Mayer Lawee, an 86-year-old Montreal man, remembers a childhood in his family’s elegant mansion, built by his father and uncle in the heart of Baghdad, Iraq’s quixotic capital, especially family weddings in the walled gardens with its tiered fountains, palm trees and statues.
The outdoor nuptials for his three sisters were like something from old Hollywood movies, but Mayer, the baby of the family, was always sent to bed early, which during the summer meant sleeping on the roof where the night air was cooler. It was hard to sleep knowing what he was missing.
“There’d be the wedding parties underneath me and I’d be throwing things on the party,” he says. “I was a bit mischievous.”
The family now has only Mayer Lawee’s memories, old photographs, and documents pulled from archives to show for the grand house built in the 1930s by two brothers, Ezra Lawee and Khedouri Lawee.
The family’s mansion is now at the heart of a contentious international dispute shining light on a dark past.
It currently houses the embassy of France in Iraq, for which Paris pays rent only to the Iraqi government, despite the property having been plucked from the Lawee family by Iraqi officials after they fled anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1950s, the family says.
After decades of quietly campaigning for compensation from France, descendants of the Lawee brothers, who resettled in Canada, have turned in frustration to the courts, filing a lawsuit in Paris against the French government.
“It’s really a very odd story,” said Philip Khazzam, a Montreal businessman who is the grandson of Ezra Lawee, and nephew of Mayer.
If not for contemporary history, the location of the house would sound magical. It stands near the bank of the winding Tigris River in the historically crucial region once called Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. Recent decades have reduced Baghdad to a synonym for conflict and chaos.
Before Iraq’s authoritarianism and pogroms, before Saddam Hussein’s wars, before the coalition bombings, insurgency, and civil war, there was a time of tranquility, including for the Jewish minority in the majority Muslim country.
Ezra Lawee, Mayer’s father, and Khedouri Lawee, both now dead, were born into a Jewish family in Iraq. As adults the brothers owned the General Motors distribution rights for much of the oil-rich region, making them wealthy enough to jointly buy neighbouring parcels of land in central Baghdad in 1935 and 1937.
There they erected a large mansion to house both of their growing families. It has a stately entrance of stone steps curving to a rounded portico of four columns topped by an ornate balcony.
Mayer, the youngest of the Lawee children — and the last family member to have lived in the home — was born in 1939, a year that also brought trouble. “We were a big family,” he said. “We used to play in the yard. The war was on so most of my activities were in the yard or inside the house.”
During the Second World War, pro-Nazi sentiment in Iraq brought trouble for the long-standing Jewish community, including a period of mass violence targeting Jews. Post-war, Iraq joined the Arab military coalition against Israel in 1948 after it was established as a Jewish homeland, making life harder for Iraqi Jews. There were discriminatory laws, public violence, executions, looting and religious repression.
There was a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq to Israel from 1951 to 1952 in an international airlift operation, but the Lawees’s wealth gave them other options. They left Iraq on their own. One brother travelled to Egypt and the other to England before they reunited in New York and then resettled in Montreal in 1954. Trying to replicate their former life, they bought two adjacent houses and a GM dealership, Barnabe Motors.
The brothers became Canadian citizens in 1969, and their families flourished, some in Canada, others in the United States.
After the brothers left Baghdad, a caretaker watched over their property, Khazzam said. In 1964, the brothers leased it to the French government for use as a diplomatic post, according to old documents filed in court. The deal included the mansion, the caretaker’s home, two garages, and a walled garden with a greenhouse.
It was a suitably prestigious address for France, which had a significant presence, investment and influence in Iraq.
For a time, France paid rent to the Lawee brothers, documents show. The payments suddenly stopped in the 1970s. The family later learned that rather than paying the Lawees, France had agreed in 1978 to pay only the Iraqi government. That was the year Saddam Hussein became prime minister and was consolidating his authoritarian stranglehold on the country.
The Lawee brothers sent letters to government officials in Paris about the rent without any resolution, Khazzam said. Even after Hussein was defeated and executed, France continued to pay the Iraqi governments while ignoring the family.
In 2004, when France reopened its embassy after years of war, the tricolour flag of France was once again raised over the house the Lawees built. It caught the family’s attention.
They hired Lucien Bouchard, a lawyer and former premier of Quebec, to renew their campaign for answers. Bouchard wrote a letter to Dominique de Villepin, France’s minister of foreign affairs under president Jacques Chirac. At the time, de Villepin was best known for his speech to the United Nations opposing the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Bouchard’s intervention went nowhere.
