The Jews of Lebanon Project

Please check the complete feature story including many new photos, and an unprecedented letter from the editor titled “I want to know the Jews of Lebanon”. The article by Ghassan Hajjar is defined as nothing short of compassionate and respectful. A special thank you to journalist Marie-Claire Feghali, without her humanitarianism and her dedication this would have never been possible. And ultimately, thank you to the entire An-Nahar newspaper and staff, Lebanon’s most prestigious, and Mr. Ghassan Tueni, the patriarch of this historic newspaper.

http://www.naharashabab.com/

Lebanon’s few remaining Jews live out their lives in the shadows
Downtown Beirut synagogue stands as testament to what was once a thriving community
By Rym Ghazal
Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 17, 2007

Lebanon’s few remaining Jews live out their lives in the shadows

BEIRUT: Just a two-minute walk from the sit-in launched almost five months ago by the Hizbullah-led opposition, an abandoned and crumbling synagogue stands as the last remnant of a once-thriving Jewish community in Beirut. Known as the Magen Abraham Central Synagogue, it is located in the heart of Beirut in Wadi Abu Jmil, directly under the Grand Serail where Prime Minister Fouad Siniora works - an area that has become the focus of ongoing political tensions in Lebanon.

The synagogue’s rusty gates are held shut with chains, and its punctured roof howls when the wind blows. While thick weeds and grass have taken up residence around the building’s foundations, the Star of David still crowns its every column.

Given the obscurity of the structure - which dates to 1925 - amid the posh new edifices of the Beirut Central District, some people in the locale understandably said they were surprised a synagogue sits in the area.

Several private security guards patrol the area around the synagogue and have been instructed by Solidere, the publicly held company that owns many properties Downtown, to keep an eye on the place.

“Just in case of trouble,” said one security guard. “Besides the synagogue, there is also some private property around here [owned] by Jewish Lebanese.”

The site was allegedly part of Solidere’s renovation plan, initiated by slain former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, but that has been put on hold.

Not far from Downtown, a Jewish cemetery in Sodeco contains hundreds of tombstones with names and epitaphs etched in Hebrew.

The Jewish community in Beirut, estimated at less than 100 and nearly impossible to identify, once numbered as many as 14,000 and can trace its roots bacy to 1000 BC

The Jews are one of 18 religious groups officially recognized in Lebanon but generally keep their religious identity secret for fear of persecution from other sects.

“No one likes us here, so we keep a low profile and pretend to be Christian or Muslim,” said one Jewish Lebanese businessman who spoke on the condition that he remain “untraceable.

“We can’t even bury or visit our loved ones in the Jewish cemetery out of fear someone might see us,” he added.

A 2004 report said one out of 5,000 Jewish Lebanese citizens registered to vote had actually participated in municipal elections held that year. Most of those registered are believed to be deceased or to have fled during the Civil War that divided the country along sectarian lines in 1975.

The largest exodus of Jews from Lebanon began in earnest after 1982, when Israel invaded the country.

Some say most of the remaining community consists of old women, and one particular one, a 50-year-old known as Liza Sarour, lives in grave poverty in Wadi Abu Jmil and refuses to talk to the media.

The Jewish community was traditionally centered in Wadi Abu Jmil and Ras Beirut, with smaller numbers in the Chouf, Deir al-Qamar, Aley, Bhamdoun and Hasbayya.

Aaron-Micael Beydoun, a Lebanese-American, is on a quest to revive the history of the Jewish community in Lebanon. He launched a Web site last year, The Jews of Lebanon (www.thejewsoflebanon.org), as a forum for documenting the community’s history in Lebanon.

“I launched it because I refused to believe fellow Lebanese have been forgotten and left in the shadows based only on the premise of their religious belonging and [subjected] to hollow and ignorant geopolitical generalizations attributed to foreign factors,” he said.

Beydoun hails from Bint Jbeil in the South, although his family left Lebanon in the early 1970s due to growing security concerns. Asserting that he has “no Jewish roots whatsoever,” Beydoun said he still cares about a group of Lebanese who have been “completely isolated.”

