I’m still tied to a tradition stemming all the way back to the First Temple

By Aryeh Levy, as told to Boaz Bachrach

Although I was just a toddler when our family left western Iran for Eretz Yisrael, I’m still tied to a tradition stemming all the way back to the First Temple

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hile modern-day Iran has been dominating the news cycle with its nuclear ambitions, bombardments on Israel, and death-to-the-west proclamations of its hardline fundamentalist government, it’s hard to imagine that there was a time not too long ago when Iran was a secular, peaceful, liberal country run by the Shah, who was friendly toward the Jewish people and the State of Israel. That’s the country where I was born.

I was born in 1950, in the city of Saqqez, then a thriving, cultural hub in the Kurdistan area of western Iran, near the Iraqi border. An ancient, deeply religious community, Jewish life in Saqqez dates back to the days of Churban Bayit Rishon or even earlier, to the exile of the Ten Tribes by Sancheriv of Assyria. My family has a tradition that we are descended from Leviim who were exiled after the destruction of the first Beit Hamikdash and who didn’t return to Eretz Yisrael for the building of the Second Temple — the very Leviim the Gemara discusses regarding Ezra HaSofer’s tariff on the Leviim who did not return, in which he gave away their maaser.

Saqqez was in the area of Bavel of 2,000 years ago, and the spoken language among the local Jews was Aramaic. As such, the language of our household was the language of the Gemara and of Onkelos, with some Persian/Arabic added over the centuries. When relatives from Kurdistan would ask, “How are you?” in our ancient language, they would use the word “dachyet” — from the Aramaic word “dachia” or “Are you pure?” This is an unusual question to ask of a little child, but one of many indications that the Jews of Kurdistan must have kept this expression from the time of the Beit Hamikdash, when the laws of Taharah were practiced. Until we moved to Israel when I was a toddler, this was the only language our family spoke or understood. To this day, when I open a Gemara, the Aramaic language itself is not the part that takes work for me to understand (baruch Hashem, I’m on my fourth Daf Yomi cycle).

Our family members were very pious people, strictly adhering to halachah and versed in Kabbalah. We kept ancient traditions, including the mitzvah of yibum. When my grandfather’s brother passed away without children, the beit din in Kurdistan insisted my saba marry his brother’s wife, even though he was already married to my grandmother.

While our ancient community had held strong to its roots for thousands of years of galut, all of that changed in 1948. For while the Jews of Kurdistan had lived there for centuries, we were always yearning to go back to Eretz Yisrael — and especially to live in Yerushalayim. When the State of Israel was established, it seemed this dream could finally become a reality. This deeply-rooted love for Eretz Yisrael was not of a political nature, but rather a religious one — and our community viewed the establishment of the State of Israel as the beginning of the Final Redemption.

First, the entire Saqqez Jewish community joined together and moved to the capital city of Tehran, where Israel, which actually had warm relations with Iran at the time, sent planes to pick us all up. That was in 1951, when the hundreds of families from Kurdistan joined thousands of others from across the Middle East as we all set out to actualize our dream and move to the nascent state.

(Decades later, in 2022, Saqqez became a symbol of Islamist oppression with the murder of Mahsa Amini by IRGC “Morality Police” for removing her hijab. The country my parents loved and dreamed of returning to visit was irrevocably changed, and any thoughts of visiting had been dashed with the Iranian revolution of 1979.)

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espite the excitement to set out for Eretz Yisrael, this mass aliyah was not without its challenges. When we left Iran, we were allowed to take with us one suitcase with our belongings. Some people tried to sell whatever they had, but the non-Jews knew that we were leaving, so they wouldn’t buy any of the property. People basically came with nothing. And once in Eretz Yisrael, it was not as if we could take up our careers from Kurdistan in Israel. My father was an accountant in Saqqez, but the language barrier and accreditation requirements prevented him from working in the field at first — until five years later, when he passed the necessary exams.

With the sudden rise in aliyah from Muslim countries throughout the Middle East, the new state was faced with the significant task of finding housing for its hundreds of thousands of new citizens. At first, we were placed with other Middle Eastern Jews in a tent city near Hadera, with no electricity and no running water — this was the fate of the Jews who came from Muslim countries. This situation was untenable, and the government had to work quickly to find a new solution.

During the War of Independence in 1948, many Arabs — encouraged by their leaders — abandoned their homes in neighborhoods throughout Yerushalayim. Some of those areas were later appropriated to provide housing for the influx of new immigrants. Our family was moved to a barren field in the southern Yerushalayim neighborhood of Talpiot, where we settled in a transit camp — a ma’abarah — consisting of temporary tin huts. It was an upgrade from tents, though not by much. For our first four years in Israel, we had no electricity or indoor plumbing.

During the winter rains, you could hear the drops pelting the tin, scaring the children, who would start crying. Outside the hut, you’d sink in the heavy mud created by the rain. There was no heat in the winter, when Yerushalayim can be very damp and cold, and in the summer the huts would become like ovens, with no trees to take cover from the blazing sun. There was no sanitation, no bathrooms, and no running water. We had to walk to the communal well to draw water. Purchasing basic food items like eggs, oil, sugar, or tea required showing the store owner vouchers issued by the government. The vouchers were limited, to ensure that demand did not exceed supply, as food items were scarce. Malnutrition and diseases among children and the elderly were rampant.

