Books, torn and stained, as they were found in the flooded basement.

On May 6, 2003, a U.S. Army team entered the headquarters of Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's intelligence services in Baghdad, looking for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. They didn't find them. Instead, in the building's flooded basement, they found more than 2,500 books and thousands of documents relating to the Jewish community of Iraq. They were written in a variety of languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and English. The oldest dated from 1568, the newest, from the mid-20th century.  

The books and documents were water-logged, stained, moldy and tattered. There were prayer books, portions of Torah scrolls, schoolbooks, calendars, school report cards, correspondence between officials of the Jewish community and the government, and more.  

Carefully, the Army team removed them to a lawn to begin to dry out. Then, they were frozen, a common preservation technique for materials in this condition. With the consent of Iraqi officials, they were packed in metal trunks and shipped first to a facility in Texas and then to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. for restoration.   

A page from a Haggadah, printed in Vienna.

Now, some of these objects are on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City in an exhibit called, "Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage." A video and photographs show the flooded basement, the tangle of documents and their journey to the conservators who are painstakingly resurrecting them.    

On Feb. 3, the night before the exhibit opened to the public, David E. R. Dangoor, a board member of the World Organization for the Jews of Iraq, stood in front of a small group of guests to reflect on the exhibit and its significance. "These Iraqi archives are like a miracle that have served to finally shine the light on Iraqi Jewry," he said. Most people that he met didn't know that there were Iraqi Jews.

Today, there are around 330,000 Babylonian Jews in the world, Dangoor said. Most of them live in Israel. In 2008, they established the World Organization of Jews from Iraq in order to protect, preserve and promote Jewish communal assets and the Iraqi Jewish heritage. "For example," he said, "we hope to preserve the tombs of the Prophets Nahum, Ezekiel, Jonah and Daniel, among others, as well as those of Joshua, the High Priest and Ezra, the priest-scribe."   

Dangoor said that the documents found in Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters "were plundered from homes, schools, and congregations by the Baath regime. At one time, it was even forbidden to have any books or writings in Hebrew in one's home." The Iraqi Jews would like to have these documents back. Neither the Iraqi government nor President Obama has responded to their plea.  

However, on March 7, U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who represents the Congressional district in which the Museum of Jewish Heritage is located, joined with Representatives Steve Israel (D-NY), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and 17 other members of Congress to introduce a resolution (H.Res. 505) to return the Iraqi Jewish Archives to Iraqi Jews and their descendants. In the meantime, 24 of the Iraqi-Jewish books and documents are on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage through May 18. 

- Terese Loeb Kreuzer 

For more information about the exhibit and about the hours and admission fees at the Museum of Jewish Heritage at 36 Battery Place, click here. In addition, a website has been created to make these materials available online as they are digitized and catalogued. For the website, click here.