Beydoun explained that while the first name Aaron is often given to Jewish children, his given name originates from the Arabic name Haroun-Micayeel.

“Aaron-Micael is an English form, as I was born and raised in the US and my parents both immigrated here when they were very young [and], naturally, they gave their children American names to adapt more to mainstream society,” he said.

Beydoun lambasted those who would judge him merely by the spelling of his name, and labeled Lebanon’s political elite as hypocrites for empty calls to respect marks of difference.

“The politicians flaunt their hollow slogans of ‘national unity’ when in essence this statement has no substance whatsoever; national unity is not just tolerance but acceptance of all,” he said.

“Yesterday the Jewish community in Lebanon was silenced - who will be next? Maronites, Shiites, Druze, Sunnis, Orthodox, who?” he asked.

He recalled the story of a girl who grew up thinking she was Christian until her parents told her when she was 23 that they were Jewish but had hidden their ancestry to protect themselves from persecution.

Beydoun has been in touch with the media-shy Jewish community and said that many of them own businesses in Beirut and Jbeil.

“I even know of a few families where the Jewish mothers are still practicing their faith in West Beirut and are married to Muslims,” he added.

“Muslims respect people of the book, and Jews are people of the book,” a Hizbullah official told The Daily Star.

“Muslims would never destroy a place of worship or cemeteries,” he added.

But whatever Beydoun’s feelings on preserving the Jewish community, a community he believes is “in waiting,” some of those interviewed near the synagogue said the place of worship should be “destroyed,” but most stressed that the Jewish cemetery should be left in peace.

“We respect the dead, unlike [the Jews],” said Tony Franjieh, member of the Christian Free Patriotic Movement, one of the main opposition parties.

“Unlike the Israelis, we respect places of worship and cemeteries,” he added, referring to the ongoing Israeli excavations around the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

While most of the Lebanese interviewed expressed a dislike for the Jewish community in Lebanon, Franjieh summed up the opinions voiced by many: “It’s OK for them to come pray here, but not live here.”

But some of those participating in the sit-in near the synagogue in Downtown Beirut do not share the same sentiments.

“The synagogue is empty now, and that is how it will remain,” said Hassan Khansa, one of the Hizbullah demonstrators camped out just a short stroll from Magen Abraham.

“Good riddance,” said Khansa, who, like many other people in the country, believes that Jewish Lebanese work as “spies” for Israel.

“Their loyalty is to Israel, and so they belong there, not here,” he said, echoing similar statements made by other demonstrators in the tent city.

From Daily Star - 09/04/1999

Munira Khayyat

Daily Star staff

The faded letters chiseled in the eroded stone above a gate in Beirut’s old Green Line are in Hebrew and spell out “bet hayameen.” This is the unassuming entrance to Beirut’s Jewish cemetery in Ras al-Nabaa.

In recent months, the cemetery has been given a facelift as Lebanon’s shrunken Jewish community rehabilitates the resting place of its ancestors.

The steps leading up to the graveyard are lined with pot plants, and old trees cast shadows on the white marble gravestones that are inscribed in Hebrew, Arabic and French.

Carved onto each gravestone is a black Star of David or a seven-pronged candleholder, the menorah, symbols of the Jewish religion. Some of the graves in the cemetery have stones on them, silent pointers to the fact that the graves are visited on a regular basis.

Apart from some cracked gravestones and the occasional bullet-hole that testify to the cemetery’s central place in the crossfire of the civil war, it looks peaceful and well preserved.

But until last summer when its renovation began, the Jewish cemetery was a tangled mass of dried grass and barbed wire. “We had to remove 20 years’ worth of weeds that concealed two thirds of the cemetery’s total area,” said the engineer in charge of its restoration, who did not wish to be named.

The graveyard was also barricaded with barbed wire, metal rods and sandbags, and embedded with anti-personnel mines.

According to Um Ali, a refugee from the Bekaa who has lived for eight years in the structure that previously housed the cemetery’s caretaker, the Lebanese army removed the mines and the barricades just over two months ago.

