Once a King

Sassoon Abda is one hundred years old now, but the last four decades of his life have been a free gift. He was whisked away from the gallows at the last moment and survived years of torture at the hands of the evil Iraqi regime. The indictment of this former millionaire: serving as a Zionist spy.

He is one hundred years old, but you’d never suspect it. He finishes up the last prayers of Shacharis, carefully winding up his tefillin, before welcoming his guest into his sixth-floor Tel Aviv apartment. That Sassoon Avraham Abda overcame years of cruel, unspeakable torture at the hands of the Iraqi government after the Six Day War is another surprise. Sassoon’s seventy-one-year-old son, Eliyahu Abda, translates the incredible story of his father, who speaks only Arabic.

For many years in Baghdad, Sassoon, a Jewish real estate broker, was treated “like a king” by the prime minister and government officials alike. He was invited to important state events and was entrusted with the confidences of top officials because of his sincerity and uprightness, Eliyahu explains. Through his real estate dealings and the villas he built in Baghdad, he had succeeded in creating a small fortune which allowed his  wife and five children to live in comfort. “We were half a Rothschild,” Eliyahu says. “My father made 90,000 dinar, which was like 3 million dollars.”

As history has it for Jews living in comfortable exile, the situation of the Jews in Baghdad took a deadly turn after the establishment of the State of Israel, and then again after the Six Day War in 1967. Jews were killed without reason, tortured, or falsely accused of plotting against the Iraqi government. At that time, the Ba’ath Party, under the chairmanship of Saddam Hussein, retook the power it had lost in 1963. It took another ten years before Saddam was officially named president, but he held the reins of power nonetheless.

Many of the abductions, tortures, imprisonments, and murders from this period are documented in the book Fascinating Life and Sensational Death — The Conditions in Iraq Before and After the Six Day War by Gourji Bekhor. The book includes a section devoted to the horror story of Sassoon and his brother Meir, Jewish victims of an evil regime.