Point of No Return

In the bomb shelter, thinking of an earlier Purim – in Baghdad

bataween | Posted on 2 March 2026 | No Comments |

This Purim, as Israelis take refuge from Iranian drones and missiles, Sarah Sassoon sat with her dog and children in her Jerusalem shelter, dreaming of baking the traditional Iraqi Purim foods her grandmother would have made in Baghdad, such as ‘cheese sambusak’. By Purim of 1951, her grandparents had registered to leave for Israel. Read her Substack column:

*Children have been coming into Sarah Sassoon’s bomb shelter dressed in their Purim costumes*

In Iraq, Purim is called Id al-Megillah — the festival of the Scroll. As they signed their names and surrendered their citizenship, ending a 2,600-year Babylonian Jewish presence, did they think they are signing up for a new chapter in the same story?

Today, more than half of Israel’s population descends from the nearly one million Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries in the twentieth century — as my family did.

Now we sit in shelters and feel the reverberations of Iranian missiles exploding overhead, most intercepted by the Iron Dome. Purim parties are held underground. Mothers bring children dressed as princesses and superheroes, and a sweet baby lion. Many come alone; their husbands have been called up to serve. WhatsApp groups of soldiers’ mothers pulse with supportive messages — to stay strong together.

Our sons and daughters stand on the borders of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Judea and Samaria. Each person protecting, in their own way, what they love.

Last night, between sirens, I hear the neighbors’ singing Hebrew songs, a violin threading through the cold night air.

Our flag bears the Shield of David.

Our miracle, like in Persia, is that we can defend ourselves.

When I walk to the corner shop — still open — to buy flour and mozzarella for my grandmother’s cheese sambusek, I know I am baking more than food.

I am baking memory.

I am baking exile and return.

I am baking the stubborn Jewish story that we live from generation to generation.

Am Yisrael Chai

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Paris loses another symbol of Tunisian-Jewish life

bataween | Posted on 2 March 2026 | No Comments |

With the death of the owner of restaurant ‘Bob of Tunis’, another icon of Tunisian-Jewish life in Paris has been lost. Khamous Attal, the restaurant proprietor, has passed away aged 80. (With thanks: Véronique) :

*Hamous Attal, standing on the right, with customers at his restaurant ‘Bob of Tunis’*

Generations of customers enjoyed Attal’s stews, Tunisian briks and shakshouka. The restaurant, opened in the 1980s in the rue Richer in Montmartre, was a popular meeting point for Tunisian Jews and other Maghrebi exiles.

‘Bob of Tunis,’ which closed down in the autumn of 2025, was famous for the antiquated tuna tins in its window. The always-smiling Attal was a former high-performing boxer. “He left his mark in this part of Montmartre which he loved so much,” says the mayor of the 9th arrondissement, Delphine Bürkli. “The street will never be the same.”

She has decided to erect a plaque in memory of Bob of Tunis and its owner.

Iranian regime flips Purim story : ‘the Jews plotted a genocide’

bataween | Posted on 28 February 2026 | 1 Comment |

The Islamic Republic claims that the Purim story is a false historical account: for them, the Jews were not targeted for genocide, but Mordechai schemed to install Esther as queen and caused the king to approve a massacre by the Jews of 77,000 Iranians. Esther and Mordechai’s tombs at Hamadan have become a magnet for anti-Jewish protests. Simone Saidmehr writes in The Forward:

*Inside the shrine of Esther and Mordechai at Hamadan*

Each year, in the weeks before Purim, a familiar narrative begins circulating through regime-sponsored media, school lectures, television programs and academic articles. “I saw it in a lot of blog posts when blogs were a thing. I see it in regime media. It’s really everywhere,” said Thamar E Gindin, author of The Book of Esther – Unmasked.

The Book of Esther does not end gently. Its climactic scenes depict sanctioned violence against the enemies of the Jews. But it is widely considered not to be a verifiable historical account, and there is no independent Persian record of the events it describes.

According to Gindin, many prominent analysts, specifically well-known Iranian political commentator Ali Akbar Raaefi-Pour, push the idea that the narrative is that the story told in the Book of Esther is a false account of historical events. For them, the real historical story of Purim is that Mordechai manipulated the king into banishing Queen Vashti and installing Esther as part of a scheme. Haman sought to expel the Jews because they were oppressing others, but Esther and Mordechai ultimately secured royal approval for the Jews to kill 77,000 Iranians.

