The family and its names

The father of the family was Menashe ben Yosef Sharabani; the mother was Georgia, daughter of Ezra (her family name is unclear in the recording, possibly Shilo). They married in Baghdad in 1921. Three daughters came first: Louise (also called Aliza), Juliet, and Hilla. Then three sons: Nissim, called Nissim Kaduri; Ephraim, called Ephraim Kamal; and Shaul, called Shaul Edward.

Every child carried two names. Ephraim explains it both ways in the interview: the second names honored the father's brothers Kaduri, Ephraim, and Shaul, all of whom had died, and a name like Kamal was an Arabic name, given, as he puts it, "to confuse the enemy." Kaduri was also the name of the grandfather of Ephraim's future wife, which made Nissim's name a family bridge. Both Ephraim and Nissim later named sons Ezra, after their maternal grandfather Ezra, whom Ephraim knew.

On the family name itself: Iraqi Jewish families were usually named for the towns they came from. Someone from Mandali was called Mandalawi, from Basra Basrawi, from Hilla Hillawi, from Kirkuk Kirkukli, from Mosul Mosulawi. Sharabani comes from Sha'raban, a town near the Persia-Iraq border. Ephraim does not know who in the family lived there or who first came to Baghdad; the family was in Baghdad for as long as anyone could say. He notes there are many unrelated Sharabani families in Israel, including a rabbi and building contractors in Ramat Gan.

Menashe's decade in Palestine

Menashe was born in Iraq and was conscripted into the Ottoman army as a young man (the transcript gives both "1910" and a garbled earlier year). His service took him to Ottoman Palestine, and he remained there from about 1910 to 1920. He married there and had two daughters and a son. His wife died in Tiberias of malaria. In 1920 he returned to Baghdad a widower with nothing, as Ephraim puts it, without a lira in his pocket. The interview does not say what became of the children of the first marriage.

In Baghdad he married Georgia. Her brothers helped set him up with a small shop, a kind of small grocery selling all sorts of goods, and from it he supported a family of eight, barely: rent for the house, rent for the shop, taxes, and food. The family never owned a home in Iraq. Rent was expensive; Ephraim gives the example of 150 pounds sterling a year to an Arab landlord, more than the family could carry alone, so houses were often shared, two or even three families to a house, each paying a share.

A modest childhood

Ephraim is direct about the family's means: they grew up modestly. Others in Iraq had wealth; his father, back from the Turkish army, had none. The eldest sister, Louise, did not attend regular school, as most girls then did not, but she studied at a sewing school, which he calls a very important education for girls. The younger sisters had several years of schooling. Nissim finished the six-year elementary school. Ephraim continued through high school, eleven years in all. Shaul, the youngest, finished elementary school; by the time his turn came, the emigration of 1950 was underway.

In 1947 Menashe fell ill. There were no health funds as in Israel; a doctor's home visit or a medic's visit cost a great deal, and the illness strained the family for years. He was still unwell when they came to Israel.

Schools

Iraqi schooling ran six years elementary, three years intermediate, and two years of high school, eleven years, with government examinations and certificates at each stage. A high school certificate exempted its holder from army service and opened study abroad in Syria, Lebanon, London, or the United States for those with money.

Ephraim studied only in the Jewish community's schools, and finished at the Shammash school, the community high school where every subject, physics, chemistry, algebra, geometry, was taught in English. The Alliance school taught French alongside Arabic. The community schools taught Hebrew as well; the government schools did not, and there Jewish pupils learned the Quran like everyone else. Ephraim notes without rancor that the Quran contains chapters on Joseph, Abraham, and Isaac.

The Jewish community's institutions impressed him: synagogues every two hundred meters in the Jewish quarters, he says, and fine schools, some founded by a widow in her late husband's name or by a widower in his wife's. The community supported its poor through organized charity.

Shabbat and the synagogue

Friday nights the family gathered: kiddush, songs, the grace after meals, and early to bed. Saturday began before dawn; synagogue at three thirty or four in the morning, home for breakfast, back for the afternoon prayer, home to eat, evening prayer, a light meal of cheeses, and the songs for the close of Shabbat.

