From Baghdad to Coventry – a rabbi reflects on refugees’ journeys
In Synagogue, we are presently reading portions of the Torah, that describe the journeying of the Jewish nation in the desert.
This journey began by their frightened exit from Egypt, running from Pharaoh and his slavemasters; and would eventually end after forty years with the entrance into the Land of Israel.
It was not an easy journey, and there were many points of vulnerability along the way.
And so journeying, movement, migration and its dramatic ups and downs has been a part of our national story ever since.
So, to be sitting last week, with individuals who have themselves experienced this journey only recently from Iraq, Syria and Yemen was quite humbling and most certainly allowed for an immediate sense of solidarity.
We met a woman and her daughter who had escaped the clutches of ISIS in Iraq, only to spend 9 years as refugees in Jordan.
They were then flown to the UK as part of the UN’s Vulnerable Persons scheme for refugee resettlement, taking them to the open arms on Coventry.
How would a family brought up in Baghdad, believe that they would one day live in Coventry, a place that they had never heard about.
But then think about our forebears and whether a Jewish family say brought up in Odessa, would have thought that their grandchildren would be born in say Liverpool, or Brighton.
I was also left last week with deep pride for the work in Coventry and other places in the UK undertaken by World Jewish Relief.
As one of my colleagues said, the work they were doing was a ‘Kiddush Hashem’ or sanctification of G-d’s name.
Being in Coventry with Rabbinic colleagues from the United Synagogue, viewing this amazing work of WJR, felt simply right.
