Holocaust Ceremony Serves as History Lesson

Commemoration focuses on fate of Sephardic Jews during World War II

Monday, April 30, 2007

By LESLIE PALMA-SIMONCEK / ADVANCE STAFF WRITER

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A Holocaust memorial service last night at the Joan and Alan Jewish Community Center in Sea View served as a history lesson for some of the more than 100 people in the audience.

The annual commemoration -- postponed from April 15 by the nor'easter that roared through -- this year focused on Sephardic Jews and their experiences during the Nazi bloodletting. Sephardic Jews are those who were expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and dispersed to North Africa and throughout the Middle East.

"While the entire Jewish world has heard of 'Kristallnacht,'" said keynote speaker Shelomo Alfassa of a night of anti-Jewish violence in Germany in November 1938 that presaged the Holocaust, "few have heard of the 'Farhud,' where Arabs who were Nazi sympathizers in Baghdad killed, maimed and committed numerous atrocities against the Jewish community," in June 1941, during the holiday of Shavuot.

About 180 Jews were killed in two days, and 240 wounded. Ninety-nine Jewish homes and 586 Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, said Alfassa, founder of the International Sephardic Leadership Council.

Alfassa said the fixation on the idea that the Holocaust was a catastrophe for European Jewry was so entrenched, that it wasn't until last year, through lobbying efforts by himself and others, that the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., included the program in its exhibits.

The Farhud was just one example of the suffering of the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa during the Holocaust, Alfassa said.

Quoting from a variety of sources, including the book "Banking on Baghdad" by the journalist Edmund Black, Alfassa said the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, an influential leader throughout the Arab world who was unhappy about the increasing Jewish settlement in Palestine, allied himself with Hitler and used Arabic-language radio broadcasts relayed from Berlin to incite Arabs to kill Jews.

Hitler's "final solution" for the Jews also targeted the Jews of North Africa, Alfassa said. Jews in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya were denied rights granted to them during colonial rule, were place under economic restrictions and many were sent to forced labor camps. The 1,000-year-old Great Synagogue in Tunis was taken over by the Nazis and used as a horse stable. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, has documented 17 slave labor camps in North Africa.

After Hitler's Third Reich was defeated, Alfassa said, "we burned the Nazis books but we didn't stop the paradigm that was created during the Nazi time: Virulent hatred of the Jews, handed from the Nazis to the Arabs." Seventeen-year-old Esther Ribori, a Port Richmond High School senior who chosen to read the pledge for her generation to never forget the Holocaust, said Alfassa's message made it "more important than ever" to remember.

A Sephardic Jew with roots in India, Emmy Smith of Port Richmond said her mother always told her how safe Jews were there.

"We were always proud of that," Ms. Smith said. "We really did think it didn't touch us. But it did. It touched all Jews."

Leslie Palma-Simoncek is the religion editor for the Advance.