Iwas five years old when the doors began to close.

In Iraq, where my family had lived for generations, Jews suddenly found themselves trapped. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, a moment that should have meant safety and self-determination for the Jewish people, the opposite happened for Jews across much of the Middle East and North Africa. In country after country, regimes turned against their Jewish citizens in retaliation. Jews were stripped of rights, targeted as enemies and violently pushed out of lands they had called home for millennia.

My family was among them. In Iraq, we were no longer permitted to leave the country. Overnight, we became hostages to a government that treated us as internal enemies. That was more than 60 years ago, yet this trauma has recently be

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