Thread by @HenMazzig

Thread: Meet Hela, my grandmother, loving, generous, caring Jewish mother of 12. She think that she is 93 y/o, but when she was forced out of Iraq her official documents were taken and over the years she didn’t celebrate her birthday and forget the exact date she was born...

She doesn’t speak a lot about her past. It is challenging to get any negative stories from Iraq out of her. She prefers to tell me stories about how great it was, how beautiful Baghdad is, and how they always felt safe – until the 2 days of horror: June 1-2, 1941, the #Farhud.

To me, this event signifies the days of catastrophe; the start of a Jewish “Nakba” (catastrophe) that no one wants to acknowledge. These two days led to my family becoming refugees.
“Farhud” means brutal intimidation of a population by its ruler, but it was more than just the...

rulers turned on the Jewish population of Iraq during those days in 1941. My grandmother always told me the story of the cafe that she spent her days at, a beautiful little shop, she said. On the first day of the farhud she was there.

She tells me how she saw an Iraqi Muslim man screaming “kill the Jews,” and a Jewish woman walking across the street with her 7 children, one in her arms. The man pointed the gun at the woman and began shooting her kids. One by one they were murdered, as the mother screamed.

Only after he murdered all of her children did he kill her. Quickly, the cafe owner hid my grandmother in the back of the store, until her father came to take her, running back home.

That night, she couldn’t sleep. She and her family hid at her Muslim neighbor’s home.

The terrible noises from outside – screams, cries, shattering glass – made it into one of the most terrible nights of her life. When morning came, they were all relieved, thinking that the horror was over. They were wrong.

At noon, she was sitting on the porch at her house while her mother was out getting food and her father was at the neighbor’s home. She saw Dalia, a Jewish teen with mental disability, walking down the street. She called her, urging her to go back home. Dalia didn’t listen.

Moments after, an Iraqi Muslim man saw Dalia and walked over to her. When he realized that she was mentally disabled, he started raping her. My grandmother was paralyzed by shock and fear as she witnessed the attack. The young girl was screaming.

After he was done with his sickening act, he took a glass bottle, broke the bottom half on the floor, and wounded her genitals. My grandmother, inconsolable, couldn’t speak to anyone that day.

Though she survived the bloody massacre that day, the Farhud reminded the Jews in Iraq of “their place” in Iraqi society. These 2 days in 1941 led directly to the violent expulsion of 120,000 Iraqi Jews from their land, the confiscation of their property and possessions,

valued at an estimated $300 million, and the denial of their basic human rights and dignity. My family was part of 850,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa that were forced out of their countries following the rebirth of Israel. #RememberTheFarhud for my grandmother.