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May 6, 2005
Troubled history of a mizrahim
Richmond man's journey from Iraq and then Israel brought him blessings.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
His birth name was Farouk. In Israel, he became Shalom and, later
still, when he moved to Canada, he was called Mike Hazon. He was
probably born in the spring of 1942, although no one is certain,
as the recording of births in Baghdad at the time was haphazard.
He was one of thousands of Iraqi Jews forced to flee their homeland
after the Arab pogroms of the 1940s.
Today, Hazon lives comfortably in Richmond with Anne, his wife of
35 years. He has worked for Air Canada as an aircraft mechanic -
refurbishing airplane interiors – for 25 years. He works hard,
rising at 5:30 each morning. The couple has two grown daughters,
Naomi and Leanne, who work as a teacher and a television producer,
respectively. They are a close-knit family. All have been active
members of the local Jewish community – the Hazons were among
the founding families of Beth Tikvah Synagogue. But Mike Hazon's
early years were beset by difficulties that were beyond his family's
control.
"I was robbed of my childhood by political conditions,"
he said, referring to official Iraqi reprisals against Jews for
the establishment of Israel in 1948 (they had already been subject
to mob violence for a number of years).
Up to that point, Hazon and his family had led a privileged lifestyle
in Baghdad. His father, David, was a jeweller, and the family –
including, at that time, six children – lived in a large home,
open to the sky, with servants and a palm tree growing right in
the middle of the house. Hazon attended a private school. He remembers
playing with the neighborhood children, including Arabs. They played
marbles and soccer; made slingshots.
There had been Jews in Iraq for thousands of years. In Hazon's childhood,
there were 50 synagogues in Baghdad. His grandfather was a rabbi.
Then, it became a dangerous place. "They hung Jews in the centre
of Baghdad," Hazon recalled. "They were going wild with
the sticks – [there were] hundreds, looking for one Jew.
"Once my mother went to buy something, and there were two Arabs
talking, and one was saying to the other, 'tomorrow, the Jewish
blood will be up to the knee.' My mother started shaking –
they didn't know she was Jewish too."
A sympathetic neighbor – for whom Hazon's mother had done many
favors – took the family in and refused to give them up when
the hunt was on for Jews. In the end, it wasn't wealth that saved
the Hazon family, but the mitzvot carried out by Hazon's mother,
Aliza. "That's why it says [in the Talmud], "A good deed
will save your life," said Hazon.
An article on the pogroms, published in the San Francisco Chronicle,
suggests as many as 900,000 Jews were "dispossessed" by
Arab governments. It was called the Farhud, said Hazon – from
far, the Arabic for throw – and Yehud, Jew: "It
means throw the Jews away."
The family left Iraq in 1951. They became penniless refugees in
Israel, along with thousands of Holocaust survivors.
"My parents lost everything," said Hazon, "the business,
the land." Like other departing Jews, they were forced by Iraqi
authorities to sign papers saying they'd relinquished ownership
rights to their belongings and were leaving voluntarily.
"In the airport, they were pushing you," said Hazon. "I
had to go into a small room, they checked me. I was eight years
old, I had nothing, [I said], 'What do you want from me? You took
it all.' "
There has never been any compensation for the Arabic Jews who were
forced from their homes.
The Hazon family was flown to Israel on an American plane. On arrival,
they were trucked to an orange orchard, Pardesse Hannah, where they
were fumigated. Two weeks later, they were taken to Marbarot
(Tent City) Ramat Sharon, near Herzliah. There is a stadium financed
by Canada on the same site today.
When they first arrived, Hazon tried to restart his schooling. After
several attempts, he finally found a school that agreed to take
him, six kilometres away. He spoke almost no Hebrew (the family's
language at home was Aramaic) and had to walk there and back each
day in 35-degree heat and with bare feet. "I had no shoes –
I couldn't afford shoes. I had sandals; I had to fix the sandals
all the time. The nails came through and my feet were bleeding."
During the school holidays, Hazon worked alongside his parents picking
cotton and vegetables. Eventually the family raised enough money
– $16,000 – to buy a one-bedroom apartment in nearby Ramat
Gan. By now, two more children had arrived.
Hazon joined the army at 18 and was stationed in the Golan Heights.
He fought in the Six Day War and was given a commendation for bravery
after dousing a fire in a truck packed with six tons of explosives.
He caught fire, too, and had to roll repeatedly in the sand to put
it out before using extinguishers on the truck and then driving
it away from the Beit Shan base. He was in hospital with burns for
three weeks.
After his release from the army, Hazon spent a year at Kibbutz Ganasaar.
He turned down offers to stay in the army (where he would have had
a good salary and a non-combat position) and at the kibbutz (which
had, he recalled, a swimming pool, soccer field, radio station and
espresso outlet). At the time, he didn't want to settle down. "When
you're young, you think different," he said.
He moved to Toronto, where his brother and sister were already living.
There he met Anne, a nurse.
He is happy in Richmond now. "I came from the ditch,"
he said, looking around at his living room, "and God gave me
something in my hand to show." But he still considers Israel
– the country that took his family in and provided them with
citizenship, as well as hardship, to be "something holy."
His nephew was at Jenin and he said it's hard for him to see his
family in potentially life-threatening situations.
"I don't deny that Israel goes hard on the Palestinians sometimes,"
he said. "But if I am sitting here and you keep hit me, hit
me, hit me and I don't want to hit you back, and then I get frustrated,
I come very powerful to hit you. They know that. Israel doesn't
come to hit them, they are not stupid people, they are civilized.
What for go kill children? But they [the Palestinians] want more."
Mostly, he hopes that his birthplace will soon become a true democracy.
During both conflicts in Iraq, said Anne Hazon, "Mike was mesmerized
– he sat and watched the TV day after day, just to get a glimpse
of Iraq – his homeland."
"After the war in Europe," said Mike Hazon, "people
could go and visit where they were born. Every Jew can go and see
the country where he was born, except for the Arab countries. I've
never had the chance."
One day, he hopes, that chance will come – a chance to walk,
once more, the streets where he played as a youngster – and
to finally say Kaddish at the graves of the grandparents who were
left behind all those years ago.
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