By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

In July, Rachel Zelon went to Baghdad to find and rescue what might be the tiniest oppressed minority in the world - the 34 Jews of Iraq.

For more than 30 years, a small Jewish community struggled to survive under the repression of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party, a government whose official line was one of hatred for the state of Israel and contempt for Jews.

The irony was that the small group of Jews in and around Baghdad were the last remnants of a once-flourishing Jewish culture whose roots went back to the days when Iraq was Mesopotamia, the birthplace of Abraham, the father of Judaism.

Zelon, a New Yorker who came to Cincinnati Thursday to tell the story of Iraqi Jews, went there as director of field operations for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. That's an international organization that has, for decades, been rescuing thousands of Jews from anti-Semitic regimes around the world.

She left Iraq with six, most of them elderly, whom she took to Israel.

"The people I met there were fearful, hungry, living without the basic necessities of life," said Zelon, who spoke at a meeting of the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati. "They were like shells of human beings."

Under Saddam Hussein, the Jews lived low-key lives, Zelon said, under a regime that didn't single them out for any special repression; everyone in Iraq, under Saddam, was oppressed.

"But since the regime fell, the anti-Semitism has come out in the open," said Zelon. "People are very afraid. Of everyone and everything."

The Jews she found, Zelon said, were living under "deplorable conditions,'' without electricity, indoor plumbing and continually short of food - particularly kosher food.

Zelon said her organization's greatest fear is that the daily "chaos'' in Iraq will unleash more anti-Semitism against the handful of Jews who, so far, have decided to remain.

"My hope is that more will decide to get out,'' Zelon said. "I really fear for them.''

E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com