Jewish philanthropist Isaac Wakil dies aged 104

Isaac Wakil, the Baghdad-born businessman, property magnate and philanthropist whose generosity reshaped some of Sydney’s most significant cultural, medical and educational institutions, has died in Sydney. He was 104.

Wakil, who passed away on July 1, leaves an immense legacy through his support of healthcare, education, medical research, the arts and numerous charities — much of it given jointly with his late wife Susan, with whom he shared an inseparable partnership until her death in 2018.

Born in Baghdad in 1922, Isaac grew up in one of the city’s most prominent Jewish families. His grandfather, a Kabbalistic rabbi, founded a school for orphans and led a community that had lived in Iraq — formerly Babylonia — for two millennia.

That world was shattered by the Farhud of 1941, when antisemitic violence, encouraged by the alliance between Adolf Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, erupted into a brutal pogrom. Armed mobs murdered and raped Jews and looted their homes and businesses. Within a decade, the ancient Jewish community of Baghdad, numbering some 135,000 people, had effectively disappeared.

Wakil fled Iraq and arrived in Sydney in 1947. He opened a clothing store in Bondi, where he met another Jewish refugee, Susan Resnick, who had fled Bessarabia. The couple married in 1953.