Iraqi Jewish Archive

Iraqi Jewish Archive is a collection of 2,700 books and tens of thousands of Jewish history documents found by the United States Army in the basement of Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The collection includes a wide variety of books and rare documents, ranging from 500-year-old commentaries on the Talmud to personal letters sent during the 1950s. The Intelligence Agency of the Iraqi regime gathered the books and documents from synagogues and Jewish community institutions after almost all Iraqi Jews made Aliyah to Israel in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Upon leaving to Israel, Iraqi Jews were forced by the Iraqi government to leave most of their belongings behind, and thus the archive was created from the books and papers that were left behind.

The archive was found by the American army in 2003 in a difficult condition in a flooded basement. It was rescued due to book freezing process on special trucks, and then brought to the United States with the consent of the new Iraqi government, and along with an American commitment to return the archive back to Iraq at the end of a period of preservation and presentation of selected items. The archive came to Washington and was handled by the National Archives of the United States. At a cost of $3 million, the archive is meant to be digitized and fully available online, and at the end of that process the rare books and documents are deignated to be returned to Iraq. A large number of Jewish organizations were joined in an effort to prevent the return of archives to Iraq, on the grounds that the archive is a stolen Jewish property. However, due to a contractual obligation to return the archive, jurists are divided over whether there are legal grounds to keep the archives in the United States.

On February 2014 the United States Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling on President Barack Obama to reopen a new negotiations over the agreement on the archive return to Iraq. In May of the same year, it was reported that the governments of the United States and Iraq have reached an agreement that most of the items of the archive will remain in the United States for several more years.

External links

• Iraqi Jewish Archive at the National Archives and Records Administration website
• Press release of the American National Archives on Exhibit Opening
• iraqijewisharchives.org a website dedicated to the struggle not to return the Archive back to the Iraqi government
• Experts at odds on archive's legal standing Point of No Return website
• Deal struck on Iraqi-Jewish archive Point of No Return website
• Edward Rothstein, The Remnants of a Culture’s Heart and Soul: Iraqi Jewish Documents at the National Archives, The New York Times, November 10, 2013.