Dhafer Eliyahu's death hit Iraq hard, not only because the doctor treated the neediest for free, but because with his passing, only four Jews now remain in the Middle Eastern country.
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At the Habibiya Jewish cemetery in Baghdad, wedged between the Martyr Monument erected by ex-dictator Saddam Hussein and the restive Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, an aged Muslim man still tends to the graves, but visitors are rare.
To hear Jewish prayer out in the open is rare now in Baghdad, where there is only one synagogue that only opens occasionally and no rabbis.
Jewish roots in Iraq, however, go back some 2,600 years.
According to biblical tradition, they arrived in 586 BCE as prisoners of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II after he destroyed Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
In Iraq, they wrote the Babylonian Talmud on the very land where the patriarch Abraham was born and where the Garden of Eden is considered by some to have been located, in the heart of the Mesopotamian marshlands.
More than 2,500 years later, in Ottoman-ruled Baghdad, Jews were the second largest community in the city, making up 40% of its inhabitants.
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Some were very prominent members of society like Sassoon Eskell, Iraq's first-ever finance minister in 1920, who made a big impression on British adventurer and writer Gertrude Bell.
Today, "one prays at home," said a Baghdad resident knowledgeable of the city's Jewish community, who also chose to remain anonymous.
When people with a Jewish name deal with the administration, "they will not be well received," he added.
According to Edwin Shuker, a Jew born in Iraq in 1955 and exiled in Britain since he was 16, "There are only four Jews with Iraqi nationality who are descendants of Jewish parents" left in the country, not including the autonomous Kurdish region.
A turning point for Jewish history in Iraq came with the first pogroms in the mid-20th century. In June 1941, the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad left more than 100 Jews dead, properties looted, and homes destroyed.
In 1948, Israel was created amid a war with an Arab military coalition that included Iraq. Almost all of Iraq's 150,000 Jews went into exile in the ensuing years.
Their identity cards were taken away and replaced by documents that made them targets wherever they showed them. Still today, Shuker said, Iraqi law forbids the restoration of their citizenship.
By 1951, 96% of the community had left.
Almost all the remaining Jews followed suit after the public hangings of "Israeli spies" in 1969 by the Baath party, which had just come to power off the back of a coup. "Promotion of Zionism" was punishable by death, and that legislation has remained unchanged.
Israel, on the other hand, is now home to 219,000 Jews of Iraqi origin.
They left behind homes and synagogues, which, up until 2003, "were in perfect condition and each owner identifiable" in Iraq, Shuker said.
"All it takes is a vote in parliament" to return everything to the families, he said.
This article was first published by i24NEWS.