The Shabbat food was what this site's food section describes: eggs set overnight on the coals together with stuffed chicken, the dish called t'beet; eggs in the morning, the t'beet itself at midday.

Of the three brothers, only Ephraim loved the synagogue. From age five or six he went with his father; Nissim and Shaul did not care for it. He remembers being ten or eleven at the afternoon prayer of Rosh Hashana when he raised his voice, and a congregant asked him to lead the prayers because his voice was beautiful. He declined: he was not yet bar mitzvah, and he could not.

Passover made at home

His mother began Passover a month early, the day after Purim. Wheat was taken to be milled and the flour brought home to make matza under the strictest care. Water was set aside in a place where nothing could touch it. The family raised a hen at home whose eggs were reserved for Passover alone. His mother made the date syrup, silan, herself, from purchased dates, for the seder, and made the wine herself, so that nothing should be less than strictly kosher. The festival had its own dishes, plates, and cups; after the second seder night they were gathered and stored for the next year.

Festivals and pilgrimages

On Shavuot, families visited the nearby shrine he calls Yehoshua Kohen Gadol, close enough to walk in about half an hour. The tomb of the prophet Ezekiel was a pilgrimage site as well, and Ezra the Scribe lay near Basra, some three hundred kilometers away.

On Tisha B'Av nearly all the Jews fasted, and the synagogue read kinot, laments, from morning to evening. Rosh Hashana ran two days, with prayers from before four in the morning until the shofar around ten; on those days no one was allowed to sleep, not even to doze, and some went house to house reading Psalms all day at homes holding memorial gatherings. Before Yom Kippur every member of the household did kapparot with a chicken; a family of eight or ten would donate two or three of the birds to the needy. Two days after Yom Kippur the sukkah went up, a large one, about four meters square, with four large sofa-like seats, its timbers kept ready from year to year.

The river

Summer vacation ran more than three months; the community schools resumed only after Sukkot. Boys took paid swimming lessons in the Tigris, ten lessons for a fee, and Ephraim would swim from six to seven thirty in the morning, a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from home.

In summer the river dropped and an island rose in mid-stream. Jews held parties there, he says, bringing orchestras; Arab fishermen caught fish, washed and split them, and staked them around a fire, masgouf, serving the diners, who drank arak until two or three in the morning. The revelers were mostly Jews; he remarks that the fishermen's livelihood depended on them. The family of Ephraim's future wife had a house on the riverbank; she was small then, but she remembered watching and hearing those nights. Ephraim and his brothers were too young to go.

These are the same river-island nights recorded in Savta's interview notes ("al jazra") and in Sasson Somekh's memoir. Three independent recollections of the same custom.

Neighbors

The family had Muslim neighbors and, as Ephraim tells it, good relations: "they loved us very much, and we had nothing bad with them." The neighbors' children would sometimes hit the Jewish children coming home from school, but the parents would not allow it and punished it when they saw it. The markets were shared; Arab vendors carried their goods in and sold to everyone. Kosher slaughter ran daily, since there was no refrigeration; meat unfit after inspection was sold to Arabs at half or quarter price, and before a multi-day holiday the timing of slaughter had to be planned around the days when slaughter was not permitted.

He is emphatic that in 1941 some Arab neighbors protected Jews. One neighbor stood with a rifle in hand and said that whoever came near, his blood was on his own head. "They guarded us," he says.

The Farhud, as the family lived it

Ephraim sets the scene with the politics as he remembers them: the pro-German leanings of the court and of a prime minister who moved against the British in 1941, a month of fear while there was no functioning government, and the return of the British at the end of it. His account of the kings (Ghazi, the regency for the young Faisal II, Nuri Said) is compressed and in places garbled in the recording, and is given here only in outline.

Then, on the eve of Shavuot 1941, with no government yet formed, the mob rose against the Jews. In his telling it lasted twenty-eight to thirty hours, and three to four hundred Jews were killed. Published histories generally estimate about 150 to 180 killed; his figure is his own recollection. Homes and shops were stripped. The wealthy were largely untouched because they lived at a distance from the old quarters. Afterwards the community's rabbinate organized relief; many Jews were left without homes or even clothes.

