Friday, February 20, 2015

The Nazi Affect on Immigrating to Israel

Nadene Goldfoot                                            
Husseini, the sherif of Jerusalem plotting with Hitler the destruction of Jews
Back in 1948 when Israel was reborn on May 14th, the leaders were afraid that what happened in Europe would also happen in the Arab countries.  That was their reality.  The question the leaders asked each other was, if the Mizrachi Jews didn't make aliyah to Israel then, perhaps they wouldn't live long enough to be able to ever think about coming.  The situation was very drastic in Israel at the time.  They were not prepared for a big influx of people as they had been attacked immediately after pronouncing their state was in existence.
                                                                             
Israeli Diplomat, born April 23, 1923
Shlomo Hillel(b: 1924 , himself an immigrant from Iraq, was responsible for bringing 125,000 Iraqi immigrants to Israel.    He is 91 years old today, a self named "little shmendrik."  They were the most ancient Jewish community of the Middle East, as Hillel himself knew.  He is a descendant of the Babylonian Jewish religious leader, Hillel , and his family had lived there for at least  the past 2,500 years.

Nebuchadnezzar of the  Babylonians had attacked Israel in 597 BCE  and again in 586 BCE and had carted off some of the best of the people as slaves.  That's when the Temple had been destroyed.  Hillel the Elder was a 1st century BCE founder of the school of thought,  "The House of Hillel,"  a scholar of the Tanakh (Old Testament) he fathered people who went on to the 5th century who were such leaders.  Born in Babylonia, he made aliyah to Palestine and worked as a manual laborer while studying with 2 special teachers, He became president of the Sanhedrin and was the last of scholars.  Noted for his humility and leniency, his name has lasted throughout the ages.

Shlomo had moved to Palestine in 1934 to join his older brothers.  His parents joined them in 1935.  Their move was instigated by the Independence of Iraq in 1932.  The situation changed from when the British had taken over after WWI when they had appointed a king.  King of Iraq was Emir Faisal I who had been agreeable to the creation of Israel.  He was first made king of Syria in 1920 that only lasted from March to July, and then made king of Iraq from 23 August 1921 to 1933. He was a member of the Hashemite dynasty. He died on September 8, 1933 at age 48. Officially it was said he died of a heart attack, but evidence pointed to arsenic poisoning.  It was hushed up.

By 1933, Shlomo's father saw what was happening in Iraq and Germany and that that the end was near to them in Iraq also.  1933 was the year of a massacre of Assyrian Christians in the north of the country.  Iraq's army were then parading around their homes showing off about their Christian killings, making out that the Jews were next.

In 1941 during WWII Baghdad had a Nazi-inspired pogrom (farhud)  against the Jews and that ended any hopes of a continued peaceful existence for the Jews.  It was a scary traumatic event for them.  Young Jewish lads wanted to organize self-defense organization and an underground.  In Palestine the Jewish leaders  started to work on escape routes for them.

Jews from Arab lands are called Mizrahim Jews.  Many were forced out of their homes by the Arabs and most made aliyah to Israel.

We have had Swedish Jews from Malmo harrassed and frighted and attacked to much that many of the younger ones have made aliyah to Israel already.  The French Jews have been undergoing the same things, including deaths to their children and teachers which has caused many of them to already make Aliiyah, and the harassing continues.  Ukranian Jews are in the midst of a war between Russia and the Ukraine and they are packing up and leaving for Israel as well.  When Denmark's synagogue was actually attacked and the Jewish member of the synagogue was shot and killed while standing guard, of course Netanyahu made it plain to the Danish Jews that they could make aliyah to Israel as well if they wished.  That's why Israel was created in the first place by our Zionist leaders.

Theodore Herzl, journalist from Vienna,  held the First Zionist Congress in 1897 because of all the pogroms happening in Russia against Jews and after what had happened with the Dreyfus case in France of 1894.  This was when a French Jewish soldier on the general's staff was accused of selling documents to Germany and it was a lie due to anti-Semitism which was raging.  .  Zionism's name came into being in 1893 by Nathan Birnbaum who coined it, the name of Jerusalem;  Zion.  It expressed the aspirations as old as the Babylonian Exile to return to Israel.

  "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, we also wept, when we remembered Zion. We hung our lyres on the willows in its midst. For there those who carried us away captive required of us a song; and those who tormented us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember you, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. (Psalms 137:1-6)"

Resource:  Magazine:  The Jerusalem Report, February 23, 2015, p 18-23, Saving the Jews of Iraq
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlomo_Hillel
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/babylonian_exile/
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2013/10/aleppo-syrias-most-dashing-israeli-spy.html

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