Jewish family sues France for $25 million for using home as embassy in Baghdad

According to the family’s account, France paid rent for the property until 1974, after which the payments stopped.

By Ailin Vilches Arguello, The Algemeiner

A Jewish family of Iraqi origin is suing the French government for $25 million over a Baghdad property seized from them that now serves as the French Embassy in Iraq, reviving a decades-old dispute over Jewish property left behind amid the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews.

The plaintiffs, descendants of Iraqi Jewish brothers Ezra and Khedouri Lawee, had previously brought a separate case before France’s administrative courts, seeking $22 million in unpaid rent and an additional $11 million in damages from the French government.

According to the family’s lawyers, the lawsuit centers on the wrongful seizure of Jewish property, with the family seeking compensation for more than 50 years of unpaid rent and emotional damages over the loss of their property, in what they say was a decades-long injustice.

However, the Paris administrative court dismissed the case in February, ruling that France’s administrative justice system lacked jurisdiction over the dispute and that the matter should instead be heard by a court in Baghdad.

Now, according to documentation first reported by AFP, the family is seeking to revive its claims against France, challenging the legal basis for the government’s continued use of the property and seeking compensation for what they say was the unlawful dispossession of their family’s home.

The dispute traces back to the mass departure of Iraqi Jews, when the Lawee brothers, who owned the Baghdad property, left for Canada in the late 1940s as persecution and discrimination against the Jewish community intensified all across the country.

Initially, the French government leased the Baghdad property from the Lawee brothers under an agreement signed in 1964 and effective from 1965, covering the 3,800-square-meter building and the 1,150-square-meter plot on which it stands.

In the 1950s, the Iraqi government seized Jewish property and stripped Jews of their citizenship, yet the Lawee family retained legal ownership of their Baghdad home even after being forced to leave in 1951.

According to the family’s account, France paid rent for the property until 1974, after which the payments stopped. The family received nothing for more than 50 years.

Last year, Philip Khazzam, grandson of Ezra Lawee, told The Globe and Mail that, under pressure from Saddam Hussein’s government, French authorities stopped paying rent to the Lawee family and appear to have diverted the funds to the Iraqi treasury.

The French Foreign Ministry explained the government’s position on the matter, arguing that it had leased the property from Iraqi authorities after the Lawee family had been stripped of their ownership under laws targeting Jews who had fled the country.

The family’s attorneys, Jean-Pierre Mignard and Imrane Ghermi, argued that the Lawee home was seized through “a unilateral measure of an antisemitic nature taken by the Iraqi authorities, which the French state complied with without raising any objection.”

“This dispossession of Jewish property was carried out with the cooperation of the Foreign Ministry. France bears responsibility,” the lawyers said in a statement.

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