“We all thought that it was lost, that we would never get it back,” said Khazzam. However, the family later learned the Lawee brothers were still listed in Iraqi records as the property’s owners.
As a new generation of his family looked at their history, they realized it was not only an issue of an old asset, he said.
“I realized that this is not just about a house, it’s about human rights. That was my motivating factor. It is hugely unfair. They are occupying our house,” Khazzam said. He thought of it in the context of works of art looted by the Nazis during the war, often from Jewish families, that are periodically repatriated.
“If you have art that’s stolen or a house that’s stolen, it’s the same thing,” Khazzam said. “It wasn’t a person or a company who stole it, it’s a country. And France was taking advantage of our misfortune and that’s not right. They’re a G7 country and they also stand up for human rights. So how are they doing this? It doesn’t make sense.”
The family tried again, this time hiring a lawyer in Paris.
Jean-Pierre Mignard is not just any lawyer. He is an establishment figure who was close to François Hollande, president of France for years until 2017. After Hollande stepped down, Mignard was an early supporter of Emmanuel Macron, who went on to become France’s president.
Mignard wrote to his government in 2021 with the flowing grace of a diplomatic entreaty, presenting France’s foreign affairs minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, with details of the “very painful case,” the letter says, translated from French.
A month later, Le Drian wrote back. It sounded promising.
“The facts you have exposed caught my attention,” says Le Drian’s reply. His office researched the family’s claims and found the embassy had indeed rented the building from the Lawee family in 1964 and later had a replacement lease with the Iraqi government. He asked for documentation.
The family replied with copies of 22 documents, from the architectural drawings for the house when it was being built, photos from the 1930s, title deeds, lease contracts, birth certificates, the brothers’ Iraqi passports and their wills.
Two months later, however, a new foreign affairs minister was appointed. Mignard started again, congratulating Catherine Colonna on her appointment and outlining the “quite sensitive dossier.”
The Lawee family “were robbed of their property,” he wrote, “when the regime of Mr. Saddam Hussein ordered the confiscation of all the property of Iraqi nationals of the Jewish faith.”
Iraq’s claim to the Lawee’s house, he wrote, had no legal basis and was “purely and simply a plunder.” He said an Iraqi law for “the dispossession of Jewish people from their properties in Iraq when they returned to Israel,” didn’t apply here; not only does it abuse international human rights but because the Lawees didn’t leave in the airlift program and didn’t settle in Israel.
“It creates a very difficult situation for France, which occupies Jewish property seized in violation of rules, values of our Republic, and international law,” he wrote.
Once again there seemed to be interest in settling the matter. The family figured they were owed about US$13 million in rent. They asked for repayment of their loss and then the family would sell the property to France.
Momentum, though, seemed only in words. Mignard’s further letters dropped the language of diplomats, sounding more like a debt collector.
“Apparently we did not understand each other well,” Mignard wrote in 2023. “This property is not the property of France. This property is also not the property of Iraq because it has been plundered and stolen. This building is the property of my clients and of them alone.”
He threatened that he and his clients might show up at the door of the Baghdad embassy and try to enter their house.
It is now a court battle. Friday was the deadline for both sides to submit their documentation to the administrative court in Paris.
Mignard told National Post they turned to the courts because decades of informal appeals have failed. He had even written to Macron about it.
“France refuses to acknowledge any responsibility, claiming that it is a decision made by the Iraqi government. This is false. France could at least continue to pay the rent, which would indicate that it is not complicit in the spoliation of Iraq,” Mignard said this week.
“We want France to be condemned, and we feel ashamed and sad because we are French lawyers and this is our country.”
A spokesman for France’s foreign affairs ministry wouldn’t answer questions about the Baghdad mansion, saying only: “We do not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.”
Macron’s office declined to say whether the president has stayed at the embassy in the past, but his director of communications, Edouard Lafourcade, said “no visit to the site by the President of the Republic is currently scheduled.”
Estimates of the value of the house and property fluctuate from a low of US$10 million to more than US$20 million.
Mayer Lawee said he would like to see money from his childhood home distributed among the brothers’ descendants. “They should all benefit.”
If Khazzam felt it was safe, he would love to see his ancestral home in person.
“If I could go tomorrow, I’d drop everything and go. That’s how bad I want to see and feel what it was like to walk the streets and be at the parks where my grandparents and parents lived.”
A trial is expected next year.
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