Aside from the difficulties of the ma’abarot themselves, by sticking thousands of Middle Eastern Jews from different cultures in extremely close quarters, many arguments and culture clashes broke out. Additionally, the Talpiot ma’abarah was close to the Jordanian border, with no clear border demarcation. Jews would often hear shots from the nearby border, and those who got too close to the unmarked border were killed or wounded.

The issue with the Jordanians was not unique to the Talpiot ma’abarah. My maternal grandparents had been moved to an abandoned Arab building at the end of Jaffa Road in the Mamila neighborhood of Yerushalayim, right next to the demilitarized zone (“no-man’s land”) separating the Jordanian and Israeli troops. Their porch faced the wall of the Old City, and about a hundred feet away from them were Jordanian soldiers pointing their guns. My grandparents used to tell me not to go on to the porch because it was dangerous — the Jordanians might just decide to shoot.

The neighborhood was very dangerous, with Jordanians throwing rocks across the demilitarized zone and occasionally shooting at Israeli Army positions nearby. One of my childhood friends lost part of his leg when he accidentally entered the demilitarized zone and stepped on a land mine. Because of their proximity to the Jordanian army position, my grandparents would often find Israeli soldiers on their roof, stationing themselves across from enemy positions. On Succot, my grandparents would build their succah on the same roof, inviting the soldiers to join them in the succah when not on duty.

IN

1955, we moved from the ma’abarah in Talpiot to Yerushalayim’s Katamonim/Gonen neighborhood, where the government had built small apartments for the new immigrants. Although we were still without electricity, at least we had running water and indoor plumbing. By then I had two younger brothers, and we were squeezing five people into a cramped studio apartment. Two years later, we were able to move to a slightly bigger apartment, this time with electricity.

Katamonim was similar to other low-income areas, a slum neighborhood with crime and fighting. Unable to afford luxuries like toys and games, neighborhood children were left to find alternative forms of entertainment. Hoping to find some money to buy toys or bikes, we’d sometimes dig for gold because there were rumors that when the Arabs left the area in 1948 they had buried their gold in their homes, which by now lay in ruins. These rumors were not unfounded. One of my relatives, who was living in an abandoned Arab home in the Mamila area in the 1950s, once had to break down a wall and found gold hidden inside.

Other “games” included jumping onto the bumpers of passing trucks to catch rides to different places in the neighborhood, and mud-sliding in the winter. My father, who had to serve in the army reserve and was on a 24-hour-pass, once brought home a gun, hand grenades, and other ammunition, and while he was sleeping, we took some bullets and threw them into the fire outside in order to watch them go off like a rocket.

While the Israeli government was able to utilize its few resources to provide very basic housing for its influx of immigrants, religious infrastructure was sparse at best. There were no shuls, because the government, with the little resources it had, wanted to prioritize construction of apartments for the new olim, and didn’t see shuls as a priority. We wound up using schools and kindergartens to daven on Shabbat and Yamim Tovim. There was a group of bochurim who would come from the nearby branch of Yeshivat Porat Yosef to teach Torah to the children, giving them candies as an enticement, but other than that there was no organized Talmud Torah. (Nearly two decades later, when Rav Ovadiah Yosef ztz”l became the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel and set the goal of “bringing back the Sephardic tradition and observance to its past glory,” he pushed the government and wealthy Sephardic individuals in Israel and abroad to help build many shuls and yeshivot in the Katamonim area and other areas around the country. Today, Katamonim, parts of which have been gentrified, has many beautiful shuls and batei medrash.)

For us, all this was a very hard adjustment. Where we came from in Kurdistan, the Jews were all Torah-observant. Even though there were only about 250 Jewish families in my town, there were several shuls with regular minyanim. There was a cheder, and there was a small yeshivah of rabbanim who had studied in yeshivah in Baghdad and who taught Limudei Kodesh. Many of the new olim struggled in their Yiddishkeit, watching it slowly slip away in this new state without any religious infrastructure. And so, these once religiously vibrant communities slowly lost their fervor.

I was fortunate, though. I had a lifeline — my grandfather. Although he wasn’t a rav or revered talmid chacham, he was a deeply religious man who throughout his life busied himself with learning Torah and involvement in the tzarchei tzibbur of the Kurdish kehillah. In Iran, he had been the treasurer for the shul in Saqqez. I would go with Saba to the makeshift shul, often spending the entire Shabbat with my grandparents. And Saba made sure that I was always enrolled in religious schools.

Meanwhile, my father, too, was bothered by the lack of shuls for the community, and in 1957 took it upon himself — with the help of three other friends from Saqqez — to raise the funds necessary to build a shul for the Kurdish kehillah in Katamonim. The shul is actually still standing today, though it looks very different now. A frum contractor had wanted to build high-rise apartment buildings on the block where the shul was located, so he agreed to build a brand-new shul across the street before building the apartment complex.

