Kesher Talk

Jews in odd places: Iraq: Rachel Zelon is on a one-woman mission to rescue the 34 Jews who remained in Iraq after the recent war, the last remnants of a Jewish community that numbered 150,000 in the 1940s. Zelon, the 44-year-old vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, aimed to find every one of the Iraqi Jews, many of them elderly and housebound, and offer them a way out: a plane ride to Israel.

From Iraq, Zelon made occasional phone calls to her agency's American offices. Leonard Glickman, president of HIAS, said that the sound of shooting in the distance came through the fuzzy signal during those calls. "This was a pretty stark example of Rachel putting her life in harm's way in order to rescue Jews in need in some far corner of the planet," Glickman said. "She put herself last, and her job and these people first."

posted by William @ 11/03/2003 08:56:57 AM