Um Ali observes all the comings and goings of the graveyard. “Very few people come here,” she said.

Um Ali and her son have informally taken over the duties of cemetery guardians. Ali dug the last grave to be used for an elderly man who died in 1997. In the absence of a Rabbi, an elder of the Jewish community presided over the burial.

Um Ali is familiar with all the graves and points to her favorite one. “She was very beautiful” she said of the woman whose likeness is preserved on a gravestone in a far corner of the cemetery.

Um Ali is aware that the Lebanese Jewish community is an ancient one that was very much part of the Lebanese national fabric. “The Jews here are Lebanese like us, they are not like the Israelis,” she said.

The cemetery land is owned by the Lebanese Jewish Community Council and dates back to the 1820s. The engineer in charge of renovations said the cemetery’s renovation was financed by the council. Although there are Jewish cemeteries in Sidon, Tripoli, Aley, and other Lebanese towns that once had prominent Jewish communities, only the Beirut cemetery will be renovated for now.

Plans for the renovation of Beirut’s only remaining synagogue, the Magen Avraham synagogue, in what used to be Wadi Abu Jmeel, are being drawn up and renovations will start later this year. “It seems quite by mistake that the synagogue was spared by the bulldozers `reconstructing’ downtown,” said the engineer. The old Alliance Israelite school which children from all communities attended has gone.

“Life is not easy for Lebanese Jews,” he continued. “There are too many powerful misconceptions about who they are. They prefer to stay quiet and lead quiet lives.

“I did not fix the crumbling Hebrew signpost above the gate. I left it faded and broken so as to not attract attention to it. If I had repainted the Hebrew letters, people would have noticed and most probably objected or defaced the Hebrew writing that is powerfully associated with Israel here.”

The Jews of Lebanon started leaving their country after 1948, but most left after the 1967 war. The civil war and the Israeli invasion escalated this emigration until almost no Jews were left.

Today there are about 100 Lebanese Jews in Lebanon. But the likelihood of the Jewish community regaining its pre-war numbers is small.

“Maybe in 200 years, Lebanese Jews will be able to come back and fully partake in Lebanese society as one of the 19 acknowledged religious confessions in this country” the engineer said. “But right now, the association of Jews with Israel is too deeply embedded.”

Because of the Jewish cemetery’s greenline location and the mines planted in its soil, the cemetery became inaccessible to the diminishing Jewish community during the war. A few gravestones dating back to the mid-1970s and 1980s point to the fact that some Lebanese Jews chose to stay in Lebanon despite the increasing difficulties of being both Jewish and Lebanese in a country at war with Israel and Zionism.

“The problem here is that people are not differentiating between the Jewish religion and Zionism,” according to Joe Mizrahi, the head of the Lebanese Jewish council. “More and more politicians are using the word `Jew’ to indicate the Israeli aggressor. We are not Zionists, we are Lebanese and we are here because we choose to stay in our land.”

Yet the Lebanese Jews who left their homeland and went elsewhere are initiating contact. “Some have relatives buried in the cemetery and have commissioned me to restore their relatives’ graves,” the engineer said.

Um Ali recalled a woman coming to the graveyard one day. “She was carrying rocks in her hands and walking among the graves. I thought she was a tourist so I asked her what she wanted.” Um Ali said. “She replied in broken Arabic that she was here to visit her father. I did not really understand at first but then I realized that she was looking for her father’s grave. “She sat for a long while near the grave and then left. I haven’t seen her since. She must have traveled back to where she now lives.”

COPYRIGHT (c) THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.
(c) 1999 THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.
Date: 09/04/1999
Publication: Daily Star

Announcement

Starting immediately, we will be publishing old news articles pertaining to the Lebanese Jewish community on a regular basis derived from media sources around the world. These archives are not readily available over the internet; we hope to establish our own exclusive news archive here on this website in our further effort of preserving the community’s history.

Concurrently, the NGO evolvement is progressing very efficiently and within a very solid framework. This is on-going and developing.

Jewish schools in Beirut once served purposes of integration
From Daily Star - 09/10/2003

Jewish schools in Beirut once served purposes of integration - But their effects on Arab Jews was noted and denounced by Zionists.

