new york | When Rabbi Mitchell Ackerson blew the shofar at Rosh Hashanah, it reverberated loud and clear throughout one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.
More than 100 Jewish members of the U.S. forces stationed in Iraq attended last weekend’s services at the former Iraqi dictator’s Baghdad compound.
“It was a 25-foot ceiling, so it really goes,” Ackerson said, describing the shofar’s blast in a telephone interview from Baghdad on Monday.
Many of the young Jews also “kept looking at all the marble, the gold, the fancy chairs,” the rabbi said. “It was rather magnificent.”
Then, under a late afternoon sun, the group performed the tashlich ceremony outside the palace, casting pieces of bread representing sins into a private lake once owned by the Iraqi dictator’s sons, Uday and Qusay.
“It was a gorgeous setting,” said Ackerson, who is from Baltimore. “It tells me we can actually put these places to good use.”
For Jews serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the High Holy Days began on a sweetly ironic note — as they celebrated the new year in unusually elegant fashion, in the heart of Saddam’s turf, which now serves as a U.S. military base.
As the senior rabbinic chaplain for the U.S. operation in Iraq, Ackerson said he wanted the year to start with a spiritual bang for the estimated 500 Jews among the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait.
It seems to have worked.
“One sergeant told me it was the most meaningful Rosh Hashanah he’s had in 20 years,” Ackerson said of the palace services.
There were also services for Jewish service personnel in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, which drew some 50 people, and two services in Kuwait, where U.S. forces also are stationed.
Not all personnel could make it to the holiday services, as some were on special missions. The luckier ones were on leave.
Kayitz Finley, 21, a marine corporal from Los Angeles, is at home on 30 days’ leave.
The son of ex-Marine Rabbi Mordecai Finley of Congregation Ohr HaTorah in Los Angeles, the young Finley said he has encountered all kinds of hostilities in Iraq.
In his first of many firefights during the war, Finley recalled lying in a ditch and watching a rocket-propelled grenade fly over his head “so close you could see the engravings on it. But I wiped away all the fear, picked up my rifle and just went to work.”
After the war, Finley was stationed in Hilal, 40 miles south of Baghdad, where he helped train police, repair basic services and visit schools.
Generally, Iraqis welcomed the U.S. forces, he said, and he made a point of telling many of them he was a Jew who “put my life on the line to free their country.”
Typically, he said, that declaration met a “sour” reception, with many Iraqis blanching and walking away or asking him to leave a house where he had been welcomed moments before.
Finley, who last April had held an impromptu seder in the former Iraqi secret police headquarters in Baghdad, said he asked one 35-year-old school teacher how he felt about Jews before divulging his identity. The teacher told him that the Koran taught him to kill Jews.
“So I showed him my dog tags,” which identified him as Jewish, “and said, ‘Here’s my knife, do your mission, kill me!’ I was ready,” Finley said, “but he couldn’t.”
Finley told the teacher that life is too short for such bigotry, before the man walked away. The teacher returned the next day, Finley said, and told the Jewish soldier “life’s too short to hate.”
“I felt at least I could change one life,” Finley said. “It was ironic, you know?’
Three New York synagogues donated four Torah scrolls, each insured for $10,000, and one Maryland congregation sent prayer books and Hebrew learning material for the holiday events, which will include Yom Kippur and Sukkot services.
The Torahs capped a civilian grassroots effort dubbed “Operation Apples and Honey” by the Jewish Educators Network of New York. The group also sent 1,200 kosher dinners and 800 bagel-and-lox lunches to the troops to complement their usual ready-to-eat meals, along with prayerbooks, books on Judaism and ritual objects such as kiddush cups.
After the Baghdad service, Ackerson said one soldier “asked me to send a note to his mother, saying he went to Baghdad for Rosh Hashanah — and he had an aliyah,” the honor of being called up to recite the blessing before the Torah reading.
Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, chief chaplain of the New York National Guard, carried one of the Torahs, along with Sukkot supplies, with him to Kuwait, where he led services at Central Command in Doha, Qatar.
Maj. David Rosner, a Marine who served in the first Gulf War and the current conflict, said Jewish troops deeply appreciate such efforts. Rosner, whose tour of duty ended in time for him to make it home for Rosh Hashanah, remembers attending Passover seders in Kuwait in April, which featured “the bare minimum of supplies: matzah, gefilte fish and tuna fish.”
When the Jewish troops weren’t attending discussion groups and reading books such as “The Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Survival Kit,” Ackerson said, they slept relatively comfortably in Saddam’s former house.