A few months ago, Rabbi Elhanan Miller posted a video online of his interview with an elderly Jewish man who had fled Syria in the 1980s. The video, in which Mordechai Ezra shared his terrifying experience undergoing interrogation by Syrian intelligence officers before escaping to Israel, went viral.
Among the hundreds of thousands who viewed it on Miller’s
YouTube channel and
Facebook page was a Syrian refugee living in Germany. When Miller notified his followers on social media recently that he was heading to Berlin for a short trip and would be happy to meet up for coffee, this young man accepted the invitation.
It is not every day that Miller gets to hold face-to-face meetings with his Arabic-speaking social media followers and subscribers, most of whom are based in countries where Israelis cannot step foot. He therefore jumped at the opportunity.
“Like Mordechai Ezra, this young man – who was Kurdish – came from the city of Qamishli in northeastern Syria,” recounts Miller. “The story of this Jewish refugee resonated strongly with him, as it has with many Syrian refugees. But what was especially moving for me in this particular encounter was that it offered me an opportunity to communicate with someone from the Middle East outside the virtual world.”
In the video interview, Ezra also nostalgically recalled his childhood home and spoke about the marketplace in Qamishli that had been named after his grandfather. Not only did it receive many comments, says Miller, but it also generated direct email requests for Ezra’s contact information. After obtaining his interviewee’s permission, Miller was happy to oblige.
It would not be the first time he found himself in this unusual intermediary role.
A few years ago, he also interviewed Dr. Haim Daya, a family physician from Aleppo who had moved to Israel in the late 1980s – among the last batch of Syrian Jews to flee the country. Daya spoke at length about the wonderful relations he enjoyed with his neighbors and patients in Syria.
“I thought he must be exaggerating,” recalls Miller. “But as soon as the video went up, I got dozens of comments from Syrians living inside and outside Syria saying that Haim had been their doctor and that they missed him. There was this unbelievable outpouring of emotion and nostalgia.
Then, too, Miller found himself forwarding on contact information.
He considers it a sign of success of his latest project that it has enabled
Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin to reconnect with their former compatriots, fostering friendly exchanges between citizens of countries officially at war.
“It’s above and beyond anything I expected,” says the 41-year-old rabbi.
“Jews of the Middle East,” as this oral history project is known, was launched five years ago as a way of preserving the stories of Jews from communities in the Arab world on the verge of extinction. Thus far, Miller has posted some 70 interviews on his dedicated website – as well as on his YouTube channel and Facebook page – with Mizrahi Jews old enough to have memories to share. It follows that most of them are in their seventies and older.
The majority were born in two countries that had especially thriving Jewish communities, Syria and Iraq, and ended up in Israel. But not only those. Miller recently interviewed a Jewish woman in her nineties, currently residing in London, who came from Port Sudan. “Who even knew there was a Jewish community there?” he asks.
(full article online)
Rabbi Elhanan Miller’s enterprise interviewing Jews who lived in Arab countries is not the only oral history project – but it is one of the few being conducted in Arabic. This has allowed Miller to build up an audience in the Arab world and make some surprising connections. The project explodes...
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forward.com
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jewishjournal.com
unitedwithisrael.org