Some even link Purim to Sizdah Bedar, the Iranian spring picnic day, claiming that Persians commemorate the day Iranians fled their homes to escape a Jewish massacre by gathering outdoors.

Despite the efforts of Iranian Jews to demonstrate allegiance to the regime and hatred of Israel, the tomb of Esther and Mordechai has repeatedly become a stage for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish protests.

As early as 2011, demonstrators hung a banner on the fence reading “the Holocaust of 77,000 Iranians” and burned Israeli flags. After the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023, the mausoleum was again a magnet: Protesters burned Israeli flags and waved Palestinian and Basij militia flags. During that time, calls circulated on Iranian social media to convert the tomb into a museum commemorating alleged Jewish crimes against Iranians.

In the years following, Jewish Iranians making pilgrimages to the site have been met with the sight of a Palestinian flag hanging from the entrance gate.

More recently, after an Israeli strike killed seven IRGC commanders in Damascus in 2024, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the site.

Meanwhile, attempts to push back on the official Purim story have led to arrests of even foreign visitors, according to Gindin, who recounted that several years ago, two American Jewish tourists were detained: “They wrote graffiti in Iran that said ‘Death to Haman.’”

So long as renewed military strikes don’t shut the country down, the megillah will be read in synagogues on Purim in distinctively Iranian style, with limited booing for decorum purposes. Costumes will be omitted (a custom that reflects Iran’s modesty norms), and instead of mishloach manot, some will prepare halva. Despite Iran being officially alcohol-free, Jews will be permitted to drink inside their homes for religious purposes.

But they will also continue to play a careful game, showing loyalty to the state in an attempt to secure their own safety.

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Moroccan lambasts Arab colonialism

bataween | Posted on 27 February 2026 | No Comments |

Adil Faouzi is a journalist for Moroccan World News. He also has a blog on the Times of Israel. This one lambasts Arab colonialism, praises Israel’s tolerance, and the tendency of authoritarian media to use Israel’s freedom of speech against it. Yet while his article is a stinging critique of Arabism, he is a loyal defender of the king and has accused another admirer of Israel, Mustapha Ezzarghani, of attacking Morocco’s ambassador to Washington for not doing the United States’ bidding.

*Adil Faouzi: loyal to the Moroccan king*

In 636 CE, Arab armies under Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab conquered Jerusalem. Within sixty years, the Umayyad Caliphate constructed the Dome of the Rock in 691 CE and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 705 CE – directly on top of the Temple Mount, directly on the ruins of the holiest site in Judaism, directly on the foundation stones where Jewish worship had occurred for a millennium before Muhammad was born.

This was not coincidence. It was the deliberate architectural assertion of supremacy – the same practice every empire in history has employed: you conquer a people, you build your shrine on the rubble of theirs, and you declare the land was always yours. The Romans did it. The Spanish did it in Tenochtitlan. The Umayyads did it in Jerusalem. The only difference is that when Arabs did it, the modern world decided it wasn’t colonialism.

And here is what makes the hypocrisy not merely historical but ongoing, not merely intellectual but structurally breathtaking: Israel, the Jewish state, the country that every Arab government and half the world’s activist class accuses of religious extremism and territorial supremacism – that state has not demolished the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It has not removed the Dome of the Rock. It has not even claimed sovereign worship rights on its own holiest site.

Since capturing the Temple Mount in 1967, Israel has maintained the status quo under which the Jordanian-administered Waqf controls daily religious affairs, Muslims pray freely, and Jews are prohibited from praying on the mount – prohibited from praying on the very site where their temples stood for a thousand years before Islam existed.

There are Jewish extremists who dream of rebuilding the Temple. Israel has restrained them, policed them, arrested them, and enforced a policy that privileges Muslim worship on a Jewish holy site in a Jewish state. Name one Arab or Muslim country that has extended one tenth of that restraint toward a religious minority’s sacred site. Name one. The silence that follows is the sound of a civilization that knows the answer but cannot say it – because saying it would require dismantling every accusation it has ever made.

