4419 W Brigantine Avenue
Brigantine
Dr. Arthur Goldschmidt and Omar Mohammed (Zooming with us from Paris! ) MosulEye – The Jews of Mosul Sunday, May 23rd from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m.
Dr. Arthur Goldschmidt is Professor Emeritus of Middle East History at Penn State University. Omar Mohammed, an Iraqi national, is a PhD candidate in Middle East history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is also an instructor at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. He earned his BA and MA degrees from the University of Mosul in Iraq. He is now well known as the founder of the “Mosul Eye,” which at great personal risk recorded the actions of the Islamic State during its military occupation of Mosul and which more recently has played a major role in the reconstruction of that historic city. Omar documented the destruction wrought on the city of Mosul by ISIS in 2014. “It has become my life mission to restore the Jewish heritage of Mosul,” Mohammed said in an interview. Jews had lived in the area of Mosul, alongside Arabs and Kurds, Muslims, Christians and Yazidis, for thousands of years. At its peak, the community numbered 15,000. Three-quarters of the country’s Jewish population fled to Israel under pressure from the anti-Zionist government in the early 1950s. “When [Jews] were deported from Iraq and Mosul, it wasn’t just that they were sent away,” he explained. “They were erased from our history. They were deliberately omitted from everything.” This program will be presented by both Dr. Goldschmidt and Omar Mohammed.