November 30, 1947
After the U.N. General Assembly vote the previous day to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, violence breaks out between Jews and Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine, opening the first phase of Israel’s War of Independence. Meanwhile, riots break out against Jewish communities in Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Beirut and Aden, and the leaders of Al-Azhar University in Cairo declare a holy war against the Zionists.
In Aleppo, Syria, a mob chanting anti‐Jewish slogans gathers outside the Great Synagogue and eventually breaks in. The mob destroys Torah scrolls and badly damages an ancient Torah manuscript, the Aleppo Codex, written around 930 C.E. Most of the manuscript is saved and hidden and in 1958 is smuggled out of Syria to Jerusalem. The Aleppo riots destroy 150 Jewish homes, 50 shops, five schools, and 18 synagogues, including the Mustariba Synagogue, built in the fifth and sixth centuries.
“I remember everything. I saw my father weeping like a child,” recalls Asher Baghdadi, son of the caretaker of the Great Synagogue of Aleppo. “My father sat. And I went through the papers, the piles, to find the pieces of the codex.”
On December 2, Arabs kill 82 Jews and wound 76 others in British-controlled Aden, now part of Yemen.
On December 5, in Manama, Bahrain, Jewish homes and shops are looted, and the synagogue is destroyed. One Jewish woman is killed.
Continuing Arab violence against Jews drives hundreds of thousands of flee Arab states over the next few years and immigrate to the State of Israel.
