Remembering Jewish exodus from Muslim lands
November 30 is the official day the State of Israel marks for the first time as the national day of commemoration for Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran, based on a law sponsored by MK Shimon Ohayon (Yisrael Beiteinu) and passed this summer by the Knesset. The date has a special meaning – it is the day after November 29, the day in 1947 that the United Nations General Assembly approved the partition plan for the Palestine Mandate and the creation of a Jewish state. November 30, the day after the decision, is the day the Arabs started their concerted attacks on the Jews.
“The Arab nations did not accept the UN partition plan, and the riots against the Jews started. We want to remember this day as the Nakba [catastrophe in Arabic, used to refer by Palestinians to Israel’s Independence Day] Day of the Jews of Arab lands,” Kahlon told Haaretz. “It is not just the Nakba of the Palestinians – it is also our Nakba, Jews of Arab lands who were expelled and slaughtered.”
Almost a million Jews lived in Arab and Muslim countries in 1948 when Israel was founded. The largest Jewish community was in Morocco, with 250,000 Jews. Today are only a few tens of thousands of Jews left in all the Arab countries together.
Kahlon was born in 1938 in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. The city had a Jewish population of 40,000 until 1948. His father, Shalom Kahlon, came to Tripoli from Al Khums (also known as Khoms), a town in northwest Libya on the Mediterranean Sea. There Shalom met his wife, Margalit Gita Fadlon. One of his uncles was the head of the Jewish community in Zuwara, on the sea near the Tunisian border. One of his ancestors was the famous rabbi Binyamin Kahlon.
Kahlon’s mother was killed in the Holocaust of Libyan Jews in 1942. “They came to take my father to the labor camps. My mother did not want to open the door. The Germans and the Italian fascists hit the door, my mother fell and died a day later,” he recounted.
Later the family fled Tripoli with the help of bribes and found refuge in Zuwara. “The Jews already did not feel safe in Libya, but continued to live [their lives], build and work. In 1945 133 of them were murdered in the pogroms in Tripoli, in which synagogues were burnt down and hundreds of Jewish businesses were destroyed,” he added.
Ofer Aderet