JERUSALEM — A campaign has been launched to identify property left behind when Jews were forced to flee Arab countries over the past 50 years.
The campaign is both a means to close the historic chapter on Jewish life in those countries, as well as to counter Arab claims for restitution for property lost in pre-state Israel.
The American Sephardi Federation, together with the World Jewish Congress and the Israeli government, has already mailed questionnaires to 50,000 Jews, including 30,000 in Israel. The questionnaires will be used to help identify and determine ownership of personal property, as well as schools, synagogues, businesses, hospitals, cemeteries and other premises.
The countries involved include Libya, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen. About 800,000 Jews fled those countries after Arab nations attacked Israel in 1948.
“This is an untold chapter in modern Jewish history,” Jayne Rosengarten, the federation’s national executive director, said this week from her office in New York.
“The world doesn’t really know what happened. And our constituents feel that the time has come for the world to learn about all the losses and all the suffering and…what happened to the Jews who were forced to flee or who fled from these countries. This is not a Sephardi issue, it’s a world Jewish issue,” she said.
The matter is also a political issue, as the question of abandoned property and restitution is sure to arise during the final-status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Palestinian negotiators will demand during final-status talks the right of return for Palestinian refugees, or in the case of those not wishing to return, compensation for their property, according to Hassan Asfour, a Palestinian negotiator.
Asfour said this position is based on U.N. Resolution 194, which passed in December 1948. It states that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.”
David Bar-Illan, director of policy planning and head of communications for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is interested in the tit-for-tat of the issue.
“If claims to Arab property are raised, then obviously Israel will have to counter them, with claims to property that are immeasurably greater,” Bar-Illan said.
He added that it is impossible to calculate the value of the property abandoned in the Arab countries.
“It is really mind boggling,” he said. “The property owned by 800,000 Jews is beyond any kind of estimation at this point. It’s an unbelievable kind of amount, and that should put an end once and for all to the claim that only Arabs have suffered from the War of Independence, which was initiated by the Arab regimes and the Palestinians.”
Amram Attias, chairman of the Sephardi Federation’s Committee of Jews from Arab Lands, said his organization “would like to demand from the government of Israel and negotiators that they put our demands against their demands: If they are asking for a mosque, we are asking for a synagogue, if they are asking for a school we are asking also for a school.
“Our main point is that the Jewish state will stay a Jewish state, and that is all that is guiding us. It’s not to try to get any money, we have no hope, no expectation that we are going to get any money. The question is a moral issue, and that moral issue has not been recognized.”