Mazen Wehbe

Special to The Daily Star

The year is 1870. The building no longer exists, but was located somewhere in the bourgeois and aristocratic neighborhood of 19th century Achrafieh.

Antoun Shehayber, lawyer and businessman, was addressing the director of the Jewish School of Beirut: “Yes, director, it is impossible for us to forget what suffering you have endured for our sakes and what efforts and zeal you have shown for our moral upbringing and education. First of all, in order to plant in us the spirit of the noble religion of Judaism you brought us an energetic rabbi. Secondly, you implanted in us the grammar of the Arabic language of our homeland, and how much expense and effort you have borne to bring professor Bekhor Leon for French. We want to assure your excellency, director, that we the Syrian Arabs are grateful for your favors. Although we are Arab in appearance, and our costume is Syrian, we still strive to attain the highest degree of science and progress. Friends, who have nominated me to undertake this noble task, raise your voices with me in calling out: Long live the Syrian, Arab and Jewish director from Sidon, Zaki Effendi Kuhin.”

Sadly, this speech survived but the school didn’t. It was shut down in 1904, probably because of lack of funds. Even though other institutions succeeded the school, and used a similar “Levantinesque” approach to Jewish education, its contribution to Beirut society was unique. In today’s world, the adjectives Syrian, Arab and Jewish would probably be met with disbelief if they were used to describe a rabbi who headed a Jewish school in Beirut.

The remaining Jewish community in Beirut (around 60, according to unofficial estimates) does not even have a rabbi. The synagogue survived the civil war and still stands, deserted and damaged, in Downtown Beirut, awaiting restoration and the return of the Lebanese Jews, something that might not happen soon.

Most of the Jews of Lebanon fled the country when their quarter in Wadi Abu Jmeel in Downtown Beirut became a battle zone in 1975.

But this is the present, and our story begins in Beirut in the 19th century. The city was still under Ottoman rule. European protection and the “civilizing missions” had transformed the non-Muslim inhabitants into agents of “social change.” Beirut was becoming Westernized.

According to author Leila Tarazi Fawaz, during the 19th century Beirut was transformed from a provincial town of 6,000 to a political and cultural center of 120,000. At this time of profound social change in Beirut, Kuhin (or Cohen) established what would be the first and largest Jewish-Arab college of its kind. Children of the small Jewish community in Beirut (around a thousand at the time) were taught Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, French, German and other foreign languages.

Kuhin and Shehayber (who was either Jewish or Christian, the records are not clear) even set up a Jewish-Arab theater on the same premises in Achrafieh. People from all sects came to the often-packed theater to watch Arabic adaptations of Moliere, as well as original plays performed in Hebrew, and sometimes French and Turkish. In many ways, the Beirut Jewish-Arab Theater was a response to the classic misrepresentation of the Jew in European theater.

Ironically, it was in the city of Beirut in the 19th century that Jewish characters transcended stereotypes and found depth to become the protagonists of European tales hostile to Jews in their original versions. It was not uncommon for a Jewish actor on the stage of the Beirut Jewish theater to quote Koranic expressions and Arabic poems, and mix French with Hebrew.

The whereabouts of what was the Jewish school is now a mystery. The information above was taken from a single article written by P.C. Sadgrove and published in 1992 in the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Sadgrove said the plays are now in the possession of the Abulafia family in Israel. The plays interested Sadgrove because to him they were an affirmation that, at the height of the Arab renaissance, Arab Jews were committed to “broader cultural, social and political values of parallel Arab and Syrian identities.”

This cultural participation was not confined to Lebanon. Around the same time in Egypt, Yaaqoub Sannouh, an Egyptian Jew who was also a member of Jamaleddine al-Afghani’s Islamic nationalist circle, was calling himself the “Egyptian Moliere.” His plays were aimed at a general Egyptian audience, and he played a prominent role in the development of the Egyptian dramatic tradition.

