22.07.2016
By Jamal Penjweny
Today the world goes under the worst refugees crisis sin Second World War. In a mediatic era that can be cruel, Jamal Penjweny’s images as a poetic respond. In this edition, Pucheronews shows his new work «Islamic Jewish». In less than three years – from 1947 to 1951- Iraqi Jews left their homes in Iraq and headed to Israel. Their presence and integration in the Iraqi society, is a chapter that has been intentionally forgotten by many. Political interests and ideologies have rewritten history according to different versions. In a small town of south-east Iraq, Ahmad is still keeping their names, photos and school marks in the archives of its office in Qala’t al Salih.
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Iraqi Jews identified themselves with the Iraqi homeland, proclaimed themselves Jews by region and Iraqi by nationality since the early beginning of the Iraqi State. King Faisal guaranteed by Constitution their freedom of worship and equal rights and opportunities in government employment. A British diplomatic note of the late 30s states : “The Jews of Iraq live contented lives, they are involved in all branches of commerce and economy, they do not have thoughts of emigrating”.
Wealthy Jews donate funds to built school and colleges, encouraging the establishment of a modern educational system which included classes in French and English Arabic and Hebrew since the beginning of the Ninety century. Qalat al Salih was probably one of the beneficiary institutions.
Qala’t al Salih school is a treasure chest of history. School records from 1925 onward are there preserved and archived. Ahmad, is the school manger and the guardian of the treasury-chest. He is proud to show to every visitors the heavy records he has preciously archived during the last decades. “I kept the names and photos of those Jew students. I kept the original school bell, I found when I was first employed in the school. What is missing is them. Starting from 1947 they all fled away. They disappeared almost suddenly. Few in Qalat al Salih remember or know that they were their neighbours half a century ago” he narrates.
The exodus of the Jews from Iraq is one of the largest diaspora movement in the history of population flows. Between 1950 and 1951, 120.000 Iraqi Jews moved from Iraq to Israel and never came back.
“This school was erected in 1925 in memory of Lt. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude from funds collected by Qalat al Salih” reads the epigraph on the entrance wall of elementary school in Qala’t al Salih, a small city in south-east Iraq and once a main centre of the Jewish community in Iraq.
Several generations of students sat on the benches of Qalat al Salih’s classroom since 1925 onward.
Back in the time the epigraph was carved in the wall, the majority of the students were Jews. As of today, all of them are Shi’as. However not much have changed during the last century in Qalat al Salih school.
Alike their predecessors, students attend their classes every day from 8 am to 5 pm and wait anxiously the ring’ tolls to run and play in the school courtyard.. All along, the classrooms line up on each side of the squared courtyard: arithmetic, literature, science…etc. The brownish school desks are aligned in rows of two. The school bell split the mornings in Sixty minutes classes. The sunshine hits the courtyard each afternoon, day after day. Students count down the days left to summer break. They learn, they graduate, they leave the school and grew adult. This cyclic rhythm repeats itself every year since 1925.
Qalat al Salih school looks immortal and without time. Yet, history unwound within its classroom and courtyard. The school was erected at the time when the region was a mosaic of communities living side by side and Jews were as an integrated part of Iraq’s society and economy.
History left his traces on Qalat’ al Salih walls and on the memories of some of the city’s inhabitants. Ahmad, who is working as school manager starts narrating “ I become the manager of this school of Qalat al Salih several decades ago. However, this school has a long history, much longer than my experience here. “You won’t believe maybe, but until 1947 the majority of the students here were Jews..” he recounts, raising his eyebrows behind the reading glasses.
Iraq hosted one of the most numerous and flourishing Jew communities in the region. Since the Ottoman time, Jews were dynamic traders, bakers and notables. In the dawning of the First World War they grew in number and in importance. Almost 80.000, Jews were living in the northern to the southern regions of Iraq: Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and Baghdad. Many of them were employed in the bureaucracy of the newly-established Iraqi state-institutions under the British Mandate (1917-1934).
The causes of this massive from Iraq are still controversial and kindle the debate among historians. Certainly, the foundation of the State of Israel, the pogrom in 1941 (farhoud ) in the Jewish areas of Baghdad, the increasing relations between the Jewish Agency in Palestine and underground Zionist movements in Iraq, they altogether created the circumstances for their departure from Iraq.
The memory of Jews in Iraq fade away but some their names of haven’t blotted out. They are still written in records of the school of Qalat al Salih along with their black and white picture and their grades. These children six height and ten years old are today in the mid of their Sixties, they living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Haifa…
Most of them probably do not know that, in a small town of south-east Iraq, Ahmad is still keeping their names, photos and school marks in the archives of its office in Qala’t al Salih.
Iraq/ 2016
All pictures © Jamal Penjweny
Spanish version here
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