The Arab colonization of the Middle East and North Africa is not ancient history confined to textbooks. It is the living, breathing political reality of the modern region.

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Ahmed al-Khalidi: the settler colonial lie

UAE Muslim: ‘Jewish refugees from Arab countries must be heard’

bataween | Posted on 27 February 2026 | No Comments |

This Instagram video by Louay al-Shareef makes the case for the 850,000 Jewish refugees driven from Arab lands. Al-Shareef, who is based in the UAE, is one of a handful of Muslims who are increasingly outspoken on social meda in their advocacy for Jews and Israel.

Al-Shareef declared: ” The world forgot the Jewish refugees of the Muslim world. It shouldn’t. As a Muslim, I never wanted to see a Palestinian or Jewish refugees. It’s time these stories are heard.”

The video garnered 98,000 views among what is predominantly a youthful audience. Some of the comments, by the descendants of Jewish refugees, give detailed accounts of the persecution suffered by Jews in Egypt and Iraq.

Click here to see the video.

Last Saudi Jew passes away

bataween | Posted on 26 February 2026 | No Comments |

David Shuker, known as the “last Jew from Saudi Arabia,” has passed away aged 82.

*Jews in Najran were allowed to carry weapons*

Resident in Israel, he died without ever being allowed to return to the land where he was born.

Shuker ‘s last wish was to be allowed to re-enter Saudi Arabia, but he was debarred from doing so.

Shuker was born in Najran, which came under Saudi rule for just 14 years until its Jews were airlifted to Israel. He wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal asking to be allowed to return before he died.

New tool helps decipher Iraqi-Jewish surnames

bataween | Posted on 26 February 2026 | No Comments |

By 1860, most Jews in Iraq, not only property owners, used surnames. The main source for genealogists is the Baghdad Register (528 pages). Other sources include lists of young men exempted from military service, a Baghdad burials ledger (1949- 2001) and recently-discovered issues of Ha-Dover, a Hebrew language newspaper published in Baghdad (1863-1871). A new tool called Transkribus reads handwritten text and converts it into printed text. Geneaologist Jacob Rosen- Koeningsbuch explains what collecting surnames can tell us about trends in migration in the journal Jewish Genealogy:

*A page from the Baghdad Register, the main source of Jewish surnames for genealogists*

What are the most important benefits of indexing the surnames of Baghdadi Jews? Perhaps most important, such an index provides a tool that can reveal the places of origin of some Baghdadi Jews. For example, plagues in 1741 and 1761 devastated Baghdad’s population and triggered mass emigration.

After a while, when the situation stabilized, the composition of the Jewish community began to change with the arrival of newcomers from surrounding regions. Thus, one finds in Baghdad in the last quarter of the 19th century surnames such as Laniado and Sethon (from Aleppo), Barazani (from Kurdistan), Bumbaili (form Bombay), Maslawi (from Mosul),Karkukli from (Kirkuk) Ajami, Dasht/Dashti, Shirazi, Mashadi, Rashti/Rishti, and Mizrahi (from Iran), and Shami (from Damascus).

When combined with similar surname indexes of Aleppo and Damascus the index is a useful tool to analyze the composition of the Jewish populations of Cairo and Alexandria in the 20th century. At the turn of the 20th century, both cities had about 10,000 Jews each. Following the “Young Turks Reform” in 1908, exemptions from military service in the Ottoman Army were nullified which meant that Jewish males were forced to be drafted into the army.The loss of military exemption privilege led many Jewish families to emigrate to Egypt, which was practically under British control and where Jews were not drafted. Then came World War 1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In less than 30 years the Jewish population almost quadrupled both in Cairo and Alexandria. Equipped with the indexes described above one can identify the Baghdadi, Aleppian and Damascene Jews there. The same is true for Beirut, Port Said, and even Kobe, Japan where there were many Jews from Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus.

Thus far, any list that was surveyed and researched has revealed new surnames. As the generation of Baghdadi born Jews is withering, as in other Levant communities, these indexes constitute an alternative genealogical source until the archives open, if ever.