In fact, Egyptian Jews are acknowledged to have played important roles in Egyptian culture, specifically theater, cinema, music, the printing industry and the Arabic press. It is well known that Um Kulthoum in Egypt never performed without Daoud Hosni, an Egyptian musician who was Jewish.

In Iraq, we find a multitude of different Jewish authors making similarly important contributions. In fact, until 1948, we could still find outspoken authors like Murad Faraj in Egypt advocating Egyptian nationhood based on equality and fraternity, and Murad Mikhael in Iraq writing patriotic stories entitled He Died for his Country, and She Died for Love.

Kuhin’s school in Beirut was replaced by what some Lebanese still remember as the “Alliance.” The “Alliance Israelite Universelle” was the first international Jewish organization of its kind. Founded in Paris in 1860 by a group of liberal French Jews, it believed that emancipation of the Jews would come through education (L’Emancipation par l’Instruction).

By the turn of the 20th century, there were over 100 Alliance schools across the world in most of the cities with Jewish communities. The schools taught over 26,000 students.

The Alliance’s effect on Arab Jews was seen and denounced by Zionists, who abhorred Jewish integration into Arab society and accused the Westernized Jewish schools in the Levant of weakening the racial awareness of Middle Eastern Jews. Yehuda Nini from the Institute of Contemporary Jewry in Jerusalem said the Alliance schools “paved the way for a gradual alienation from Jewish tradition and Jewish nationalism, and for the perception of Western lands, rather than the land of Israel, as destinations for migration.”

Many Zionist authors argued the Jewish Arabs were only superficially “Arabized.” Zionist writers like Itamar Levin and Norman Stillman generally minimized the role Jews played in Islamic civilization and Arab culture.

The story of the Jewish school in Beirut and the Alliance contradict this version of history. It shows a degree of cultural integration that could have lasted until the present had it not been for militant Zionism, which sought to remove Jewish Arabs from their natural setting and create a new kind of Israeli Jew.

Ben Gurion said: “We do not want the Israelis to be Arabs. It is our duty to fight against the spirit of the Levant that ruins individuals and societies.”

But the spirit of the Levant gave the Jews a voice. After all it was in Beirut, not in the Yishuv (Palestinian Jewry), and certainly not in Europe, that a biblical play called The Sacrifice of Isaac was performed in the 19th century. One night in 1883, the characters of Abraham, his wife Sara, and Hagar, the bondmaid, stood together on stage with his son Isaac, ancestor of the Jews, and Ismail, ancestor of the Arabs.
(c) 2003 THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.
Date: 09/10/2003
Publication: Daily Star

Lital Levy, is an American Post-Doctoral researcher of Iraqi-Jewish descent. She is completing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley; her thesis is the participating of mashriqi Arab Jews in the modern Arabic and Hebrew renaissance movements i.e. Nahada and Haskalah. She is concurrently pursuing a Post-Doctorate degree at Harvard University.

Peace and greetings to all the viewers,
I am a doctoral student in the U.S. researching the role of Arab Jews in
the nahda (the modern Arabic literary renaissance) and I am looking for
information about the following Beiruti Jews who played a role in this
movement:

• Esther Azhari Moyal (and her husband Shim’on Moyal and son ‘Abdallah
Nadim Moyal)

• Rabbi Zaki Kuhin (Cohen), founder of Tifereth Israel/ al-Madrasa
al-Isra’iliya al-Wataniya, and his son, the writer Selim Zaki Kuhin
(Cohen)

• The writer Selim Eliahu Mann (also a publisher and the founder of the
newspaper al-’Alam al-Isra’ili

I have a very small amount of information about the Kuhins and Mann, and
there are considerable gaps in my knowledge of the Moyals. If you are a
descendant of one of these Beiruti Jews or if you know of a
descendant, please contact me! I am also interested in learning about any
other Jews from Lebanon or Syria who took part in the nahda, especially in
the late 19th century. Very little has been recorded about the history of
Jews in the modern Arabic movement. Your knowledge is very valuable.
Thank you!

Contact Information:
Lital Levy
Harvard Society of Fellows
78 Mt. Auburn St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
lital@berkeley.edu or llevy@fas.harvard.edu