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For Iraqi Jews in L.A., This Passover Is Special

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Times Staff Writer

As Jews worldwide begin Passover today, Rabbi Haim Ovadia and his Los Angeles congregation will not need to reach far into the past to find parallels with the ancient Exodus story of freedom from slavery.

They are Jews of Iraqi descent, many of whom experienced an exodus from an oppressive land and see the Iraq war as the miraculous liberation from a modern pharaoh -- Saddam Hussein.

“Saddam’s people were slaves, tortured and killed as he wished,” said Ovadia, a bearded and gregarious Israeli native who heads the Kahal Joseph Congregation on Santa Monica Boulevard east of Overland. “The liberation of Iraq was an incredible thing that reflected the ideas of the Exodus: No one should be subjugated to any dictator.”

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Ovadia and his congregants are remnants of the world’s oldest surviving Jewish community outside Israel, tracing its roots to ancient Babylonia 2,500 years ago. That is when Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar is said to have destroyed the first Jerusalem Temple and brought back the cream of Jewish society to work as astronomers, scholars, artists and craftsmen in creating one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the ancient Babylonian hanging gardens.

Only a handful of Jews still live in Iraq, most having migrated to Israel and elsewhere. The community in Southern California numbers in the thousands.

At Kahal Joseph, the Orthodox congregation of about 350 families traces Iraqi roots through way stations in India, China, Singapore, Burma, Indonesia, Japan, Britain, Israel and Iran. Today, Ovadia says, his congregants live scattered throughout Southern California and work mainly as professionals in education, medicine, business and law.

Their diversity is reflected in a stunning collection of more than 30 Torah scrolls from those lands, which are encased in silver and velvet boxes behind locked doors inside the synagogue. The temple, an airy space dominated by stained-glass windows and classic Iraqi menorahs, was established about 40 years ago.

The various nationalities find common heritage as Sephardic Jews -- those from Spain, the Middle East and North Africa -- and in Arabic culture and Iraqi liturgies. During Passover, for instance, parts of the Haggada and a special children’s dramatization of the Exodus are presented in Arabic. Customary foods include rice and lima beans, which are not found at Ashkenazi Seder tables, Ovadia said.

But many Jews across the world find deep meaning in the traditions of ancient Babylonia. Judaism’s patriarch, Abraham, is said to have been born in the region, in a city called Ur along the banks of the Euphrates River in southern Iraq. One of Judaism’s most important legal texts is the Babylonian Talmud, which was written by religious scholars in Babylonia, beginning in the 3rd century AD.

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According to Rabbi Mark Diamond, executive director of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, Babylonia inspired a gilded age of rabbinic Judaism. From the 7th to 11th centuries, he said, the community flourished under Muslim rule in a climate of religious tolerance, producing great scholars, rabbis and texts. Babylonia served as the seat of the geonim, the Diaspora’s central rabbinic authority, and the world’s leading rabbinical schools, he said.

“It was really the fountainhead of world Jewry in its heyday,” Diamond said.

According to community elders here, Jews continued to flourish in Iraq until the 1930s, holding seats in government and constituting 10% of the country’s 2.5 million people. But pogroms and persecution began in the late 1930s, after a wave of pro-Nazi sentiment in Iraq. Antagonism toward Jews was heightened with the establishment of Israel, a series of Mideast wars and the rise of Hussein and his Baath Party.

Not all Muslims supported the pogroms. Some Iraqi Jews, such as Beverly Hills residents Joseph and Yvette Dabby, recalled that their Muslim neighbors took up machetes and guns to protect their families from murderous mobs.

But the growing anti-Semitism prompted an exodus of 150,000 Jews during a limited window of freedom in 1951. Those who stayed behind to wrap up business, such as the Dabbys, were trapped in Iraq when authorities suddenly banned emigration.

The Dabbys, who run an Encino engineering and property development firm, can still taste the bitterness of persecution, which they say intensified after the Six-Day War in 1967. Authorities confiscated business licenses and passports, banned Jews from schools and employment, restricted their movements, cut their telephone lines and froze their bank accounts.

In 1969, they said, 45 Jews were hanged in Baghdad’s public square. Joseph Dabby, then a college student and now Kahal Joseph’s president, was arrested and jailed on what he says were phony charges of spying for Israel. His wife, Yvette, says she was fired from her civil engineering job.

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“If you heard a knock on the door, you were scared to death,” Yvette said. “At a certain point, you just can’t live that way anymore.”

In 1971, the couple, disguised in Arab clothing, boarded a train for northern Iraq and paid Kurdish smugglers to help them escape into Iran. After a year in the Netherlands, they immigrated to Southern California.

Despite such painful memories, the Dabbys and others say they are proud of their dual roots in Jewish and Arab traditions. Ovadia says he dreams of creating a cultural center in Los Angeles that can bring together the two traditions, as well as take rapidly assimilating young Sephardic Jews back to their roots.

The rabbi, like most Iraqi Jews, is a fluent Arabic speaker; his uncle taught Koranic classes and his sister is researching the links between Iraqi Jewish liturgies and Sufi devotional music, finding ways that the two traditions cross-pollinated each other.

“Our culture is basically Arabic,” Yvette Dabby said. “When Arabs and Muslims see there are Jews who are proud of this culture and music and arts, maybe then we can be a bridge.”

She says she still regards Iraq with the love of a homeland, and will keep a special prayer for it during this Passover season.

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“The Iraqi people were suffering horrendously and should have been liberated,” said Rabbi Ovadia, who added that he supported the war but now believes an international force should replace the Americans in overseeing the reconstruction.

“Everyone has a right to live in freedom,” he said. “That is the message the Jews gave to the world.”

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