Minority report:
The Jews of Lebanon
Descendants of the country's dwindling community recall listening to their parents' memories of a lost 'paradise'
As the world pours out its love for Beirut after the port explosion on Aug. 4, Lebanese Jews know all too well what it means to have fallen in love with the country once upon a time. To have cried again and again over its never-ending calamities. After a sad departure, Lebanese Jews have done what every Lebanese in exile does: Safeguarding the memory of that “lost paradise” by creating a “Little Lebanon” wherever they go.
Here is a story of a community that is forgotten by the mother country; a country so close, yet so far away...
In 2014, when the Magen Abraham Synagogue reopened in Beirut, Lebanese politicians from across the spectrum were present, bathed in the glare of TV cameras. They all reiterated their support for a community they said they cherished as much as the other 17 sects that make up the Lebanese government.
Former prime minister Fouad Siniora declared: “We respect Judaism. Our only problem is with Israel.”
Even Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah weighed in: “This is a religious place of worship and its restoration is welcome.”
On the outside, it looked as if the stage was set for the return of the Jewish community into Lebanon’s public life. The renovation of the Magen Abraham was nothing short of an open door for Lebanese Jews to come back. But the pomp of the opening ceremony did nothing to halt the decline of this community.
In the 1950s and 1960s there were 16 synagogues in Lebanon, and they were always full. The only place in the Arab world where the number of Jews increased after 1948 was Lebanon. But the 1967 war and the gruesome civil war that followed gradually drove Lebanese Jews away.
Today, there are 29 Jews left in Lebanon. The story has it that a Jewish woman from Beirut who was keen to meet other Jews heard of a coreligionist living in the town of Zahle, 50km east of the capital. She went there and searched for her. It was difficult as the woman had changed her name, something many Jews have done for safety reasons. But when she finally found her, the Zahle woman met her with a glacial stare. She spoke one word: Leave. The woman was obviously scared of the attention her visitor might awaken.
Those who are still there preserve a total silence about their identity. They gather secretly in each other’s houses for their prayers. And yet Lebanese Jews, unlike other Arab Jews, left their original country feeling sad. They did not want to leave Lebanon. They left because they were caught in the crossfire, just like the other Lebanese.
Their silence has plunged them into almost total oblivion. So much so that when Lebanese Jews in New York run into visitors from Lebanon at some Brooklyn restaurant or park, the visitors are shocked to hear even the term “Lebanese Jew.”
This community has not forgotten Lebanon. Far from it. Walk, for example, around Gravesend, Brooklyn, and see how they have established a Lebanon there that they carried within them when they left: bakeries, stores, synagogues where the Lebanese dialect is spoken fluently.
Walk into their homes and you recognize the smell of thyme and unmistakable Lebanese spices. Talk to them, and they will tell you about that old idyllic image of Lebanon that every Lebanese grew up with but has now forgotten. The myth of Lebanon remains alive only in the consciousness of the Lebanese Jews: That Lebanon which was once described as the pearl of the Middle East. For the Jews, Lebanon’s reputation was earned because of the kindness of its people and their hospitality. That is where “paradise” (as they call Lebanon) really resides.
Before the blast that shook Beirut, Arab News searched for members of the Lebanese Jewish community in the diaspora and listened to many of their hitherto untold stories.
This coincides with the upcoming publication of a book by historian Nagi Zeidan that for the first time documents the presence of every Jewish family that lived in Lebanon. The 25-year journey that this historian undertook can be said to be the story of the rise and fall of a prejudice. He tells us how he began by subscribing to the anti-Semitic rhetoric propagated by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, and how circumstances, in addition to a maturity on his behalf that pushed him to ask questions, have led him to a great love for this community.
“They taught us honesty and trust. You know how valuable that is in a country like ours,” said Zeidan. He has shared his story with Arab News about what it was like to devote his life to tracking down the Jewish community members, one by one, and listen to their stories.
An age-old connection
By Ephrem Kossaify
Historian Nagi Zeidan was a teenager growing up in Lebanon when his father, an official in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP, which was very popular in the country at the time), sent him to initiation camps, grooming him to become a leader himself one day.
