Flora Mizrahie
In the expansive and multivariate history of Jewish migration to Los Angeles, truly inimitable stories diversify the richness of its composition. One such story is the life of Flora Mizrahie, an ethnic Iraqi Jewish woman from Calcutta, India, who now lives in Los Angeles’s Fairfax neighborhood. In many respects, her life unfolded as it did because of violent conflict. For her parents, their relocation to India was the result of the chaos created by the post-World War I collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They found refuge in India, settling in a multi-ethnic community comprised of Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, where they started a family that would ultimately consist of nine children..
Flora Mizrahie’s early life was defined by her family’s faith. As a distinct minority in India, Jewish lives were markedly different from those of their neighbors. Flora’s father was a deeply religious man, demanding the absolute immersion of his sons to the faith, and the enrollment of his daughters in all-Jewish academies. Though Flora estimates the Jewish population couldn’t have exceeded a total of 7,000 individuals from 1935-1947, her entire childhood was spent around other Jews, at home, school, and synagogue. Convinced that their lives would be spent in India, Flora noted that the family was genuinely shocked and disturbed by the increasingly violent tension between Hindus and Muslims following the 1947 Partition of India. As uncommitted non-actors in the conflict, most the country’s Jews fled India, including the Mizrahies in 1952. For Flora, this move effectively signified the start of her adult life.
London was unlike any place Flora had been before and was the catalyst for the wanderlust that would ultimately come to define her adult life. Even Flora’s father, a self-described cynical curmudgeon, called their new home “the garden of Eden.” Within a few years, Flora found employment at Lloyd’s Bank, the largest retail bank of the country, and spent her free time exploring the country with her siblings and their new British friends, many of whom were Jewish as well. By 1966, however, Flora was feeling an unsettling discontent, particularly after the death of her mother. So she packed up and moved to Toronto, Canada, where she quickly obtained her citizenship and a job with the Department of National Defense, where she garnered the respect of her supervisors over the course of two decades.
After the death of two of her siblings in the mid-1980s, Flora decided it was again time to resettle, deciding this time to move to the Fairfax neighborhood in Los Angeles, where she believed she would thrive in the majority Jewish community. She worked at Arco’s Headquarters for almost a full decade before starting work at the Freda Mohr Community Center. Though she is now officially retired, she has continued to volunteer at the Freda Mohr Center for over a decade – truly an integral part of the center’s operations. She is now beginning to coordinate her “second retirement,” which she will dedicate to relaxation.