IN my senior year in high school in 1967, I’d take the bus from Katamonim to my school in downtown Yerushalayim, but on 26 Iyar that year, everything changed. Suddenly, an air raid siren went off, and my classmates and I spent the day in the school bomb shelter instead of taking a history test. It was the first volley of what would be the Six Day War, and Jordanian artillery fire was raining down on Yerushalayim.

Even after I was able to return home on foot, the war was at our doorstep, although our location wasn’t in the line of fire. We could see the flares, we could hear the bombings, and we could see the Israeli planes attacking the Gilo mountain area near Beit Lechem where the Jordanian Army had their artillery positions. I spent the next few days on the roof of our building, watching the strafing of the machine guns. I also saw an Israeli plane being shot down close to Kever Rachel. But miraculously, within three days, all of Yerushalayim, including the Old City, was back in Jewish hands, and three days later, so was all of Yehudah, Shomron, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. And as we were within walking distance to the Old City, we were one of the first civilians to daven at the Kotel.

Soon after the war ended, my friends and I got our own call-up notices to the IDF. I was with a group of other religious students when I reported, and Rabbi Shlomo Goren, at the time the chief rabbi of the IDF, met each of us personally — he was looking for religious soldiers who would become chaplains and take charge of religious services for the units on the front lines. I didn’t think I’d make a good chaplain, though, because I didn’t really know enough halachah and didn’t feel comfortable in that position. Instead, I was put in charge of training paramilitary high school students to become new soldiers.

And while I never did become a chaplain, I still made sure to be part of the unit’s religious life, despite the difficulties that it often involved. The army was respectful of religion — as long as it didn’t interfere with army duties. So, for example, if you had to be at early morning roll call, you had to wake up even earlier to daven.

The last year of my three-year service was during the War of Attrition, which involved large-scale enemy shelling in the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and sporadically in the Jordan Valley. I remember one Shabbat afternoon while our unit was stationed north of the city of Yericho, facing enemy lines on the edge of the Jordanian mountains. Since we didn’t have training on Shabbat, the afternoons were usually reserved for resting up, but that particular Shabbat, we experienced heavy shelling all around our camp. One of the artillery shells exploded in a tent about a hundred feet away from me, killing several soldiers. I grabbed my Uzi and helmet and ran to take cover, until the Air Force was able to score enough hits to silence the Jordanian bombardment, lighting the whole mountain across the Jordan River on fire.

After our time in the Jordan Valley, part of the unit was moved to its original base near the Syrian border, where we had access to much more updated and sharper intelligence information that allowed us to be better prepared for Syrian military bombardment. One time, we were given a warning of an upcoming bombardment. I was in charge of a group of soldiers, but I was especially concerned about the soldier manning the booth at the gate of our base since he wasn’t close to a bomb shelter. I was finally was able to reach him, and I told him to find a place in a ditch near his booth to take cover — which he did just seconds before his booth took a direct hit and was completely destroyed.

B’chasdei Hashem, all our soldiers survived that and other shellings until the war was over, but just three years later, several soldiers from our combat unit would be killed in a fierce battle to retake the strategic area over Mount Hermon during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

In the interim, I was looking forward to settling down to civilian life as a student at Hebrew University, where I met my future wife Nancy (Nissa) — a junior in Rutgers studying for a year abroad.

But the quiet wouldn’t last long. The situation on the Israeli borders slowly deteriorated, and as Yom Kippur 1973 approached, there were already indications that another war was on its brink. Along with thousands of men in talleisim, davening in shul, I was picked up on Yom Kippur afternoon during davening and tasked with gathering other Hebrew University students to their respective bases. For the duration of the war, all the men in our family were enlisted to serve — my younger brother was deep in the Sinai, in the unit of Ariel Sharon, which would eventually end the war when they crossed the Suez Canal and encircled the Egyptian Third Army. I was stationed near Beer Sheva, where my unit helped injured soldiers get transported to hospitals, so whatever the official reports were, I knew the toll the war was taking. Even my father was on patrol, stationed in the Old City to make sure that the Arabs wouldn’t make trouble there while Israeli forces were at war on two fronts.

All this was over 50 years ago, and while I’ve lived an entire life since then, I wanted — especially in these days — to share the story of my early years. After the Yom Kippur War and receiving my BA from Hebrew University, I came to the US to get a master’s degree in business and accounting, and became a CPA. Nancy and I got married in the US, eventually settling in the Highland Park-Edison area of New Jersey, where we’ve lived for the last 40 years. And while today my family is pretty much classic American-frum, there’s still a part of me that’s a little Kurdish/Iranian boy from Saqqez, navigating a new life in the Holy Land while hanging on to the rich traditions of our ancestors. While the Iran of the mullahs is filling up our headlines, we remember a quieter time, when we embarked on the first stage of our personal redemption. May all of Klal Yisrael soon see the Final Redemption, with no more wars and no more missiles — just the tangible holiness of geulah.

Aryeh Levy, a partner at Urbach & Avraham CPAs, is also an assistant treasurer of the Agudath Israel of Edison/Highland Park, where he lives.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1068)