The Forgotten Jewish Refugees-A Reality Check

May 8, 2010
By Nurit Greenger

When the "enlightened" world speaks about refugees, the only refugees that come to mind are the Arabs refugees who, following their leaders blazing rhetoric, left Israel with the hope that the Jews will lose the war the Arab nations launched on the fledgling new Jewish state, with the hope that few weeks later they would be able to return to a Jew free country.
NO ONE ever talks about the close to One Million Jewish refugees who were expelled from the Arab countries in the early 1950's. No one talks about the fact that had there was no State of Israel then, One Million more Jews would have expired.

Thankfully, there was already Israel where these Jewish refugees found safe sanctuary and could establish their new home.

After the Holocaust, the forgotten Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish refugees is the world's second greatest injustice to Jews the world choose to ignore.
Whereby in 1948 One million Jews lived in the Arab countries, today their count total only approximately Forty Thousands.

So we DO NOT FORGET, film producer Steven Spielberg in collaboration with Yad-Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority and the Holocaust memorial of the Jewish people in Israel, have founded a program to put on record the stories of all the Holocaust survivors.

It is now time to take a comparable action and record the stories of the Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish refugees who fled their homes in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and, Libya, leaving behind enormous wealth and hundreds, if not thousands, of years of most significant and rich Jewish history in Arab lands.

The living witnesses of the expulsion of the Jews from all Arab countries, which took place from 1949 to mid-1950's, are now in their late 70's-80's and time is running out for them to put on record this part of sad Jewish history, to record our story.

Please put on world's record our Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish story so when we bring our case in front of the world's Human Rights bodies and the American Congress and they tell us that there is an Arab refugee issue to settle, in turn we can present to them our Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish refugee issue that requires even handed treatment and must be equally settled.

Just like we have put the Holocaust record straight, our duty is now to also put the Jewish refugees from all the Arab counters' record straight.
Let us take action before it is too late.