Farhud in Baghdad

On 1–2 June 1941, during the Shavuot holiday, mobs, soldiers and youth militias attacked the Jews of Baghdad in the power vacuum left by the collapse of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's pro-Nazi government, while British forces waited outside the city. Years of Nazi propaganda spread by the German envoy Fritz Grobba and by the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had prepared the ground. Official figures counted about 180 Jews killed, while community estimates were higher; hundreds were wounded and hundreds of homes and shops were looted. Some Muslim neighbors hid Jews and saved them.

The Farhud ("violent dispossession") shattered the confidence of a community whose roots went back to the Babylonian exile of −586, the home of the Babylonian Talmud. Young Jews turned to Zionist underground groups and self-defense, and within a decade nearly all of Iraq's roughly 135,000 Jews had left, most of them in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. It is recalled on 30 November, Israel's day marking the departure and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran.