Deputy Euro-Asian Jewish Congress Secretary General, EAJC representative in Israel Haim Ben Yakov has participated in the international conference “Justice for Jewish Refugees From Arabian Countries,” which took place in Jerusalem. The conference was organized by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in cooperation with the World Jewish Congress.

The conference once again raised the topic of over 850 thousand Jews who were refugees from Arabic countries had to leave the countries in which they had lived because of persecution on both a state level and a personal level following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Many of these refugees have had their belongings confiscated.

Currently the state of Israel is preparing a draft law on creating a Memorial Day for Jewish refugees from Arabic countries. A museum and archive are also planned to be created, for the documentation of historic events in the Jewish communities of a number of countries, as well as for the preservation of their cultural heritage. Over 20 000 documents on the history of Jewish refugees have already been gathered, and the work on gathering more documents and eyewitness reports is to be continued.

This project, titled “I, Refugee,” has a starting budget of 2 million shekels. A call has been put out for the refugees and their descendants to provide their testimonies (documents and photographs) for the archive, like it has been done for the Yad va-Shem Institute for the victims of the Holocaust.

The World Jewish Congress also calls for the governments of various countries and the UN for relevant legislative initiatives, which would guarantee that the problems of Jewish refugees would be important to the global community.

As the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress Secretary General Michael Chlenov notes, “Over the course of many years our Congress has been stressing the importance of putting the problem of Jewish refugees on the global agenda. We had a discussion on it several years ago with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia. The Euro-Asian Jewish Congress made a request to the member organizations of the EAJC to make an effort to express our position on the matter to the governments and Ministries of Foreign Affairs in the region.”