The Mystery That Haunts Israel’s Iraqi Jews

IMAGE: Cover of the book “The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century – The Agonies of Redemption”, authored by Zvi Yehuda, and translated by Marian Scheuer Sofaer (Source: Brill)

More than seven decades after a grenade ripped through Baghdad’s Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue, the blast is still echoing, less in Iraq than in the memories of the Jews who fled it. On January 4, 1951, an explosion tore through a crowd of hundreds waiting to register for immigration to Israel. Four were killed, dozens were injured, but the physical devastation was only the beginning. Almost immediately, whispered accusations spread through Baghdad’s Jewish quarters: Was this the work of local anti-Jewish extremists, or had Israeli operatives themselves thrown the grenade to hasten the community’s departure?

The attack unfolded at the very moment Israel was orchestrating Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, the massive airlift that would ultimately relocate more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews to the new state. While the operation is often remembered as a daring rescue, many immigrants have long suspected that pressure, whether political, psychological, or even violent, was used to accelerate their departure. For those who arrived in Israel to find hardship, prejudice, and lives upended, the bombing became a symbol of a deeper fracture, the painful sense that their own story had been edited, softened or erased to fit the needs of a young state.

It is into this unresolved space that director Avida Livni steps with his new documentary, Baghdad Files. The film reopens the long-dormant controversy by centering on a box of forgotten papers belonging to the late journalist Baruch Nadel. Unearthed in a Yale University archive after decades of neglect, Nadel’s handwritten notes, interviews and personal reflections form a rare, intimate record of a man who spent years listening to Iraqi immigrants who believed the attacks were carried out by fellow Jews acting on behalf of Israel.

Livni follows Nadel’s investigation across time, weaving archival testimony with new voices from survivors and descendants still struggling with unanswered questions. Instead of offering a definitive culprit, Baghdad Files turns the camera toward the corrosive power of secrecy itself: how official silence breeds suspicion, how buried histories refuse to stay buried, and how a community can continue carrying a trauma that the state insists never happened.

In reopening this wound, the film asks a broader, more urgent question: when a nation guards its past behind locked archives, who is left to tell the truth?

Nirit Anderman reports for Haaretz…

New Documentary Asks: Was Israel Behind the 1951 Baghdad Synagogue Bombing?

For years, many Iraqi immigrants believed Israel was behind the attack that shattered their community to hasten their Aliyah. A new documentary reopens the case.

On January 4, 1951, a loud explosion devastated the Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue in the heart of Baghdad. “The Synagogue was bombed from a nearby house (…) I managed to escape with the rest of the crowd – some 600-700 people – who fled in panic” Ezra Naim, a Jewish man who had emigrated from Iraq, told a Davar journalist a couple of weeks later. The rumor circulating among Baghdad Jews at the time was that emissaries of Israel had thrown the grenade into the synagogue.

“I had heard as much from policemen and government officials, too,” Naim said. “Many Jews from Baghdad and other cities are (now) shut up in their homes, praying a lot and waiting for immigration.”

The January 19 report in Davar was buried on a back page, almost lost among a host of other reports. But the possibility that Israeli operatives had thrown the grenade into the synagogue – killing four people and wounding dozens – has, over the years, infuriated and haunted many immigrants from Iraq.

IMAGE: Director Avida Livni. “I want them to
say I made a good film.” (Source: David Bachar)

Though Iraqi authorities arrested three Zionist activists following the attack and executed two of them, the state of Israel has long denied any involvement in this incident, as in four other attacks targeting Baghdad’s Jewish community between 1950 and 1951.

Yet Baghdadi Jews remained unconvinced. Even after arriving in Israel, many claimed for decades that the people behind this explosion – an event which is seen as a catalyst to the great wave of Iraqi Jewish immigration to Israel under Operation Ezra and Nehemiah in the 1950s – were emissaries of the Israeli establishment rather than enemies of the community. Israel could have easily dispelled the fog surrounding the question of who threw that grenade by releasing the conclusions of official inquiries into the incident. Instead, it has refused to reveal their conclusions.

Missing Baghdad

More than seven decades after that explosion, the controversy over the identity of the perpetrators is revived in a new documentary film: director Avida Livni‘s “Baghdad Files,” which was screened at the Haifa Film Festival and later broadcast on Kan 11. “Someone threw that grenade, and the fact that to this day it’s uncertain who threw it is due to elements preventing us from getting to the truth,” says Livni. “Once you’re blocked from getting to the truth, you start searching for it, and all you’re left with is telling stories and making conjectures. For a director looking to make an interesting documentary with twists and turns, this is an interesting starting point.”

It’s mainly the desire for justice. It’s like, the state has been established, we brought everybody here, all the Jews are here – but our story got left behind. You want to know the truth – why was your grandfather murdered or why did that boy get killed? Avida Livni

The film’s dramatic engine is a case of documents that sat for decades in the Yale University archives without anybody noticing. These were the papers of Israeli journalist Baruch Nadel, a former Lehi (pre-state underground militia) member who wrote for Yedioth Ahronoth and Ha’olam Hazeh, among other publications. In the 1950s, Nadel visited Ma’abarot – transit camps for new Iraqi immigrants – and was shocked by their unbearable living conditions.