Nagi Zeidan as a teenager. (Supplied)
Nagi Zeidan as a teenager. (Supplied)
Zeidan was given books written by SSNP founder Antoun Saadeh advocating the establishment of a Syrian nation state spanning the entire Fertile Crescent.
Antoun Saadeh, head of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. (Getty Images)
He was smitten as much by the secular anticolonial ideals as by the erudition of Saadeh, who wanted to unite people around their common history.
But the idealism of his youth was dealt a harsh blow when he came upon a sentence that changed his life forever: “We have no other enemy to fight … except the Jews.”
Questions jostled inside his young head: “Why should I subscribe to Saadeh and not befriend Jews? Abraham was born in Iraq. Doesn’t that mean that Jews are part of the Syrian Umma (community)? My father never gave me a logical answer,” Zeidan told Arab News.
“Then I met Jewish friends and found them very honest and kind. That made my inner struggle all the more intense. I grew up and the question grew with me: Why should I be against the Jews?”
Very early on, his vocation was sealed: He set about researching the Jews of his country, drawing family trees from Abraham to the present day.
“I was the only ‘suicidal one’ doing studies on the Jews of Lebanon,” recalled Zeidan. He was harassed by General Security and ostracized by his family. Uncles and cousins greeted him only from a distance.
Ironically, just when Zeidan began tracking the Jews down in the 1980s, the community had already left. Their presence, dating back hundreds of years, had almost come to an end.
“Our blood connection with Lebanon is 3,000 years old,” said Marcel, a Lebanese Jew who lives in Brooklyn, referring to the friendship between the biblical King Solomon and Hiram, king of Tyre, the port city on the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon.
Solomon sent gifts to Hiram, the Phoenician king of Tyre, for his help in building Solmon's Temple in Jerusalem. (Getty Images)
When Solomon wanted to build a temple to his God, Hiram supplied him with cedar and juniper wood, and a team of architects and masons.
Solomon, in exchange, is said to have sent his friend wheat and virgin olive oil to feed the trading empire. The wall between Jews and Gentiles was thus broken.
Biblical exegesis says when Jesus went to Sidon (known locally as Saida), the Jews took him to the cemetery where Zebulon, the last son of Jacob and founder of one of Israel’s tribes, was buried.
An engraving of Zebulon, son of Jacob, by Bartolomeo Gai, in 1751. (Getty Images)
The Jewish neighborhood of Beirut was established in 1800 by the Levy family who came from Baghdad.
Then shortly after, in 1805, an Ashkenazi family arrived from Lithuania. Abraham Mann and his family were on a pilgrimage trip to the Promised Land. They stopped in Beirut to rest, work and save money before hitting the road again.
But they fell in love with Beirut. They stayed and never left.
By 1932, there were 265 Jewish families in the city. A surge in arrivals during the 1930s more than trebled the Jewish population there to 7,000 by 1940.
The Lebanese Jewish diaspora’s love for Beirut never died; it lives on in their hearts.
“Whenever my parents talked about Lebanon, they had tears in their eyes,” said Marcel, who was a toddler when his parents fled the Lebanese civil war.
“There, in the other country, house doors are open. Neighbors enter without knocking. After work, people gather, talk and make each other feel better.
“Life is different here in New York. It’s all work, home, shower, eat, sleep. Start again the next day.
“But my parents made sure we knew who we were. We grew up in a Lebanese house. We wear shihhata (slippers) and only eat Lebanese food: manakish, knefeh, baklava. We don’t do burgers and pizza.
“We know all the Lebanese songs by heart. In our synagogue, we sing Jewish prayers to the tunes of Feiruz.
Hear a Jewish prayer to a Feiruz tune on this YouTube video.
“Whenever we went somewhere, my mother would tell us: Remember, nehna lebneniyyeh, (we are Lebanese.) That meant we had to dress up properly, be clean, polite and kind to others.
“Whoever called us the Switzerland of the Middle East knew the value of our people, who had manners and respected and cared for each other.”