To access the article, login to the Journal

More from Jacob Rosen-Koeningsbuch

Scholar writes comprehensive study of Berber Jews

bataween | Posted on 25 February 2026 | No Comments |

If you want to know more about the Jews who lived in the Berber (Amazigh) regions of Morocco you can do worse that read this academic study in Eurasian Review by the scholar Mohamed Chtatou. It ranges widely over music, language, and pilgrimages to ‘saints’ tombs. The need to document their culture and history is all the more urgent now that these communities have disappeared. (With thanks: Boruch)

The Jewish presence in North Africa constitutes one of the longest continuous diasporic experiences in Jewish history, with communities potentially predating both Christianity and Islam in the region (Hirschberg, 1963; Stillman, 1979). While scholarly attention has focused primarily on urban Judeo-Arabic speaking populations and their interactions with Arab-Islamic civilization, the extensive integration between Jewish communities and Amazigh (Berber) populations—particularly in rural, mountainous, and desert regions—has received comparatively limited systematic analysis (Chtatou, 2020, August 9 ; Schroeter, 2008). This gap persists despite evidence suggesting that substantial Jewish populations spoke Berber languages as their primary vernacular and participated deeply in Amazigh cultural systems (Camps, 2002; Chetrit, 2007).

The near-total emigration of North African Jewish communities following the establishment of Israel (1948-1967) and regional political instabilities resulted in the dissolution of these integrated societies and the dispersal of populations whose cultural practices embodied centuries of synthesis (Laskier, 1994). This demographic transformation simultaneously created urgent imperatives for documentation and preservation while generating new diasporic contexts in which Judeo-Amazigh cultural elements could be maintained, transformed, or abandoned (Ben-Ami, 1998).

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Israeli land registration reform corrects anomaly

bataween | Posted on 24 February 2026 | No Comments |

A recent move by Israel to reform land registration in Area C of the West Bank has been slammed by the media as ‘annexation’. It was to correct a discriminatory legal anomaly, argues Honest Reporting, and does not mean that Israel is extending sovereignty over the area:

*New building in Beitar Illit in Area C*

As detailed in a recent legal analysis, between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan controlled the area, it halted land registration and imposed restrictions that prevented non-Arabs from registering land ownership in the territory. The freeze left vast areas in legal limbo, without clear, updated ownership records.

When Israel took control of the West Bank in 1967, it did not complete a comprehensive land settlement process. For decades, registration remained partial or frozen, creating uncertainty for both Palestinian and Israeli residents. That uncertainty has fueled disputes, litigation, and political accusations from all sides.

The Jordanian regulations barring Jews from legally registering land ownership in the territory were based on nationality and identity. In other words, Jews were categorically excluded because they were Jews.

By contrast, inside Israel proper, Arab citizens can and do register land in their names. Property registration is not restricted based on ethnicity or religion. And that’s how it should be.

Critics who describe Israel’s move as inherently racist rarely acknowledge that the pre-existing framework effectively codified discrimination against Jews.

So the cabinet decision that seeks to resume and systematize land registration under Israeli administration is correcting a historic discriminatory flaw. Resuming land registration does not, in itself, transfer sovereignty. It creates formal records of ownership in an area whose final status remains subject to negotiation.

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West Bank law repeals death penalty for land sales to Jews

Turkish blood libel display gets no condemnation

bataween | Posted on 23 February 2026 | No Comments |

There has been no public condemnation from local authorities to an antisemitic public installation in Antalya, Turkey. The absence of a clear response seems to indicate that antisemitic rhetoric is moving into the public space. Report in the Jerusalem Post:

*International figures including Jeffrey Epstein, Benjamin Netanyahu and Michael Jackson are shown consuming the organs of Palestinian children*

A graphic public installation erected on Tuesday outside a school and educational center in Antalya, Turkey, has drawn sharp condemnation for reviving one of history’s oldest and most dangerous antisemitic myths.

Images circulating on social media show a staged scene. Prominent Israeli and international figures appeared seated around a table, consuming the organs of Palestinian children. The display included representations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and late pop icon Michael Jackson.

The installation reportedly featured bloodied childlike figures placed on the table. Dollar bills were scattered across the scene. An Israeli flag hung above the display.

The imagery unmistakably echoed the medieval blood libel — the false accusation that Jews murdered children for ritual purposes or consumed their blood. That myth has historically fueled violence against Jewish communities.

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