Iraq wants United States to return historic Jewish archive

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Iraqi officials say they will go to the U.S., possibly next month, to assess the materials of Jewish archive found by U.S. troops in 2003 and plan for their return after an absence of nearly seven years, according to the Canadian Press. “Some Jewish authorities are skeptical, arguing that since most estimates put the number of Jews in Iraq at less than 10, the archive no longer belongs here,” the World Jewish Council (WJC) said. But to Saad Eskander, the director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, it is part of a larger effort to rescue the cultural history Iraq lost during the invasion, and to put Iraqis on a tentative path to coming to grips with their past. “Iraqis must know that we are a diverse people, with different traditions, different religions, and we need to accept this diversity … To show it to our people that Baghdad was always multiethnic,” said Eskander. The archive was found in May 2003, when U.S. troops looking for weapons of mass destruction got a tip to check out the basement of a building of the Mukhabarat – Saddam’s secret police. Passing a one-tonne unexploded bomb on their way into the building, they found a flooded basement. “It was really quite disgusting, to be honest, because it was about chest-deep sewage water,” said Richard Gonzales, the army officer who led the team and has since retired. Accumulated over the years were photos, parchments and cases to hold Torah scrolls; a Jewish religious book published in 1568; 50 copies of a children’s primer in Hebrew and Arabic; books in Arabic and English, books printed in Baghdad, Warsaw and Venice – the lost heritage of what was once one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, dating to the sixth century BC. SH (S)/SR 3