Raymond Sasson, a silversmith from Brooklyn, was born in Beirut but left with his family when he was a toddler. He grew up listening to his mother’s fondest memories of life in Beirut, and in 2008 finally went back to visit the city.
Raymond Sasson, a Lebanese Jew from Brooklyn, talks about his visits to Beirut.
“Beirut was magical, a fairyland bigger than life. It was Disney World!” he recalled.
“Maybe I embellished in my own mind all the stories I heard as a child. But it was the city of stories and nice life. Surfing and sun tanning at the St George. Hamra, Starco and all the little alleys where this uncle and that cousin once lived.
“There I was sitting in a cafe where everyone spoke Arabic, and I felt: Wow, I’m home!”
Sasson took a trip to Saida to see the house where his family had lived.
“It was as if my mother was holding my hand,” he said.
“We walked into the old city, and sure enough, facing the mosque, there was this building with a big door, like my mother described.
“When we looked in, there was a staircase going up, then a landing with two doors on each side. Another staircase and there it was — my parents’ house.
“I can't tell you what it was like to go back 70 years to where my siblings were running around, up and down the stairs.”
Sasson’s father had escaped from Aleppo, in Syria, during the pogroms of 1947 — the kids woke up one day and saw their grandfather’s pool club go up in flames.
In Beirut, they found neighbors and friends, and life went back to how they knew it in their native Syria. Only in Lebanon, they were not persecuted.
But Beirut did not remain indefinitely immune to the anti-Jewish sentiment running rampant in the neighboring countries.
Antoun Saadeh, head of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)
Antoun Saadeh, head of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. (Getty Images)
Solomon sent gifts to Hiram, the Phoenician king of Tyre, for his help in building Solmon's Temple in Jerusalem. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Solomon sent gifts to Hiram, the Phoenician king of Tyre, for his help in building Solmon's Temple in Jerusalem. (Getty Images)
An engraving of Zebulon, son of Jacob, by Bartolomeo Gai, in 1751. (Icas 94/De Agostini Picture Library via Getty Images)
An engraving of Zebulon, son of Jacob, by Bartolomeo Gai, in 1751. (Getty Images)
Historian Nagi Zeidan was a teenager growing up in Lebanon when his father, an official in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP, which was very popular in the country at the time), sent him to initiation camps, grooming him to become a leader himself one day.
Nagi Zeidan as a teenager. (Supplied)
Nagi Zeidan as a teenager. (Supplied)
Zeidan was given books written by SSNP founder Antoun Saadeh advocating the establishment of a Syrian nation state spanning the entire Fertile Crescent.
He was smitten as much by the secular anticolonial ideals as by the erudition of Saadeh, who wanted to unite people around their common history.
But the idealism of his youth was dealt a harsh blow when he came upon a sentence that changed his life forever: “We have no other enemy to fight … except the Jews.”
Questions jostled inside his young head: “Why should I subscribe to Saadeh and not befriend Jews? Abraham was born in Iraq. Doesn’t that mean that Jews are part of the Syrian Umma (community)? My father never gave me a logical answer,” Zeidan told Arab News.
“Then I met Jewish friends and found them very honest and kind. That made my inner struggle all the more intense. I grew up and the question grew with me: Why should I be against the Jews?”
Very early on, his vocation was sealed: He set about researching the Jews of his country, drawing family trees from Abraham to the present day.
“I was the only ‘suicidal one’ doing studies on the Jews of Lebanon,” recalled Zeidan. He was harassed by General Security and ostracized by his family. Uncles and cousins greeted him only from a distance.
Ironically, just when Zeidan began tracking the Jews down in the 1980s, the community had already left. Their presence, dating back hundreds of years, had almost come to an end.
“Our blood connection with Lebanon is 3,000 years old,” said Marcel, a Lebanese Jew who lives in Brooklyn, referring to the friendship between the biblical King Solomon and Hiram, king of Tyre, the port city on the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon.
When Solomon wanted to build a temple to his God, Hiram supplied him with cedar and juniper wood, and a team of architects and masons.
Solomon, in exchange, is said to have sent his friend wheat and virgin olive oil to feed the trading empire. The wall between Jews and Gentiles was thus broken.
