during Shavuot this year, i saw so many that were celebrating the holiday, making jokes about dairy and goyim who don’t understand our customs. the behavior of other Jews on Shavuot has always been profoundly inexplicable to me–i’ve never been able to understand it and every year it catches me off guard.
the sixth of Sivan has always been so much darker for me and my family then it was for other Jews. we eat siete cielos, kahi, and matzah with milk for chalav; we read the Azharot; we all stay up late and read from the Mishnah in an attempt to never be overwhelmed by greatness but to stand beside it instead. but our Shavuot has always been much darker than the Shavuot that others celebrate, and it’s important to understand that Shavuot is a day of mourning for us.
it has been 72 years since the Farhud, riots led by Nazi sympathizers against Iraqi Jews. the Farhud killed 179 of our population, a population that had been in Iraq for over two thousand years after we fled the destruction of the Beit haMikdash. Jews had been treated fairly well by Muslims in Iraq for the majority of modern Iraq’s history, but the Farhud was the result of Nazi propaganda spreading in Iraq as well as a dangerous manifestation of Arab nationalism, eventually leading to violence against Iraqi Jews.
the lead-up to this included Iraqi Jews being dismissed from their work, university quotas being put in place (meaning that only a certain number of Jews were allowed in university), and other discriminatory laws. after the Farhud in 1941, the status that Jews had in Iraq since King Faisal deteriorated more rapidly. Jews were not considered Aravim by Arab nationalists anymore and were therefore not included under their protection.
the death of 180 Jews, the injury of anywhere from one to two thousand, the destruction of Jewish homes…all this went on during Shavuot in Baghdad. my own relatives were eating as they usually did during Shavuot when they heard screaming from outside; their mother forbade them from leaving the house, but that didn’t stop several of them from being killed in the events of the Farhud. my mother never got to hear the words of many of her relatives; they were killed and thrown quickly into the mass grave of the Farhud. only a few among my Jewish relatives from Baghdad survived; many of them who later emigrated were from Qalaat Salih, not Baghdad.
even so, they recount the events of that Shavuot and its horrors vividly. my great-grandmother, who was lucky enough to survive (and was old enough to provide good details), even wrote down her account of what happened during the Farhud; she gave it to my savta, who later passed it down to my mother, who later passed it down to me. it’s horrific, to say the least, and you cannot read it without getting a real sense for how terrifying that Shavuot was. knowing what happened that Shavuot in 1941, even if you do not read the letter, is enough to change your view of the festival.
while i celebrate it, it is a day of mourning for me. i must mourn for who would have been my great-uncles; i mourn for every Jew killed and every Jew who emigrated in 1950-1951 (and those who stayed behind and watched their people be hanged). i celebrate it in the Jewish way because i am a Jew. i have not let go of that. it is a day of commemoration for me, but also a day where i have to remember those who were killed by Nazi Germany, even so many miles away.
Kutal al-Yahud still echoes in our minds and for that reason, Shavuot will never just commemorate the day that G-d gave us the Torah, but also the day that we were slaughtered in a way that the Torah did not prepare us for.
