EFRAT SOPHER
The granddaughter of a former Israeli diplomat in Tehran leads our reporter to look at her own heritage
V I HAVE never properly asked my dad about his memories from Iraq. It’s a strange thing to have avoided, given my profession as a journalist, but getting the answers would make what he went through too real.
And yet I was forced to confront the issue after Efrat Sopher, the granddaughter of Israel’s former ambassador to Iran, recalled her ancestor Meir Ezri’s role in helping Iraqi Jews flee persecution in the country.
I asked my father what he remembered of leaving the family home in Baghdad with his siblings and my widowed grandmother Julie Rashty, a journey that took them through the mountains of Kurdistan to Iran’s capital, Tehran.
Now living in London, he recalled it clearly: “We left on the day of my birthday, the day I turned 15 on July 23, 1971. Mama Julie spoke to me the night before we left and said: ‘Tomorrow, we are escaping, but you must not tell anyone’. No one trusted anyone at the time. I didn’t know if I would ever see my friends or the rest of my family ever again. I took only what I was wearing: my shirt and trousers. There was one piece of hand luggage between us all.
“The morning we left, we took the train from Baghdad to Erbil in the north. I don’t remember seeing anyone on the train that we knew — but I also don’t remember seeing any police or soldiers.
“When we arrived we met a Kurdish man. He put all of us in a small hotel in one room. The next night, he drove us further north to Sulaymaniyah and we stayed in an open-air cave. I remember Mama Julie buying us a watermelon to eat from one of the stalls, but it was so hot she told me to hold it under a spring of water coming from the mountains to cool it down. It exploded all over me.
“I don’t remember sleeping that night. As the sun came up, we started to see other Iraqi Jews, all different ages — men, women and children. I remember there were exactly 27 of us that got into an army Jeep to drive to the top of the mountain. It was freezing cold and we
He said ‘you are safe now. You are in Iran’. It felt good.