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Jews Who Fled Arab Lands Now Press Their Cause

(San Francisco Chronicle) Jack Epstein - In June 1967, Regina Bublil Waldman, then 19, received a phone call at work in Tripoli, Libya, from her frantic mother: "Don't come home. There's a mob outside the house. Find a place to hide." Waldman is one of nearly 856,000 Jews who fled Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen in an exodus that began after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and ended about 1970. Today, only an estimated 5,000 Jews remain in Arab lands, most of them in Morocco. "In its zeal and need to address the plight of Palestinians, the world allowed the plight of the Jewish refugees to fall by the wayside," said Stanley Urman, executive director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, a New York-based coalition of 27 Jewish organizations. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has introduced a resolution in Congress that would instruct U.S. envoys to raise the Jewish refugee issue every time the Palestinian refugee issue is raised as "an integral part of any comprehensive peace."
2004-04-02 00:00:00
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