Archives.gov
Iraq Map

Traveling Exhibit Locations:

Jewish Museum of Maryland, Baltimore, MD www.jewishmuseummd.org
October 15, 2017 - January 15, 2018

William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, GA www.thebreman.org
January 28, 2018 - April 29, 2018

Museum of Biblical Art, Dallas, TX
www.biblicalarts.org

May 11, 2018 - September 3, 2018

Previously shown at:
Jewish Museum of Florida - FIU, Miami Beach, FL
December 3, 2015 - February 14, 2016

Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, CA
September 4, 2015 - November 15, 2015

National Archives at Kansas City, Kansas City, MO
June 18, 2015 - August 15, 2015

Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, NY
February 4, 2014 - May 18, 2014

Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery, National Archives, Washington, DC
November 8, 2013 - January 5, 2014

This online version of the Arabic/English exhibit Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage replicates all the text and images exhibited in Washington, DC and New York City. For preservation reasons, a few new documents have been substituted for original items at later exhibit sites.

Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage

Enter the Exhibit

Jews have lived in Iraq for thousands of years, but when coalition forces entered Baghdad in May 2003 only very few remained. A U.S. Army team searching for weapons of mass destruction in the flooded basement of the Mukhabarat, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services, discovered over 2,700 Jewish books and tens of thousands of documents. The remarkable survival of this written record of Iraqi Jewish life provides an unexpected opportunity to better understand this community. The National Archives is preserving these books and documents and making them accessible worldwide.

refer to captionEnlarge Video Clip: Recovering and Preserving Iraqi Jewish Books and Documents