NY Iraqi Jews Celebrate Passover

April 18, 2003

Source: The Associated Press

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20030418/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraqi_jews_passover_2

On April 18, 2003 The Associated Press reported that "as the Iraqi Jews of Congregation Bene Naharayim gathered for Passover dinner, the conversation often drifted to a country they left behind and what the future has in store for their homeland... 'We heard they celebrated Passover in Baghdad for the first time in years,' said S. Sehayek, who fled the Iraqi capital in 1974... Iraq's Jews began to leave in droves in the 1940s as Nazi-inspired pogroms swept through the country. After Israel was founded in 1948, more than two-thirds of Iraq's Jews packed up and left."