The French Embassy has been squatting in the Lawee family’s Baghdad mansion for decades. Can they reclaim it?

Photos: Family archives

The stately mansion on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad is currently the French Embassy, a strategic outpost in the heart of the Mideast. But to the Lawee family, it’s stolen property, like the other plundered treasures of the Iraqi Jewish community. Yet the thief is a liberal European government, and the family has gone to court, intent on holding the French to their own professed standards

In the Land of Abaye and Rava

Rav and Shmuel, the Jewish experience in this world was formed, refined, and developed for the ages. Bavel, Babylon, Baghdad — they’re all names for the place in which the Jewish People sat and cried, but then dusted themselves off and flourished… only to be reduced to tears again and again.

Like our first arrival at its rivers and most of subsequent Jewish history, the eras of the Amoraim and Geonim involved repetitive cycles of persecution and relief. It’s a cycle that has perpetuated itself throughout our prolonged exile, and the 20th century was no different.

Tens of thousands of bnei Torah lived and learned in Iraq, the land that was once home to ancient Bavel. Luminaries, including Rav Abdallah Somech and the Ben Ish Chai, presided over dozens of batei knesset and yeshivot such as Shaf V’Yasiv and Midrash Beis Zilcha Talmud Torah. A powerful, successful kehillah thrived for centuries, until it was robbed and subjected to expulsion and confiscation of its assets.

The ongoing saga of the Lawee family and their ancestral home on the banks of the Tigris River, built in 1939 by brothers Ezra and Khedouri Lawee, is another chapter of this alternately triumphant and tragic pattern.

Phillip Khazzam, grandson of Ezra Lawee, who is leading the family’s campaign for justice from the French government, says the Beit Lawee battle is not only about one family and their home. It’s not even limited to the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Arab countries who were stripped of their property in 1947, with no UN resolutions calling for their return. It’s a commentary and microcosm of the Jewish story through the exile, the uneven applications of social justice that narrate it, and the battered principles of right and wrong.