Biblical exegesis says when Jesus went to Sidon (known locally as Saida), the Jews took him to the cemetery where Zebulon, the last son of Jacob and founder of one of Israel’s tribes, was buried.
The Jewish neighborhood of Beirut was established in 1800 by the Levy family who came from Baghdad.
Then shortly after, in 1805, an Ashkenazi family arrived from Lithuania. Abraham Mann and his family were on a pilgrimage trip to the Promised Land. They stopped in Beirut to rest, work and save money before hitting the road again.
But they fell in love with Beirut. They stayed and never left.
By 1932, there were 265 Jewish families in the city. A surge in arrivals during the 1930s more than trebled the Jewish population there to 7,000 by 1940.
The Lebanese Jewish diaspora’s love for Beirut never died; it lives on in their hearts.
“Whenever my parents talked about Lebanon, they had tears in their eyes,” said Marcel, who was a toddler when his parents fled the Lebanese civil war.
“There, in that country, house doors are open. Neighbors enter without knocking. After work, people gather, talk and make each other feel better.
“Life is different here in New York. It’s all work, home, shower, eat, sleep. Start again the next day.
“But my parents made sure we knew who we were. We grew up in a Lebanese house. We wear shihhata (slippers) and only eat Lebanese food: manakish, knefeh, baklava. We don’t do burgers and pizza.
“We know all the Lebanese songs by heart. In our synagogue, we sing Jewish prayers to the tunes of Feiruz.
Hear a Jewish prayer to a Feiruz tune on this YouTube video.
Hear a Jewish prayer to a Feiruz tune on this YouTube video.
“Whenever we went somewhere, my mother would tell us: Remember, nehna lebneniyyeh, (we are Lebanese.) That meant we had to dress up properly, be clean, polite and kind to others.
“Whoever called us the Switzerland of the Middle East knew the value of our people, who had manners and respected and cared for each other.”
Raymond Sasson, a silversmith from Brooklyn, was born in Beirut but left with his family when he was a toddler. He grew up listening to his mother’s fondest memories of life in Beirut, and in 2008 finally went back to visit the city.
Raymond Sasson, a Lebanese Jew from Brooklyn, talks about his visits to Beirut.
“Beirut was magical, a fairyland bigger than life. It was Disney World!” he recalled.
“Maybe I embellished in my own mind all the stories I heard as a child. But it was the city of stories and nice life. Surfing and sun tanning at the St George. Hamra, Starco and all the little alleys where this uncle and that cousin once lived.
“There I was sitting in a cafe where everyone spoke Arabic, and I felt: Wow, I’m home!”
Sasson took a trip to Saida to see the house where his family had lived.
“It was as if my mother was holding my hand,” he said.
“We walked into the old city, and sure enough, facing the mosque, there was this building with a big door, like my mother described.
“When we looked in, there was a staircase going up, then a landing with two doors on each side. Another staircase and there it was — my parents’ house.
“I can't tell you what it was like to go back 70 years to where my siblings were running around, up and down the stairs.”
Sasson’s father had escaped from Aleppo, in Syria, during the pogroms of 1947 — the kids woke up one day and saw their grandfather’s pool club go up in flames.
In Beirut, they found neighbors and friends, and life went back to how they knew it in their native Syria. Only in Lebanon, they were not persecuted.
But Beirut did not remain indefinitely immune to the anti-Jewish sentiment running rampant in the neighboring countries.
Why Jews left Lebanon
By Ephrem Kossaify
Israeli army planes fly over the Sinai at the Israeli-Egyptian border on June 5, 1967, on the first day of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt. (AFP)
Israeli army planes fly over the Sinai at the Israeli-Egyptian border on June 5, 1967, on the first day of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt. (AFP)
Rabbi Avraham Abadi, left, the father of Dr. Elie Abadi, with rabbis Ya'acov Atiye and Shahud (Shaul) Chrem in Beirut. (Supplied)
Rabbi Avraham Abadi, left, the father of Dr. Elie Abadi, with rabbis Ya'acov Atiye and Shahud (Shaul) Chrem in Beirut. (Supplied)
The remaining Jews in Lebanon pray in secret in Achrafieh. (Shutterstock)
The remaining Jews in Lebanon pray in secret in Achrafieh. (Shutterstock)
Nagi Zeidan's book 'The Jews of Lebanon.'
