250,000, including some of the city's most prominent merchants, bankers, doctors and engineers.