Mosul is being rebuilt stone by stone. The mosques, the churches, the monumental houses – with foreign money and with the help of Unesco they are gradually being brought back in the old style. A video of a monumental building that has been restored in this way reminds me of what I saw after the ISIS terrorist group was driven out of the Jewish quarter of Mosul.
The building I saw then was blackened inside by fire, because ISIS forced citizens to leave and then set fire to the place. But the monumental blue marble, the beautiful woodwork and the traditional construction, with a gallery overlooking the ground floor, were still clearly visible.
Their resilience is what has impressed me about Iraqis for years. The fight against ISIS has laid much of Mosul in ruins, but the past six years have been marked above all by a urge to erase the many scars left behind by the terrorist group. But fortunately also to restore valuable heritage.
I have seen churches and monasteries that are being rebuilt stone by stone with the help of foreign countries. Mosques, which ISIS destroyed because they contained the tomb of a saint, likewise, with the help of the local community and the Sunni authorities.
Nouri Mosque
The most famous example is the Nouri Mosque, which ISIS blew up when it had definitively lost the battle for Mosul. It is being rebuilt with money from the Emirates and based on the design that was chosen as the winner in a competition. The old elements are being preserved, such as the centuries-old leaning Hadba minaret and the dome that managed to withstand the explosives. Under the watchful eye of Unesco, they are being embedded in new buildings, with lots of greenery and shade.
Something similar is underway in other cities that were damaged under ISIS and during the liberation. The city of Ramadi was the first to be rebuilt, and shoulders have also been put to the wheel in Fallujah. Hawija, which was partly destroyed by a Dutch bomb on an explosives factory, has also risen from the rubble in just a few years.
However, this does not apply to the Sassoon Synagogue in Mosul. One of the few remaining Jewish places of worship in Iraq, and the only one in Mosul. Somehow overlooked by ISIS, perhaps because the roof was already missing, it was used as a garbage dump and the mikveh (ritual bath) had served as a stable for years.
Residence
After the departure of most Jews from Iraq in the 1950s, the building had fallen into disuse and eventually even illegally into the hands of a private individual. He himself used the adjacent Jewish school for housing. After the liberation, he unsuccessfully tried to sell the complex. That’s when it became clear how illegal the purchase under Saddam Hussein’s regime had been.
Omar Mohammed, who secretly kept a blog about ISIS’s crimes in his city during the ISIS occupation under the name of Mosul Eye, campaigned for the restoration of the synagogue. There is now an organization with that name involved in preserving heritage and stimulating the revival of culture in Mosul.
Other residents of Mosul and Iraqi Jews abroad also rallied behind the initiative. And eventually found the Geneva-based organization Aliph (International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas) willing to allocate money for it. The organization has 29 projects in Iraq, including rebuilding the Yazidi temples destroyed by ISIS, mosques, churches and even a caravanserai.
All can be found on their website. However, this does not apply to the synagogue project. That has come to a standstill, even though the money for it was allocated years ago. The reason is the law Iraq passed last May that made all contacts with Israel, Israelis and ‘Zionists’ punishable for Iraqis inside and outside Iraq. This carried the death penalty or life imprisonment. The law was intended to prevent any initiative to normalize relations with Israel, at a time when one Arab country after another was moving towards that.
Ratification
The then Iraqi President Barham Saleh refused to sign the law, and whether his successor Rashid did is unclear. However, the latter was present at a climate summit in Egypt in November, together with Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein. Israel was also represented there, which led to criticism in Iraq.
All three are Kurds; Kurdish leaders are known to have good contacts in Israel – the only country that supported the 2017 independence referendum of Iraqi Kurdistan. The fact that no one was arrested in Iraq after returning from the conference suggests that Rashid did not sign the controversial law either.
Even if it has not been ratified, the anti-Israeli mood in Iraq is apparently so threatening that an international organization is intimidated by it. Edwin Shuker, who was born in Iraq and is an important member of the Iraqi-Jewish community in the UK, sounded the alarm. Because Jewish heritage is part of Iraq’s heritage and deserves equal treatment, as is his plea.
“The law must be repealed or at least amended because it does not belong in a modern democracy that Iraq claims to be,” Shuker tells the Jewish News. He points out that the law does not distinguish between an Israeli, a Jew, a Christian Zionist and even an Israeli Arab. “It is a license for the government to prosecute, detain and even kill any Iraqi whom they believe to be sympathetic to normalization with Israel or even involved in Iraqi-Jewish heritage.”
Pressure
According to him, the current impasse for the restoration of the Sassoon Synagogue can only be resolved by exerting pressure from outside on the Iraqi government to repeal that anti-Semitic law.
I ask a friend in Mosul who was also involved in the quest to preserve the synagogue. Archaeologist Faisal Jaber sees a different solution. Unesco must be convinced to expand its ‘Revive the spirit of Mosul’ project with a third phase, he believes. After the Nouri Mosque and the Al-Tahera Church, the Sassoon synagogue could then get its turn.
He then foresees few problems, because people in Mosul trust Unesco and they will not oppose the restoration of the synagogue as part of a project for all three Abrahamic religions, he argues. Since the law has not been ratified, he does not expect problems from Baghdad. There, the militias are too busy enriching themselves and they will avoid antagonizing the Americans and calling down new sanctions on themselves.
In any case, the restoration of Mosul’s last synagogue is in the hands of foreign organizations. Which will always need the approval of the authorities for their work anyway. This will draw attention to the fact that the law passed by a large majority in the Iraqi parliament has not come into effect. While the rulers in Baghdad, for whom the law has caused only problems in their diplomatic contacts, would rather not publicize this.
