Naim Reuven was only 8 when he left Baghdad more than 50 years ago, but he still remembers going with his father to catch fish in the Tigris River.
The major powers launched a new round of talks with Iran on its suspected nuclear weapons program.
The handful of Jews remaining in Baghdad must leave because their names appeared in a WikiLeaks cable, an Anglican priest in the Iraqi capital said.
The trial of Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants, which resumed in a fortified courtroom in Baghdad\’s Green Zone this week following a 40-day adjournment, has raised a few eyebrows. Among other criticisms, the Iraqi special court and the United States are being criticized for a hasty approach and weak preparation.
It was June 1, 1941, Shavuot, and over the next 48 hours, Muslim rioters killed approximately 180 Jews, injured 240 more, raped Jewish women and burned and looted 586 Jewish stores and homes.
The execution of American Jewish civilian Nicholas Berg by Iraqi extremests for being a Jew.
When Rabbi Mitchell Ackerson blew the shofar this past Rosh Hashanah, it reverberated throughout one of Saddam Hussein\’s former palaces. More than 100 Jewish members of the U.S. forces stationed in Iraq attended the High Holiday services at the former Iraqi dictator\’s Baghdad compound.
They seemed shocked and awed, not least by the echo.
Then under a late afternoon sun, the group performed the customary Tashlich ceremony outside the palace, casting pieces of bread representing sins into a private lake once owned by the Iraqi dictator\’s sons, Uday and Qusay.
When the smoke cleared in Baghdad, most Americans wanted to get out. But Manhattan resident Rachel Zelon opted to go in.
Palestinian support for Iraq took on a new dimension this week with a suicide bombing in Israel that Islamic Jihad said was aimed at showing solidarity with Baghdad.
Dozens of people were wounded, six seriously, when a suicide bomber blew himself up March 30 next to a crowded restaurant in the coastal city of Netanya. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility and identified the bomber as a resident of Tulkarm.
The group\’s secretary, Ramadan Shalakh, said the attack commemorated Land Day, which itself marks the deaths of six Israeli Arabs during protests in 1976 against state confiscation of Arab lands in the Galilee. Shalakh also said the bombing was a show of solidarity with the Iraqi people.
What was once a thriving and influential community of 130,000 Jews in the 1940s has been reduced to less than 50 people, and no one in Los Angeles has been able to contact them for some time.
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