Nagi Zeidan's book 'The Jews of Lebanon.'
True, Lebanese Jews were not rounded up and thrown out like their Egyptian, Iraqi and Syrian counterparts, yet “whenever something happened in Palestine, people would take revenge on the Jews,” said Zeidan.
“They would throw a bomb at a synagogue or kidnap a Jewish man. Protests would erupt, inciting violence against the Jews.”
There was a wave of the Jewish emigration following the outbreak of the 1958 civil war, and a second wave after the Six-Day War in 1967.
And the emigration increased with the renewal of the civil war in 1975.
“By the mid ’80s, almost everyone had left,” said Dr. Elie Abadi, the rabbi of the Lebanese synagogue in New York.
Israeli army planes fly over the Sinai at the Israeli-Egyptian border on June 5, 1967, on the first day of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt. (AFP)
Jews took refuge in France, Israel and North and Latin America.
“But did we want to leave? No. We would have loved to stay,” Abadi said.
Rabbi Elie Abadi tells the story of how his parents escaped the Aleppo pogroms to find a safe haven in Lebanon.
Rabbi Avraham Abadi, left, the father of Dr. Elie Abadi, with rabbis Ya'acov Atiye and Shahud (Shaul) Chrem in Beirut. (Supplied)
Sasson added: “Jews were seen as part of the Zionist entity, an extension of the winners of the (1967) war.
“As a Lebanese Jew, I obviously have feelings towards the land of Israel, which is part and parcel of the Jewish faith.
“Now that doesn’t include Golda Meir, David ben Gurion, Ariel Sharon or Bibi Netanyahu. Those are not the characters or the figures of the Old Testament.
“Can you be Christian and not believe in Jesus? Can you be Muslim and not face the Kaaba in Makkah when you pray?”
Zeidan said: “Synagogues need to be built in the direction of Jerusalem. When Jews die, they are buried with their heads pointing to Jerusalem. This is in the Torah.
“But (Lebanese Jews) have tenderness for Palestinians, because somewhere they feel they are Arabs.”
Sasson agreed: “Palestinians also have a connection to the land, and until there is a fair agreement between the (Israelis and Palestinians), neither one nor the other will ever live happily.”
Rabbi Elie Abadi talks about the final episode of his family's life in Beirut and the sad departure.
Abadi said Lebanese Jews would love to go to Lebanon and do business with, and for, their country.
“But we feel that Lebanon today is not the Lebanon that we left. We feel bad that the Lebanese of today themselves don’t know or appreciate the real Lebanon that it was,” he said.
“Hezbollah took over Lebanon and is dictating policy and lifestyle. Lebanon is hijacked. It is not the Lebanon that it should be.”
Marcel in Brooklyn added: “Haram, we lost a paradise.”
Sasson wants “all the changes that all my friends in Lebanon are asking for — less corruption, less sectarianism, less nepotism, tribalism, all the other isms.”
He said: “I want them to clean up those beautiful beaches that I grew up hearing about. (The rest) is bigger than you and me. I didn’t create this mess. So I can’t fix it.”
Today, there are 29 Jews left in Lebanon — and they are all hiding.
“They are afraid to pray at Magen Abraham. They gather in Achrafieh and pray in secret,” said Zeidan.
The remaining Jews in Lebanon pray in secret in Achrafieh. (Shutterstock)
“Yet this is the oldest confession in the country. Look what happened to them!”
Zeidan points to his 400-page manuscript — “The Jews of Lebanon.” It is the fruit of 25 years spent searching for the lost and forgotten community.
Nagi Zeidan's book 'The Jews of Lebanon.'
He found them all and wrote down their names.
“What hurts the Jews the most is that they can’t pray on their fathers’ and mothers’ graves. Every Jew I met asked me for a picture of his ancestors’ grave,” he said.
“My dream is for that to change. I believe in peace based on Security Council Resolution 242 (calling on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories).
