barminán

The Star of David made from barbed wire at the Rumbula mass murder site near Riga, Latvia; 1945. x  

The Rumbula Massacre took place on November 30th and December 8th in 1941 and involved the deaths of 25,000 Jewish persons at the hands of Einsatzgruppe and Latvian collaborators.  Aside from Babi Yar, it was the largest single loss of life in the Holocaust until the operation of the death camps.  24,000 of the victims of the Rumbula Massacre were Jewish people from the Riga ghetto and 1,000 of them were Jewish people from Germany who were brought to the area by train.

In the 1960′s, the Eichmann Trial as well as the Israeli military victories brought Holocaust commemoration to the forefront of issues.  In the Soviet Union the state newspapers mentioned the Jewish victims killed by the Nazis immediately following the end of World War II, but in later years this was edited to “Soviet citizens killed by the Fascists” with no mention of their Jewish background.

The “Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran” is a Memorial Day that is marked in Israel every year starting in 2014, on November 30 with the purpose of marking the departure and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran.

November 30 is the date that was chosen since it is symbolically the day following November 29, a day the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was adopted, and when many communities of Jews in Arab countries and Iran started to feel the pressure and hostility from their Arab and Persian neighbors and as a result of that were forced to leave their countries. It is based on a law sponsored by MK Shimon Ohayon (Yisrael Beiteinu) and passed in the summer of 2014 by the Knesset.

For many Mizrahi Jews in Israel it is considered to be a belated recognition of their collective trauma, after years of what many of them claimed to be the marking of European Jewry suffering only from the part of Israel, or the marking of Palestinian Nakba only from the part of the Arab countries.

The Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries or Jewish exodus from Arab countries was the departure, flight, expulsion, evacuation and migration, of 850,000 Jews, primarily of Sephardi and Mizrahi background, from Arab and Muslim countries, mainly from 1948 to the early 1970s. They and their descendants make up the majority of Israeli Jews.

A number of small-scale Jewish exoduses began in many Middle Eastern countries early in the 20th century with the only substantial aliyah coming from Yemen and Syria. Prior to the creation of Israel in 1948, approximately 800,000 Jews were living in lands that now make up the Arab world. Of these, just under two-thirds lived in the French and Italian-controlled North Africa, 15–20% in the Kingdom of Iraq, approximately 10% in the Kingdom of Egypt and approximately 7% in the Kingdom of Yemen. A further 200,000 lived in Pahlavi Iran and the Republic of Turkey.

The first large-scale exoduses took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from Iraq, Yemen and Libya. In these cases over 90% of the Jewish population left, despite the necessity of leaving their property behind. Two hundred and sixty thousand Jews from Arab countries immigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1951, accounting for 56% of the total immigration to the newly founded state.

Yemenite Jews from Aden arriving in Israel during Operation Magic Carpet (circa 1950)

Following the establishment of the State of Israel, a plan to accommodate 600,000 immigrants over four years, doubling the existing Jewish population, was submitted by the Israeli government to the Knesset. The plan, however, encountered mixed reactions; there were those within the Jewish Agency and government who opposed promoting a large-scale emigration movement among Jews whose lives were not in danger.

Later waves peaked at different times in different regions over the subsequent decades. The peak of the exodus from Egypt occurred in 1956 following the Suez Crisis. The exodus from the other North African Arab countries peaked in the 1960s. Lebanon was the only Arab country to see a temporary increase in its Jewish population during this period, due to an influx of Jews from other Arab countries, although by the mid-1970s the Jewish community of Lebanon had also dwindled. Six hundred thousand Jews from Arab and Muslim countries had reached Israel by 1972.

A new immigrant arriving in Israel from Morocco

the massacre began with arab youths throwing rocks at a group of jewish yeshiva students, with the first death occurring that night when some of those youths broke into the yeshiva to find shmuel rozenholtz, age 23, alone and studying, and killed him as he read [5]

the group went house to house, killing and mutilating and raping as many jews as they could come upon. at one point, they approached the son rabbi slonim, eliezer dan slonim, and told him that if he agreed to hand over all the ashkenazi yeshiva students who were sheltering in his house, then they would spare the sefardim from their attacks [6]. slonim, who was well known in the community for being an activist for improving the relations between the arab and jewish populations in the region, responded "we jews are one," and refused [7]. he and about 40 other jews (who had been davening (praying) at the time) were killed in that home [5]

at the end of the massacre, almost 70 jews lay dead (the counts are usually either 67 or 69, depending), and countless more were gravely wounded and raped, and many were left with life-altering mental and/or physical injuries from the event. this event marked the end of the mostly peaceful coexistence between arabs and jews in the city (though it was by no means a utopia) that had gone on for hundreds of years. it is important to remember, however, that "some 400 jews were saved by their arab neighbors" [8]

may the memories of those whose lives were lost on that day, and of the survivors of the massacre who have died since, be for a blessing to us all

Today in Jewish History (1994): The AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is bombed in a terrorist attack.  The attack killed 87 and injured over 100.  

