Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Iraq’s last Jewish doctor dies at 61

Dr. Thafer Eliyahu, one of the last Jews remaining in Iraq died last week. Mustafa Salim, the Washington Post’s Baghdad reporter announced on Twitter.

Remaining in Baghdad, during the tumultuous years of the U.S. invasion, Dr. Eliyahu was known for treating the sick and injured even as bombs fell overhead, the Times of Israel reported. According to the Iraq Body Count Project, more than 6,000 Baghdadi civilians died in the first year of the Second Gulf War alone, with thousands more injured.

Though Jews had lived in the area of Iraq for more than 2,700 years, before Eliyahu’s death barely ten Jews were estimated to remain in the country, mostly in the captial city of Baghdad.

Not long before Eliyahu’s birth, Baghdad had been one of the most Jewish cities in the world –, numbering more than 40% Jewish, according to a 1917 Ottoman census. He was born around 1960 just after the mass exodus of Iraqi Jewry, though more than 150,000 lived in the country. An estimated 96% of the Jews had left by 1951, due to antisemitism in the country.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.