Giving Compass' Take:

· According to Lela Gilbert at the Hudson Institute, the State of Israel is seeking financial reparations for the Jews that suffered persecution between 1948 and 1970. Gilbert further explores the history of religious persecution around the world and the suffering faced by different religious groups.

· Are reparations appropriate compensation for religious persecution? How can funders work to prevent future religious persecution?  

· Read more about religious persecution and the rise of anti-semitism in the United States.

It’s recently been reported that the State of Israel plans to seek financial reparations for losses suffered by more than 850,000 Jews between 1948 and 1970. During those years, Jews were either formally expelled from their ancestral Middle East motherlands, or fled with little more than the shirts on their backs to avoid eminent bloodshed.

The expulsion of Middle Eastern Jews marks one of modern history’s most notorious eruptions of brutal religious persecution and ethnic cleansing. It exclusively targeted Jewish people. And at last the long-delayed accounting has finally arrived, albeit some 50 years after the fact.

The fact that so much of the world remains unaware of the evictions and thievery perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of Jews never ceases to amaze me.

For more than 30 years, I’ve researched and written about religious persecution and antisemitism. And yet until fairly recently, I knew nothing about this enormous catastrophe in the Middle East.

Read the full article about reparations for religious persecution by Lela Gilbert at Hudson Institute.