“Whether we want it or not, peace will happen. It is impossible for neighbors to close their borders indefinitely.”
Unearthing the past
By Nagi Zeidan
American commandos land in Beirut in July 1958, following the first Lebanese civil war between the mainly Muslim left wing and the Christian right wing. (AFP)
American commandos land in Beirut in July 1958, following the first Lebanese civil war between the mainly Muslim left wing and the Christian right wing. (AFP)
Members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in 1947. (Alamy)
Members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in 1947. (Alamy)
A Talmud document showing Beirut's Hebrew dialect. (Supplied)
A Talmud document showing Beirut's Hebrew dialect. (Supplied)
Nagi Zeidan inspects the Jewish cemetery in Beirut after several graves were damaged during bad weather in a winter storm in December 2019. (Anwar Amro/AFP)
Nagi Zeidan inspects the Jewish cemetery in Beirut after several graves were damaged in 2019. (AFP)
A Hebrew tombstone from a Jewish cemetery in Lebanon. (Supplied)
A Hebrew tombstone from a Jewish cemetery in Lebanon. (Supplied)
The abandoned Jewish cemetery Sidon, where Nagi Zeidan has undertaken renovations. (Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images)
The abandoned Jewish cemetery Sidon, where Nagi Zeidan has undertaken renovations. (Getty Images)
I have understood a thousand things about the Jews of Lebanon… A dialogue is possible
I was born in 1958, the same year as the eruption of the Lebanese civil war. My mother tells me that I was a month and a half old when my father decided to participate in this war alongside his friends. My mother placed me on the doorstep to prevent my father from leaving, but he stepped over me and left. She asked him: “Who will feed this child if something happens to you?” and he replied “God will take care of him, He who gave him life, will take care of him.” My father was stationed in the village of Chemlan in the Aley province, and my mother did not see him for a month and a half. His friends who were part of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) would come to his house. I spent all my vacations with SSNP members hearing about “Jewish enemy,” about the Jews as plotters, loan sharks and profiteers whose only goal was to dominate the world and deprive us of our possessions.
American commandos land in Beirut in July 1958, following the first Lebanese civil war between the mainly Muslim left wing and the Christian right wing. (AFP)
Nagi Zeidan at the age of 5.
Nagi Zeidan at the age of 5.
Members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in 1947. (Alamy)
We were taught that the Jewish religion was based on conspiracy, that the Torah and the Talmud broadcast evil. We were told that the Jews were strangers in our country, and that there was no place for them among us. At school, I even fought with those who did not share the same beliefs as me. I was even against the anti-Zionists: they had to be anti-Jews and not just anti-Zionists. I did not accept being told that Jesus was of Jewish origin. I repeated what I had learned, namely, that Jesus had never been a Jew. At that time, those who did not share our same beliefs were called “Jews on the inside.”
A Talmud document showing Beirut's Hebrew dialect. (Supplied)
Yet, at the age of 14 or 15, I started questioning my thoughts, and tried to understand this blatant hatred against the Jews. I asked my father questions, such as: “Since Abraham was born in Iraq, and his children were born near Aleppo, and his grandchildren had lived in Hebron, why wouldn’t we consider Abraham and his descendants as part of the Syrian people?” But he never managed to give me a proper answer.
At that time, I started to hang out with Communists. I was very drawn to the secularism they promoted. To them, human beings were equally respectable regardless of their religion. It was with them that I took my first steps towards secularism. Years have passed and I have – for a long time – lived with this paradox inside me: the love for my father, my SSNP friends and my Communist friends.
Historian Nagi Zeidan narrates the story of the Sidon cemetery.
Another – much longer – civil war broke out in Lebanon on April 13, 1975. My village was in the grip of fanatic Christian fighters. They opposed my father’s party, the Communists and anyone who defended the Palestinian cause or wanted peace with Muslims. My family was threatened. Militiamen from my father’s party quietly brought us Kalashnikovs. Even I received one, without the slightest idea on how to use it. A cousin of mine taught me how to handle a rifle in two hours. This weapon never left my side, day and night, for months, for the sole purpose of defending my family and nothing else. But I have never fired a single bullet in my life.