For the family it was direct: the shop was looted, and nothing was left, not bread for the eight people in the house. Their father could not go out, so Nissim, thirteen or fourteen, and Ephraim, twelve, went to the shop, sold what few things they could, and brought home a few coins. Their mother's brothers helped them through. Their father's relatives, Ephraim says flatly, did not look after them.

Nissim, the brother

Asked to describe Nissim honestly, Ephraim answers: he was not bad, but he was born the first son after three daughters, celebrated with a brit and a naming feast, and grew up indulged and used to being in charge. As a schoolboy he was kept after hours for discipline, and forced Ephraim to wait so they would walk home together; he made Ephraim carry his school bag, and Ephraim, out of fear or respect, he is not sure which word to use, carried it. Eventually a teacher told their father the school did not suit Nissim and he was moved to another school; Ephraim stayed. He sums up the difference simply: Nissim was stiff, and he himself got along with everyone.

Nissim finished elementary school and studied bookkeeping. He served three months in the Iraqi army, where commanders were hostile to Jews; the family paid fifty dinars, a lot of money then, as ransom in place of the two-year term, so the service amounted to pointless digging and filling at a base. A completed high school certificate would have exempted him entirely, as it did Ephraim.

Nissim and Shula

Nissim worked at a large Baghdad trading house. The firm's business included jute sacks, which became expensive whenever the Tigris rose and contractors bought them for sandbag levees, and which were also opened and sewn together in pairs to make larger sacks for exporting dates to London and elsewhere; Iraq, Ephraim notes, had thirty million date palms, with the trade running through the port of Basra.

Six or seven girls came to the warehouse to open and sew the sacks. Among them was Shula, and also women later known to the family in Afula (he names Saida and her husband's mother; the relationships are hard to follow in the recording). Shula's father had three daughters and no sons; he could not read, worked hard manual jobs, and earned little, so the daughters went out to work. Ephraim himself clerked in another warehouse of the same firm, which is how he came to know Shula and all the girls years before she became his sister-in-law.

Nissim noticed her and began to pursue her. The bond deepened; he loved her and she loved him, and they went out in secret. He obtained a driving license through a fixer for fifty dinars, not exactly legitimate, though he did learn to drive a little, and would take her on drives lasting hours. He sometimes came home tipsy, and Ephraim marvels that the police never caught him at the wheel.

When the government's 1950 law permitted Jews to renounce citizenship and leave, her parents and Shula registered. Before she left, he made her swear an oath that she would not become engaged or marry anyone else. They swore it between them. A few months later he reached Israel, and they married around Lag BaOmer, a few weeks before Shavuot, in 1951. The ceremony was held at the home of the chief rabbi of Afula.

Chronology note: a spring 1951 wedding implies Shula left Baghdad around 1950, which sits awkwardly with the notes' "left at seventeen" if her passport's 1935 birth year is exact. Iraqi documents of that era often carried estimated birth years. The records are kept side by side rather than reconciled.

In Israel the couple rented in Jerusalem, then in Petah Tikva, lived on Katznelson Street (rented or bought, he was not sure), and later sold and bought on Rothschild. Nissim worked first as a floor tiler and then in a textile factory until his retirement. When Ephraim built his own house in 1956, Nissim did the tiling, for pay, Ephraim adds, like anyone else.

Leaving Iraq

From 1948, before emigration was legal, the Zionist movement smuggled young people out through Basra to Persia and on to Israel. They hid by day and walked by night, in cold and rain, sometimes without food or water; some were caught by the Iraqi police and jailed, some were freed with bribes, and some died on the way of hunger and exposure. In Tehran the Jewish Agency kept a large building where the escapees were housed until aircraft took them to Israel.

