Dec 1, 2015

BAGHDAD — In Baghdad’s Sadr City lies a cemetery of some 4,000 Jewish tombs and graves. There are only a few visitors, and silence predominates. Most of the Jewish families who buried their dead in the cemetery's five dunams (1.2 acres) left Iraq during 1950-51. In July, Ali al-Allaq, a member of the parliamentary Religious Endowments and Affairs Committee, had reported that only nine Jews remained in Iraq. In 1941, they had numbered some 130,000. Commenting on the small number of Jews left in 2008, Stephen Farrell wrote in The New York Times, “In the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan,” referring to the group of 10 men needed to perform certain rituals.

In June, committee Chairman Abdel Azim al-Ajman said that representatives of Iraqi Jews had held meetings with parliamentarians to discuss the issue of Iraqi social peace. Talking about Iraqi Jews remains a sensitive matter in Iraq even though the current political turmoil has strengthened Iraqis’ nostalgia for a past when Muslims and Jews lived as neighbors.

Inside the rusty gate of the Jewish cemetery, seldom used footpaths wind around Hebrew-inscribed tombs made of cement and sand and now covered with dust. “Some Muslims visit the cemetery seeking the blessing of a holy man buried here known as Mr. Blaibel, whose lineage is said to go back to the Prophet Moses,” Umm Essam, a 65-year-old Muslim woman, told Al-Monitor. “I visit this place every now and then to light candles. There are Muslims who visit [Blaibel's] grave because it grants a lot of their wishes.” Although a controversial issue in Islam, visits to graves of figures considered to be holy is a common practice. Moses is a prophet in Islam, so his descendant, Blaibel, would be of importance to Muslims who make such pilgrimages. It is believed that these figures help prayers be answered.

Umm Essam is an example of the old Iraqi spirit of coexistence, which stands out in these days of turmoil. Also crossing Iraq's religious divides is Ziad Mohammed, a Muslim who belongs to the family that oversaw the Jewish cemetery in the 1960s. When his father died in the early 1980s, Ziad inherited this responsibility. He guards the cemetery and helps what few visitors there are.

Mohammed told Al-Monitor, “Muslims visiting this Jewish cemetery exhibit the spirit of tolerance among the people of Iraq and the respect among people of different faiths. … Despite the apparent neglect of the cemetery, no one has violated its sanctity even during the sectarian strife of 2005-07. … An expatriate Jew visited the cemetery in 2003 after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He visited his family’s tombs and said that most Jews were afraid to visit Iraq both during the rule of the former Iraqi regime and now because of the volatile security situation in the country.”