The years passed, I became a father, still secular, and still not involved in politics. In March 1995, when my father passed away, I was able to express myself more freely. I began to express my personal beliefs, that I was neither an anti-Semite, nor against the Jews. Before my father’s passing, I didn’t have the courage to put it that way. Three months after my father’s passing, on June 27, 1995, I wrote my first article on the Jews of Lebanon, which was published in the newspaper An-Nahar.
I was congratulated over the phone by the president of the Jewish community back then, Mr. Joe Mizrahi. He wanted to meet me, but unfortunately it never happened. I went to speak with him at his office in Gemmayzeh in 2003, but he was in France at the time. His employees called him from Beirut and he remembered me. As a thanks for my research he asked his employees to provide me with the register of graves in the Beirut cemetery and a map, and he gave me permission to research the site.
Since 1995, my research has never stopped. I spent four months immersing myself in the memories of the old Jewish cemetery in Beirut, trying to decipher the inscriptions on the stelae. I discovered epitaphs, sometimes very touching. I was particularly upset by one of them, which read: “To that person who died young.” This was for Matilda, the daughter of Moses Eleazer Greenberg, who died at the age of 39, on October 30, 1909. Unable to bear the pain of losing her, her father died 51 days later on December 20, 1909 at the age of 69. He was buried next to his daughter. There was another young girl who died out of grief following the death of her father, and was buried next to him.
Nagi Zeidan inspects the Jewish cemetery in Beirut after several graves were damaged in 2019. (AFP)
And then there is the patriarch of the Srour family, who died at the same time as his two children during the great famine of 1916. All three were buried in the same place. On some stelae, we find sad poems engraved on marble, calligraphed in Arabic, sometimes with a few simple words, such as “pray for them,” in Arabic and French.
I understood a thousand things about the Jews, the complete opposite of what I was taught as a child. I felt compassion for these people while reading their epitaphs, and told myself that it was possible to live fraternally with them, to negotiate together.
A Hebrew tombstone from a Jewish cemetery in Lebanon. (Supplied)
During the renovation and cleaning of the Jewish cemetery in Sidon between 2015 and 2018, I discovered several graves buried in the sand. I was able to read the names of some deceased written in Hebrew, thanks to friends who translated them to me. This cemetery had been vandalized several times, especially after the Israeli army evacuated the city in February 1985. The majority of the stelae had been ransacked and graves had collapsed when sand was moved from the cemetery. I was in tears.
My team and I had to re-bury the deceased with great respect and dignity. I took pictures and filmed everything to record all that I saw and did. I know this cemetery by heart, I know the smallest details. I have started to archive and save each of the graves that were unearthed. This cemetery holds a special place in my heart, it is a part of me and the deceased have become like members of my own family.
The abandoned Jewish cemetery Sidon, where Nagi Zeidan has undertaken renovations. (Getty Images)
My responsibility was to make things right and to identify some of the deceased who have been buried for many years. I posted articles on my Facebook page regarding my work at the cemetery and as a result, several Lebanese Jews in the diaspora contacted me to ask if I had found their parents’ graves. Sometimes I was even asked to film and take pictures of the graves of their deceased.
I have become a different man. All my Jewish friends respect me, and I have gained self-respect, too. In a few weeks my book on the history of the Jews of Lebanon will be published in France. It will be the culmination of 25 years of research.
I hope that my testimony will touch a few hearts and prove that there are bridges between people and communities, and that dialogue is possible.
Nagi Gergi Zeidan
Watermael-Boitsfort, Brussels, July 25, 2020
Credits
Writers: Ephrem Kossaify, Nagi Zeidan
Creative director: Simon Khalil
Designer: Omar Nashashibi
Graphics: Douglas Okasaki
Editor: Mo Gannon
Photographers: Khaled Ayyad and Ephrem Kossaify
Video editor: Hasenin Fadhel, Ali Noori
Photo editor: Sheila Mayo
Copy editor: Charles Hebbert
Social media: Mohammed Qenan
Producer: Arkan Aladnani
Editor-in-Chief: Faisal J. Abbas
