The memory of ordinary, everyday intercultural or interreligious relationships, in brief

 Kifri is a town in the East of Iraq, the hub of a small district in Diyala Governate administered by the Kurdish Regional Government. Alongside a Kurdish-speaking majority, the town historically had Arabic and Turkmen speaking minorities. Growing in the early twentieth century, a small Jewish community lived a well-integrated life alongside their Muslim neighbours. At home, neighbours living within the same courtyard greeted each other at festivals, and memories are still shared now of a Jewish family cooking for Muslim neighbours on Friday, and the Muslim family in return cooking for their Jewish neighbours on Shabbat. At the school, Jewish students competed in the Quran reading competition, and often won. 

The context in which these relationships made a difference at the time

 The memory of a shared Jewish-Muslim community in Kifri is both a story of friendly human relationships and also a story of community members sharing all the resources at their disposal. These families at the same time had separate home languages, the Muslims speaking Kurmanji at home, and the Jews speaking Neo-Aramaic. Whatever conflicts individuals experienced were not reported as part of a fundamentally distant or unequal relationship – so school ragging was not a one-sided reflection of the power of a majority. Over time, the local community resisted recurrent pressures to align themselves politically, with Ottomans, with the British, or with the peshmerga, for instance. The skills of the members of the Jewish community were also a valuable local resource, such that the community did not feel it would be marginalised.

What has happened since, which makes the memory valuable 

The Jewish community left for the State of Israel in the early 1950s, at a time when the Iraqi regime was exerting pressure on the Jewish communities across the country which it suspected of Zionism. Locals recall the complete surprise of finding their Jewish neighbours gone overnight – it was not a reflection of the local harmony they knew.

A series of political pressures mean that the personal dimension of inter-communal relationships is also a political subject: from Arabization in the 1970s, the Anfal genocide, armed clashes between the Iraqi army and the peshmerga in 1991, and again in 2003 with the US military invasion, and since then contention over whether the town and its region should be ruled from Baghdad or by the Kurdistan Regional Government. 

How might the memory be used in bringing people together in practice now?

 We would like to share reflections from anyone sharing memories: In what ways do you see the memories of Kifri’s multicultural and multireligious solidarity can be used, perhaps in teaching about the value of cultural heritage and diversity, or to promote peace and understanding, or to teach lessons about small-scale, local social and economic cooperation?

Additional context/Some additional readinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kifri