In 1950 the government announced that Jews who renounced citizenship could leave, and the mass departure began; a follow-up law froze the property, funds, plots, and houses of those who registered, so people who had been wealthy arrived with nothing. Flights first ran through Cyprus and later went directly to Israel. When registration slowed during a lull, Ephraim says, the movement itself threw bombs at Jewish sites to push people to leave. This is his assertion as given; who carried out the Baghdad bombings of 1950 to 1951 remains disputed among historians. Some twenty to thirty thousand Jews stayed behind; after the revolutions of 1958 and after, and under Saddam Hussein, they lived in fear, and in 1972 those remaining were able to leave through Turkey or Persia.

Asked whether he was sad to leave or felt danger, he answers: "No. We came to Israel with joy. With joy, because we knew this is our place." He also describes, without contradiction, how embittered many arrivals were at losing everything they had.

Austerity Israel

The family registered and came with the mass aliyah of 1950 to 1951. Israel was absorbing a hundred thousand and more immigrants within a year: tents, transit camps, and rationing. Ephraim's first wage in 1950 was thirty Israeli lira a month, a lira a day. Under the austerity regime he recalls three eggs a week per adult, a quarter kilo of meat a month, chicken almost never, and bananas and carrots reserved for children; a grocer once refused to sell him a single carrot. Moving food between towns required a permit, and half a kilo of carrots or a packet of margarine could be confiscated on the road.

Ephraim worked in the post office in Afula as an exchange clerk, which gave him working relations with the supply offices, so he could obtain transfer permits. He later moved to the telegraph office in Tel Aviv. Immigrants with foreign credentials, doctors, engineers, bookkeepers, teachers, were absorbed quickly if they had managed to bring their papers; the rest took whatever work there was.

Ephraim and Tikva

Ephraim's wife Tikva was family: her mother was his cousin, and her grandfather was Kaduri, the same uncle whose name Nissim carried. His eldest sister Louise, living in Amishav, proposed the match and brought Tikva's mother to Afula to see how people regarded him. Tikva was training as a kindergarten teacher in Beer Sheva and at first refused to marry; her father, who knew Ephraim, pressed the match against other suitors with the words that the son of Menashe was the most suitable. They married in 1953, still under austerity: the supply office allotted sixty eggs, two kilos of sausage, and two kilos of margarine, and the caterer made small sandwiches for the wedding guests, which Ephraim describes, with a straight face, as a splendid huppa.

They lived in the Amishav transit camp; she worked less than a year as a kindergarten teacher until pregnancy and the unpaved distances ended it. In 1956 he bought land and built his house, the one Nissim tiled.

Wars and losses

Ephraim served seventy to eighty days in the 1956 Sinai war and sixty to seventy days in the Six-Day War of 1967; Nissim was called up for reserves as well. In 1967, just after the war, their father Menashe was on his deathbed; Ephraim was released from the army, the family celebrated his son's bar mitzvah, and two days later Menashe died. Their mother Georgia died in 1976, and the eldest sister Louise in 1977.

The grandmother who knew it by heart

Ephraim knew his maternal grandfather Ezra, for whom the family's Ezras are named, and he knew his maternal grandmother for about ten years. Her eyes hurt once; she was taken to a doctor, treated, and came home blind. She was very wise and very learned, and knew the texts by heart. Every Shabbat the boy Ephraim walked to his uncle's house with a book, Song of Songs or other texts, and she taught him from memory, telling him he was the only one in the family with the head for it. Nissim, he says, had no inclination for it, and neither did Shaul. He was the only one.

Odds and ends

Scattered through the interviews: a relative (the connection is unclear in the recording) studied a year in Syria, then engineering at the University of Michigan, stayed to lecture there, and was about ninety at the time of the interview. Wealthy Jews built villas in the newer districts, Bab al-Sharqi, Karrada, and Baghdad al-Jadida, with gardens watered by channels dug from the river. Jews, he says, worked in trade and banking and avoided politics and farming; he jokes that they did not know what a hoe was. On Fridays at noon you would not see a Jew in the street; everyone was preparing for Shabbat.

How the interviews end

The last recording closes with goodbyes, blessings for a good week, and the interviewer promising to assemble everything Ephraim said, add photographs if he can find them, and put it online so the family can have it. This page is that promise, kept.