Baghdad Jewish museum opens in former school, The National reports

The Jewish Endowment opened the Shamash Jewish Museum in Baghdad in October, The National reported on November 13, describing it as Iraq's first Jewish museum. Housed in a former Jewish school on Al Rasheed Street, it preserves records of the community's educational and family life.

Visitors can see school certificates, personal letters, identity documents, marriage contracts and family photographs, with both originals and reproductions on display. The museum opens three days each week and receives dozens of Iraqi visitors, according to the newspaper.

The building was founded as the Shamash Jewish School in 1928 by philanthropist Yacoub Shlomo Shamash. The National identified Khalida Fouad Eliyahu, a Baghdad-born dentist who leads the Jewish community, as the person directing its restoration.

Its conversion into a museum follows decades of changes in ownership and use. Ammar Al Tamimi, the community's legal representative, said the government took over the school in the 1970s and made it a public school. A court returned it to the community in 1992, he said.

Al Tamimi said changes around the building meant it could no longer serve as a school, so the museum would preserve its memory. He said Eliyahu also wanted to restore other Jewish landmarks.

The opening has also prompted differing views over whether the project is solely about preserving Iraqi Jewish heritage or could indicate steps toward relations with Israel, The National reported. The newspaper said Iraqi law bans establishing such relations.

Al Tamimi said the Endowment operates within Iraqi law and has an independent administration without outside connections. Curators told the newspaper that the museum was financed entirely through the community's own resources.

The community whose history it records was once far larger. The National put Iraq's Jewish population at about 150,000 in 1947 and reported that roughly 125,000 Jews were airlifted to Israel from 1950 to 1952.

The US National Archives describes increasing persecution after Israel's establishment in 1948. Many Iraqi Jews lost their citizenship and assets in 1950 and 1951, it says, as the community left the country in large numbers.

A separate preservation effort followed the discovery of Jewish books and documents by American soldiers on May 6, 2003, in a flooded basement at Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters. According to the National Archives, Iraqi representatives agreed to their transfer to the United States for conservation and exhibition.

That collection contains more than 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents, spanning 1540 to the 1970s, in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and English. The National Archives says it oversaw their freeze-drying, conservation and digitization.