“I encountered people in the process of mental, physical and social disintegration,” he wrote at the time. “Some, who managed to preserve their humanity, told me they had emigrated from Iraq because bombs were thrown at them by Iraqi Jews on orders from Israel.”

Over the years, Nadel returned time and again to immigrants from Iraq, collecting testimonies. More and more former Baghdadi Jews told him Israeli emissaries were behind the Baghdad attacks, and Nadel faithfully transcribed their testimonies. But when he wanted to publish these testimonies, he faced formal denials from government agencies.

A decade later, when an Israeli publisher asked him to write a book about Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, Nadel made clear he would write that Israel had been behind the bombings. Alarmed, the publisher withdrew his offer.

IMAGE: Iraqi immigrants in transit camps, 1950s. Journalist Baruch Nadel wrote that he encountered “people in the process of mental, physical and social disintegration.” (Source: Meitar Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel)

(Source: Meitar Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel)

Eventually, Nadel voiced those claims in an interview published in the periodical Bamaaracha in 1977 (Hebrew for “in the battle”, a magazine focused on ethnic discrimination against Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent in Israel), resulting in a libel lawsuit filed against him by Mordechai Ben-Porat, one of the organizers of the Iraqi Jewish immigration.

Nadel began preparing his defense for the trial – but then his world fell apart. His daughter, interviewed in the film, says that after losing his son, he decided to leave everything. He signed a settlement with Ben-Porat, left Israel for the United States, deposited his personal archive at Yale University – complete with a note written to “the future researcher of this material” – and died in New York in 2014.

Three years later, Prof. Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani and Prof. Hannan Hever discovered the papers and published an article titled “Violence in Baghdad (1950-1951), Violence of the Archives.” Livni says he first heard of Nadel’s treasure trove of documents from journalist Itay Ziv (Haaretz’s TV critic), who proposed to him and producer Ayelet Ephrati that the three of them make a documentary film about it.

The concealment and secrecy only deepen suspicions. There’s not a single person who researched this thing as thoroughly as Baruch Nadel, and he has specific, recurring names. I mainly regret not making this film ten years ago, when there were much more people still here to talk to. Avida Livni

Because it was during the Pandemic, rather than leaf through faded pages at the Yale University archive, Livni spent hours in front of his computer at home, reading the rich research Nadel had left behind. “It was like reading a thriller,” he says. “I would sit up all night reading the testimonies he had collected. There’s everything there – personal stories, documents, conclusions. At some point, I said to myself, we have a film here, even if there’s no single, definitive answer [to who threw the grenade, N.A.].

Rather than make a film providing a historical survey of events, Livni decided to place Nadel’s document case at the center of the film. He says it includes some 117 testimonies collected by the late journalist. Viewers are invited to follow Nadel’s journey: his initial inquiry in the 1950s, his return to witnesses in the 1960s, his preparations for trial in the 1970s. The film unfolds through multiple layers of inquiry, each exposing another tier of the affair. Meanwhile, new testimonies by still-living witnesses are interwoven throughout – such as Geula El’ani, who recalls her mother insisting that the Jewish underground threw the grenade – alongside second and third-generation descendants still carrying the pain and unanswered questions.

IMAGE: Nadel in 1972. He left his findings “to the future researcher of this material.” (Source: The Dan Hadani Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel)

“Baghdad Files” recounts the story of Iraq’s well-established Jewish community, a large part of which – despite the trauma of the 1941 Farhud pogrom, in which hundreds of Jews were murdered – continued to live comfortably next to their Muslim neighbors. This is why, after the establishment of Israel, many of them were in no hurry to make Aliyah. Unlike the tens of thousands from poorer classes, members of the wealthy elite – doctors, merchants, intellectuals –refrained from signing up for immigration.

In the film, Shenhav-Shahrabani notes that as early as April 1949, a suggestion was made within the Mossad Le’aliyah Bet (an arm of the paramilitary organization Haganah that managed clandestine immigration to Israel in British mandatory Palestine) to throw “some scare grenades into cafés frequented mainly by Jews, along with pamphlets demanding they leave Iraq” in order to speed up emigration. Indeed, in the wake of the 1951 synagogue attack, within just a few months, more than 80,000 Jews asked to renounce their Iraqi citizenship to facilitate their departure for Israel – and the entire community emptied almost overnight.

Baghdad before the attacks is portrayed in the film as a vibrant, flourishing city where Jews thrived and prospered. “This grenade signifies the loss – the violent severing of all that,” says Livni. “After working on this film, I too suddenly miss Baghdad.” Rare photographs from the Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue, alongside stories of children that were killed and families that fell apart, paint a picture of collective loss. El’ani’s testimony about the orphan child who was killed before her eyes – after his adopted parents left him there so he would be brought to Israel – is particularly heartbreaking.

