Every Shavuot eve, Yaakov Tzemach would tell his family and Kibbutz Be’eri members the story of the Farhud, the brutal pogrom carried out against the Jews of Iraq during the holiday in 1941. His family survived the massacre solely thanks to a neighbor, an older Muslim woman who physically blocked the way to their house and prevented the rioters from entering.
“We made Aliyah from Iraq to Israel so that Arabs wouldn’t be able to enter Jewish homes and murder us,” Tzemach explained to his kibbutz comrades and his family. After surviving the Farhud, he joined HeChalutz (“The Pioneer”), a Zionist youth movement, and made Aliyah to Israel to establish a home in Be’eri.
Over seventy years later, one of Yaakov’s sons, Doron, told me in tears how he recalled this quote on October 7 as he was hiding for many hours in the safe room of his home in the kibbutz. Shachar Tzemach, Doron’s son and Yaakov’s grandson, was part of Be’eri’s civilian emergency defense squad that Saturday. He took part in a heroic and desperate defensive battle for many hours, before he was eventually killed.
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The Farhud was an antisemitic pogrom which took place in Iraq on the eve of the festival of Shavuot, 1941. Taking place over the course of a few days, rioters looted Jewish homes and shops, while Jews in a number of Iraqi cities were cruelly murdered. The descriptions of survivors are horrific [WARNING: GRAPHIC – Y.I.]. They told of babies whose hands and feet were cut off in order to remove golden jewelry that had been hidden on their bodies. They witnessed acts of rape and abductions of young women who were never seen again.
The riots sped up the process of Iraqi Jewry’s departure and immigration to the Land of Israel with the aid of activists sent by the Zionist leadership based in the Holy Land. Professor Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, head of the Research Institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, explains that during this period, the kibbutz movement played a central role in Zionist activity in the Diaspora. The movement believed that Iraqi Jewry could play a significant part in the Zionist settlement of the country. The idea was to prepare Jewish-Iraqi youths for immigration and to provide training in skills that would be required in establishing new pioneering communes. From 1942, hundreds of young Iraqi Jews headed to the Land of Israel, with some of them forming settlement groups or joining training farms, where they waited for approval to go and establish new communities.
On the eve of Yom Kippur 1946, a settlement group of Jewish-Iraqi immigrants, who were known as the “Babylonian” group within the HeChalutz youth movement, realized their dream. Be’eri was originally established near Wadi Nahabir, a few miles west of the kibbutz’s location today, as one of 11 different settlement points that were set up that day, in a famous coordinated effort known as the “11 points plan”. Three settlement groups took part in the founding of Be’eri: one from the HaNoar HaOved movement, one from HaTzofim Bet, and “the Babylonians” – two groups of native-born Jews and one group of Jewish-Iraqi immigrants.
Shortly after breaking ground in Be’eri, some of the “Babylonians” were asked to return to Iraq on behalf of the Zionist movement. There, they worked as counselors in the youth groups, preparing additional young men and women to make Aliyah.
Yaakov Tzemach was one of these young Iraqi Jews trained by the “Babylonians”. He was a member of the HeChalutz youth movement in Baghdad and he and his friends worked together to support the pioneering efforts taking place in the Land of Israel which they had long dreamed of reaching:
“We collected money, our allowances, so that they could build a club for the pioneers in Be’eri. We didn’t go to the movies, drink juice, or take the bus to school for months. We collected the money and gave it to the movement to build a club in Nahabir. A kibbutz of veterans of the movement – an example and a model for us.”
From From the Same Village – Kibbutz Members and Families Speak of Bereavement in Kibbutz Be’eri [Hebrew] p. 18.
Later, after joining the IDF, Yaakov was part of the Israeli army’s Nahal agricultural settlement program, which sent a group to help strengthen Kibbutz Be’eri in the early 1950s.
When you understand how the kibbutz was founded and the Jewish history woven through the story of this southern Israeli community, you discover the amazing secret of Be’eri – its diverse mixture of people.
The Iraqi immigrants, many of whom were well-educated, enriched the life of the kibbutz and contributed to the culture and knowledge of its young native-born Sabra members, some of whom barely graduated high school. Today, members of the kibbutz laugh as they recall how the educated immigrants contrasted with the Sabras, who were more concerned with the movement and the running of the kibbutz than the homework they were given at school.
The cooking in the dining hall was also influenced by the immigrants from Iraq: “even the gefilte fish was done in Mizrahi style,” recalled the 80-year-old Avraham Dvori (Manchar), who was born to an Iraqi family and who came to the kibbutz at age eight, where his older brother was already set up. Manchar was a member of Be’eri’s first school class, the “Eshel” group.
He stayed on the kibbutz his whole life, and his five children and 15 grandchildren also live there. He tells of how the Iraqi family that adopted him in the kibbutz only spoke Hebrew. “I entirely forgot the Arabic I knew from home,” he recalled. Manchar, who recently returned to Be’eri along with some 100 veterans and young kibbutz members, told us of the significance of Be’eri for him: “We have members from over 30 countries of origin. Everyone is mixed with everyone, this is the Land of Israel for me. This is what gives the kibbutz a sense of warmth.”
The close ties between Kibbutz Be’eri and Iraqi Jewry were further cemented in 2002. Manchar was then the head of the Eshkol Regional Council, which includes Be’eri. Two years previously, during a routine tour for guests visiting the region, Mordechai Bibi, a former member of the Knesset and one of the leaders of the Babylonian immigrants’ organization, turned to Manchar and gave him a crumbling letter from 1945:
“I hereby confirm that members of the HeChalutz movement in Babylon collected donations amounting to 3,500 dinars for the planting of a forest in memory of the murdered of the Farhud.”
On the envelope, Yosef Weitz, Chairman of the Jewish National Fund during the pre-state era, wrote that a kibbutz was about to be established on the lands of Nahabir and that it would include a group of Iraqi members of the HeChalutz movement. There, he decided, a forest would be planted in memory of the victims of the Farhud.
Manchar picked up the gauntlet and made sure the plan was finally implemented – many decades after Weitz’s decision was taken. The monument which was established is modest, its shape resembling that of the monument set up by the Jewish community in Baghdad to mark the location of a mass grave for victims of the Farhud in the city’s Jewish cemetery. The Baghdad monument was later destroyed by the Iraqi government. The monument in Be’eri, by contrast, lies next to the Be’eri forest. A playground, a water fountain, bathrooms, and shaded places to sit can be found next to it, enabling visitors to come and enjoy the scenery in the beautiful spring months. On October 7, the forest near the monument was used by Hamas terrorists as a staging area before moving to attack Be’eri and other nearby communities.
“We were taught that the civilian settlement determines the boundaries of the State of Israel,” Manchar said, “and it was therefore clear to me that I’d be returning here. Everyone should do what they can, when they can. It’s clear to me that no-one else will rebuild the kibbutz if we’re not there.”
