- Population
- 3,900
- Location
- Jerusalem (Bukharim quarter and other neighbourhoods) and nearby towns
The Arbili Jews come from Arbil (Erbil) in Iraqi Kurdistan, an ancient city whose royal house converted to Judaism two thousand years ago, and from the small towns between the Great and Little Zab rivers. Some 3,000 of them were airlifted to Israel in 1950-1951 with the rest of Iraqi Jewry and settled mainly in Jerusalem, where they had kept their own synagogue in the Bukharim quarter since the 1930s. Their Jewish dialect of Aramaic, Lishanid Noshan or 'the language of our people', survives only among a few elderly speakers, and their children speak Hebrew. The community lost its Jerusalem synagogue in 2020-2021, when the land was sold to a developer.