IMAGE: Prof. Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani. Spoke about “scare grenades” thrown in cafés. (Source: Avner Shahaf)

“And then they arrive here, and suddenly they see that it may not be better here,” says Livni. “Some spoke of ‘cruel Zionism,’ that it was better to make a sacrifice there in order to get everybody here to build a country. Let’s say that in cold, mathematical terms, that’s true. But the orphan child whose adopted parents left him there – does something like that justify the math?”

The grenade affair, he says, is not just a historical event, but an enduring parable about political and institutional decisions repeatedly made at the expense of individuals. “This happens everywhere – the big math disrupts the lives of people who just want to live,” he says, whether by wars, evacuating communities or broken promises. “The establishment always lies because it must protect itself. If it told the truth, there would be hardly any films made, nor books or research written.”

‘The establishment always lies’

According to Livni, the establishment lied when it sent citizens to settle in occupied Sinai without telling them that eviction might be imminent; it lied when it sent soldiers to fight in the last couple of years while promising that if only Gaza were occupied, everything would be fine; and it has, of course, been lying for years to Gaza Border residents.

“I’m making a film now about the Kfar Aza Foxes, the kibbutz’s soccer team. Some team members were murdered on October 7, and the team played a match three days later at kibbutz Shefayim – barefoot – because their shoes had burned. They keep the team together with everything they have. These are people who don’t believe the establishment at all, because the establishment betrayed them. It betrayed them long before October 7, but they only realized it on October 7. You talk to them and immediately realize –this is your role here: a pawn. One day you’re here, the next you’re there.”

The Israeli establishment set up commissions of inquiry to investigate the grenade attack at the Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue, but their findings remain classified. In “Baghdad Files,” Livni set outs to search for those materials, only to discover they’re kept in state archives, inaccessible to the public. No one is allowed to read them.

I’ve read that unlike South Africa and Rwanda, in Spain after Franco’s death, when the state became democratic, there was no commission of inquiry, no examining of the facts – people just went on living. And, indeed, it still weighs heavily there. Avida Livni

IMAGE: Nadel’s writings, from the film. “Not a single person researched this thing as thoroughly as him.” (Source: From the film “Baghdad Files.”)

“The concealment and secrecy only deepen suspicions,” says Livni. “There’s not a single person who researched this thing as thoroughly as Baruch Nadel, who went around collecting testimonies. He has specific, recurring names [suspected of throwing the grenade, N. A.]. We were wary of explicitly naming names, partly for legal considerations. But I mainly regret not making this film ten years ago, when there were much more people still here to talk to.”

To him, the silence – the establishment’s attempt to bury the truth – is the real danger in this story. “I’ve read, for example, that unlike South Africa and Rwanda, in Spain after Franco’s death, when the state became democratic, there was no commission of inquiry, no examining of the facts – people just went on living. And, indeed, it still weighs heavily there. It’s like when you did something (bad) as a child and you expect punishment – you’re ready to confront it, but nothing happens. And then it becomes a secret that you keep, maybe with a few other people – and this secret burns for years, it doesn’t get extinguished,” he says, “because everything that remains silenced eventually takes its revenge.”

The film makes it clear that the new generation of Iraqi immigrants also seeks answers. “It’s mainly the desire for justice. It’s like, the state has been established, we brought everybody here, all the Jews are here – but our story got left behind. You want to know the truth – why was your grandfather murdered or why did that boy get killed?” says Livni. “You want to know, and someone stops you, saying: ‘You won’t know.’ Why? There are people here for whom those were their families. Reveal the truth, show what you got. And there are a million such cases – the Yemenite children [Allegations that thousands of Yemenite immigrant children in the early years of the state were kidnapped and given up for adoption], Pfizer [Israel’s early agreement with Pfizer to mass supply COVID-19 vaccines in exchange for medical data] – but the establishment won’t tell the truth because it needs to protect its power.”

However, Livni insists that the film’s true test lies not in its historical importance, but in its cinematic quality. “I don’t want people to say I did something important; I want them to say I made a good film,” he says. Indeed, “Baghdad Files” offers an experience that extends beyond the historical story. Baghdad before the grenade, Nadel’s investigation, the intrigues and the concealment – Livni and editor Tal Shefi succeeded in creating a documentary that blends nostalgia with a detective story, an intergenerational trauma with another historical injustice inflicted on immigrants from Arab countries by the Ashkenazi establishment that founded the state.

In the end, the question of “who threw the grenade” fades, leaving room for questions about the significance of a national secret left unrevealed. What happens when an entire community carries a memory that diverges from the official narrative? What’s the price of a silence that goes on for generations? And who pays that price? “Baghdad Files” executes Nadel’s will for a “future researcher” to take up the affair, proving that Israel’s history is written not only in official documents held by the state, but also in the memories and testimonies of citizens – who are much harder to silence.

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