Every Jewish community has its own sorrows to bear, but perhaps none quite so poignant as the Jews of Iraq. The life of the oldest continuous Jewish community in all the world has now come to an end, and has done so in the saddest possible way: in silence and without marker.
The historical foundations of Chanukah are well documented, in the Apocrypha\’s First and Second Books of the Maccabees and \”The Jewish War\” and \”Jewish Antiquities,\” written by the Jewish historian, Josephus, in the first century of the common era. As these sources relate, in the year 167 B.C.E. the king of Syria, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, decreed that only pagan gods could be worshiped in the temples, and the practice of Jewish rituals, including circumcision and Sabbath observance, was outlawed under penalty of death. Although many Jews, looking to assimilate into Hellenic society, acceded to Antiochus\’ decrees, an elderly priest named Mattathias and his five sons (the middle son would become known as Judah Maccabee or \”Judah the Hammer\”) bitterly opposed them and, after raising a rebel army, headed to the hills.
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