On the night before Pesach in 2003, I had little or no prospect of having a Seder. Or so it seemed.
I had just managed to gatecrash a bizarre meeting in the desert of Iraq beneath the world-famous Sumerian-built Great Ziggurat Step-Pyramid. It was at Ur; Ur of the Chaldees, or in Hebrew Ur Kasdim, the birthplace of Abraham.
American troops had just conquered nearby Nasiriyah, but had been frustrated by severe dust-storms in their drive towards Baghdad 200 miles to the north.
US troops in Iraq in 2003 (Getty Images)
General Jay Garner, who was assigned to be the first American ruler of Iraq once Baghdad had fallen, gave a remarkable speech inside a large tent to an assemblage of US forces and the leaders of rebel Iraqi groups battling Saddam Hussein.
He declared that this site, as Abraham’s birthplace, highlighted the great shared history of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and symbolised the start of unity and prosperity that, he said, would emerge for all three religions in the Land of Two Rivers.
A nice but supremely over-optimistic speech, I thought as I filed my newspaper story by satellite phone. I was feeling somewhat forlorn. My seemingly insoluble problem was: how to get back to Qatar in time to have a Seder.
By the time General Garner concluded the meeting, the C-130 Hercules that I had hitched a ride on from Kuwait to Nasiriyah had flown off. The sandstorm was so huge there was no way of getting to Nasiriyah, let alone to the southern Iraqi border, on to Kuwait City, and then by plane to Qatar.
I found a group of around 200 rebel soldiers camped nearby, and its leader Ahmed Chalabi offered me a camp-bed for the night. As I prepared for sleep I noticed the man next to me was unpacking his bag. To my astonishment, one item he was removing from his rucksack was a small bag marked: Tefillin. “You’re Jewish!” I exclaimed. “Me too.”
It turned out Harold Rhode was an American professor of Islamic History who had been contracted by the US Defence Department to liaise with Chalabi’s rebel group.
“We must be the only two Jews in the whole of southern Iraq,” I declared, incredulous at this odds-defying get-together. There were only around 30 Jews left in the whole country — the remnant of a Jewish presence in Iraq that stretched back at least 2,600 years.
“Where are you planning to have your Seder?” he asked me.
“How can I have one?” I responded glumly. “We’re stuck in the middle of a sandstorm in Iraq, and my Seder items are in my hotel in Qatar.” On pre-war trips to Qatar, where Centcom, the US and British nerve-centre of the war directorate, was situated, I had brought (or smuggled) enough items for a lonely hotel-bedroom Seder. Now they would seemingly go to waste.
“I have a great solution,” said Professor Rhode.“I flew in with a huge lot of Seder things, supplied to me by communities in the US and Britain.
"They want me to make the first communal kosher Seder in Baghdad since the Jews fled Iraq decades back. Well, I knew yesterday when they flew me up here for this meeting that we would never get to Baghdad in time for Pesach.
“All the Seder stuff,” he went on, “is stuck in the villa the American Defence Department has given me in Kuwait City. I’ll have a Seder there. But I’m missing something vital to a Seder: a guest. So now I’ve found a Seder guest: you!”
That sounded almost miraculous —except how would either of us get to Kuwait City in time for a Seder? “By helicopter,” he declared.
The sandstorm was abating and the next morning Rhode flew off in a US military helicopter en route to Kuwait.
But the Americans refused to take me, a mere foreign journalist.
Our correspondent Paul Cainer hands over rocket launcher(s) and a Kalashnikov to American soldiers after buying them in a Baghdad bazaar in October 2003. (Paul Cainer)
I managed to get a ride to Nasiriyah, where I found a driver who I paid (handsomely) to take our lives in our hands and get me as close as possible to the border nearly 200 miles to the south. I walked the last six miles along mine-infested desert roads, made it across the border, got a taxi to Kuwait City and reached Rhode’s villa before the sun set.
The Seder seemed particularly apt, with the liberation of an oppressed population in Iraq apparently only days away. It was made all the more fascinating when two other guests arrived.
One was a British diplomat, who was not Jewish. The other was the chief spokesman of the US forces, who was appearing on TV screens worldwide each day. It turned out that, although he had a Spanish-sounding name, he was in fact a Sephardi Jew who had been educated at a yeshivah in New York.
That night was indeed “different from all other nights”.
By the time the eight days of Pesach were over, British forces had captured Basra and American troops were nearing Baghdad. With two American journalists, I drove north on a good highway to the capital.
Saddam Hussein (Getty Images)
There, I encountered Rhode again. He had been tipped off about a large collection of Jewish objects in a basement at the massive headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police.
They had confiscated Jewish items over the years as a form of “ownership” over the Jews of Iraq, according to Rhode. The basement had been flooded because of American bombing, but Rhodes made a phone call to Natan Sharansky in Israel, who managed to persuade his friend, US Vice-President Dick Cheney, that the Jewish remnants were a priceless treasure that needed saving.
By then Rhodes had laid long segments of sodden Torah scrolls (and other documents) on the baking courtyard outside, to be dried off and repeatedly rolled to preserve the strips of parchment and their Hebrew writing.
The Pentagon flew the precious items to the US in a special cargo aircraft fitted with refrigeration.
The Iraqi government is demanding that all the Jewish items be returned to Baghdad, a move Rhode, now 73, is battling to prevent. He feels they will be discarded or stuck in another basement and abandoned.
Within weeks of the Coalition’s success in capturing Baghdad, the Jewish Agency had flown most of the city’s 30 Jews out to Israel. Years later, I met one of the remaining six Jews, and spent an emotional, uplifting Shavuot with her. But that’s another story.
It feels very painful to ponder that almost no Jews remain in a community that had existed and flourished for much of the time since the Babylonian exile.
Jews played a big role in modern Iraq. Heskell Sassoon, a finance minister in the relatively liberal government of the 1920s, is a good example.
An Iraqi politician, Mithal al-Alusi, last week told the Henry Jackson Society in London that Sassoon is still cited by Iraqis who battle widespread corruption as a role model for honesty and prudent financial management.
At one stage Jews made up a third of Baghdad’s population. When Jews fled Iraq after the Second World War, the national orchestra lost most of its musicians. Yet, sad to say, there is no museum or library to display to the people of Baghdad the massive contributions Jews made to their city and country.
But on seeing just how awful conditions became for the large Christian population of Baghdad and northern Iraq, and how their numbers dwindled, I realised in 2003 that Jews would have had no future in Iraq anyway. Yet Iraqi-born Jews and their descendants thrive, and play a significant role in Israel and in diaspora communities worldwide.
Twenty years after the fall of the tyrant Saddam, we intend to discuss the lessons of Iraq in depth at our Seder next week.
My surprise Seder in the desert provided a vital message: that an exodus of Jews, hard though it was, is far from the end of our ongoing and magnificent story.
