Features
TEL AVIV — Naim Reuven was only 8 when he left Baghdad more than 60 years ago, but he still remembers going with his father to catch fish in the Tigris River.
His dad worked in a laundromat, a middle-class father of six and one of Iraq’s more than 100,000 Jews. Baghdad’s Jewish community suffered a pogrom in 1941, but Reuven, born a year later, has only fond memories of his childhood there — until Israel declared independence in 1948.
“When Israel was established it began, there was hate,” said Reuven, now 70. “We had a neighbor we got along with, and then there was hate.”
He still remembers the fear when grenades were thrown into his family’s synagogue.
THERE is no doubt that being a photo-journalist is a very privileged occupation. In my years with BBC TV News in London, and earlier with the Daily Express and Daily Mail, I had the opportunity to meet and photograph in the UK and Europe a myriad of interesting personalities.
They included Emperor Hirohito, Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Speer, Margaret Thatcher, Edward Kennedy, Golda Meir, Charles Best (co-discoverer of insulin) and many, many others.
On July 20 1...
ON Sept. 30, 2000, as Philippe Karsenty celebrated the second day of Rosh Hashanah with friends, a grim news report from Gaza’s Netzarim Junction whipped the world into an anti-Israeli frenzy.
France 2 broadcast a 50-second account allegedly depicting the death of 12-year-old Palestinian Mohammad al-Dura, who crouched next to his father to avoid a flack of IDF bullets during an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish.
Karsenty, who did not see the France 2 piece until the following day, “was shocked,...
NEW DELHI — Lt. Gen. Jack Jacob, a national hero in India for likely saving hundreds of thousands of lives, is planning to fade away.
“I’ve just had my 89th birthday,” he says, “I think I’ve earned the right to rest.”
So Jacob, India’s “top-ranking Jew,” stayed home on his recent birthday, preferring to be alone in his modest New Delhi apartment while enjoying his birthday cake, a special delivery from Nachum’s — Calcutta’s famous Jewish bakery and now among the last ...
LOS ANGELES — After a 64-year detour, Mitchell Flint, a former fighter pilot for the US and Israel, has finally landed for the London Olympic Games.
In the summer of 1948, Flint, with a four-year wartime stint as a US Navy fighter pilot in the Pacific under his belt, graduated as an industrial engineer from the Berkeley campus of the University of California. At the same time, the newly declared State of Israel was struggling to defend itself from six invading Arab armies.
“I’m Jewish, I...