When the award-winning Bukharan-Jewish poet, writer, barrister and translator Yvonne Green stood up to read her poem at London’s Lauderdale Road Synagogue on June 2, 2016, she was greeted with palpable empathy. An elegant figure dressed in black with a simple brooch, Green read with impassioned yet contained emotion. She had written the poem to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Farhud, the violent pogrom that took place in Baghdad against Iraqi Jews on Shavuot, June 1 to 2, 1941.
Though British born herself, she was descended from Bukharan Jews in Central Asia, and introduced her poem as a secular prayer, describing how her experience resonated over the last 100 years. The poem graphically portrayed another Holocaust in Central Asia, one for which the Israeli government had recently pledged to compensate victims on the same scale as European Holocaust survivors. Prior to the Farhud, Jews, who first came to Baghdad as captives from Jerusalem between 597 and 586 BCE, were living on good terms with their Muslim and Christian neighbours in Bustan al-Khas, a fashionable suburb of Baghdad.
They spoke a Judeo-Tajik dialect of Persian. But after a coup overthrew the government in Iraq in 1941 a pro-German regime took power and a wave of antisemitism, fuelled by Nazi propaganda, spread through the region culminating in the riots in early June that saw about 165 Jews murdered and hundreds of Jewish women raped. Green also read her poem to the Knesset in Jerusalem and in Austral.