Monument in memory of the Jews who were killed in the Farhud which took place in Iraq.  The monument is located in Ramat Gan, Israel; 2010. x

On this day in history, June 1st and 2nd in 1941, the Farhud, a pogrom, took place across Iraq and claimed the lives of over 700 Jewish people with more than a thousand injured.  The Farhud began because of a failed coup from Nazi sympathizing Officers in the Iraqi army.  Nazi Germany had also worked with Arab Nationalists and, through them, spread antisemitic propaganda through both Radio Berlin and local radio stations.  The failed coup, suspected Jewish collusion with British authorities [see antisemitic ‘duel loyalty’ trope], and antisemitic propaganda all mixed to create an explosion of violence against Iraq’s Jewish population - which by 1941 was over 150,000 strong.  The Iraqi Jewish community would all but end with Saddam’s rise to power, as the central government put restrictions on the life of Iraq’s Jewish population starting in 1948. Operation Ezra & Nehemia airlifted 120,000 Iraqi Jews out of the country in 1948 and brought them to Israel.

Because the article. The article. It says:

They are searching for evidence of Palestinian history in the West Bank – traces both ancient and recent of the thriving culture that has endured here for millennia, and the memorials that bear witness to the suffering of those who call this place home.

And lo!!

What did The Guardian manage to choose, out of the many stock photos Alamy offers, but a photo of a destroyed synagogue?

One built in the century after the Roman Empire's genocide of Jews?

The century after the Roman Empire subsumed the former Jewish state into a faceless new district named Syria Palestina? Named after the long-gone and much-hated Philistines?

A large, beautiful synagogue built after the Romans had destroyed the Temple? Built because synagogues now had to become the myriad wobbly centers of a rebuilt Jewish world?

What synagogue did they choose, but one from a village known to have been Jewish even in the Middle Ages, when the synagogue itself had already been destroyed?

And the fucking book review. That they chose this picture to illustrate. Seriously says what the authors searched for was

"traces both ancient and recent of the thriving culture that has endured here for millennia, and the memorials that bear witness to the suffering of those who call this place home."

The spelling of G-D with the omission/imperfection was noted before, this is not only a Jewish tradition but a pretty exclusively Jewish tradition, which is why it's such an obvious marker. This doesn't apply in reverse, some don't keep to it for a variety of reasons, but if it is present it's a pretty dead giveaway. There's also the more niche theological angle. See how he talked about the Covenants as eternal? This is very much not a Christian approach, as most version of Christianity consider the New Covenant (with their favourite dude Jesus involved) to have superceded/replaced the old. I will say, this is a much more niche tell. And lastly, Ephraim is a very Jewish name, straight out of the Torah as one of the Tribes. So there's a lot of tells here as being not-Christian, but it's not really

Now, the deeper bit here is why is this a touchy subject? Basically, Jewish stuff gets called Christian constantly. It is practically the foundation of Christianity and Islam, that they have ownership over Judaism, that they know how their holy texts should be read better than them, that they as a group have superceded the Jews. This is basically a constant background radiation that permeates much of the modern cultures influenced by those two. So you can see why someone who is, to the eyes of someone with some suface level knowledge, quite visibly Jewish being claimed as "Christian" humour might jab at a really sore spot? Especially around this time of year, given that it is approaching Passover and that is often taken as Appropriate Jewish Culture Time by certain Christian sects (Too long to get into, but TL:DR is that Passover Seders aren't even what Jesus would've celebrated, the Temple still existed then, modern Seders are a purely Jewish tradition postdating the split, very much not for Christians to take).

keep in mind that i'm using the words "(in)valid" and "(un)sound" here in their formal logic senses: a valid argument is one where the conclusion follows from the premises. a sound argument both is valid AND has evidence to support the truth of its premises. even if an argument is logically valid, it's not sound if you can't support the truth of the premises; and even if you have evidence for the premises, an invalid argument won't be sound either.

the reason it's so important to stay away from conspiratorial language is twofold:

one, it's literally just not even useful because it's fundamentally bad logic,

and two, if you don't fill in a specific value for the actor, someone else is very likely to fill one in for you, and that's one of the easiest ways to radicalize someone. if you're already primed to look for a target for your blame, all that a malicious actor has to do is aim you at their favorite target.