Israel-Lebanon agreement shines light on long-lost Jewish community

SIDON, Lebanon (AP) — Rabbi Elie Abadie left his native Lebanon more than five decades ago and has not even visited since, but his Lebanese roots remain an integral part of his identity. He has 3,000 Arabic songs on his smart phone. His wife, an American, learned from his mother how to cook the Lebanese dishes he loves.

When he speaks with his siblings, he uses a mixture of Arabic and French, like many citizens of Lebanon, a former French protectorate. The once-thriving Lebanese Jewish community has been largely forgotten in the decades since most of them left the country. But the latest Israel-Hezbollah war — which pushed Lebanon and Israel into direct negotiations — has brought them under the spotlight again.

Last month, Israel agreed to release five civilians detained by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in exchange for Lebanon’s help in searching for the bodies of Lebanese Jewish leaders abducted and killed in the 1980s, during Lebanon’s civil war. The news stirred painful memories for Lebanese Jews like Abadie, 65, who was born and raised in Beirut to parents who moved to Lebanon from Syria. Abadie left his country of birth at 10 and settled for some years in Mexico.

He is now based in Dubai, serving as the senior rabbi emeritus of the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf states. He remembers the Lebanon of his childhood in the 1960s in its “best days” with “beautiful beaches and rivieras, mountain resorts, skiing resorts.” His family, like many Lebanese Jews, left as anti-Jewish sentiment rose after the 1967 war between Israel and Arab countries. Security fears have kept him away since, but Abadie hopes to come back one day to reopen Beirut’s long-shuttered central synagogue.

“It is unfortunately a sad reality that, since Lebanon and the Jews go back over 3,000 years from the time of King Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre and their peaceful and friendly relations, the situation in the last 50 years marked such a decline in Jewish population and life in Lebanon,” he said. A once-thriving community has scattered Nada Abdelsamad, a Lebanese journalist who wrote two books about Lebanon’s Jewish community, said the country once had between 18,000 and 20,000 Jews, many of them living in the central Beirut district of Wadi Abu Jmil, which was nicknamed the Valley of the Jews. After the war surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948, many Jews fled other Arab coun…