In 2003, historical documents from Iraq's Jewish community were found by the US Army under water in the basement of Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters. They'd been abandoned by the Iraqi Jews, who were unable to take any property with them when they were forced to flee in the antisemitic pogroms that climaxed with the 1941 Farhud, and subsequently seized by the Iraqi government. The collection - the Iraqi-Jewish Archive - was taken back to the US for preservation and exhibition, under the agreement that the US State Department would ship it all back to Iraq after an exhibition of select documents in Washington DC. The National Archives spent some $3 million in restoration.
So now the time is approaching for the return of the Archive - despite the fact that there are no more Jews remaining in Iraq.
In spite of fierce protests by Iraqi Jews and even members of Congress, the US government, which is committed to an agreement signed in 2003, has announced that it will return the archive next September.
Why is this a problem?
Not only were its contents originally stolen from the rightful owners (the Jews of Iraq), but upon the archive’s return, it will almost certainly become inaccessible to scholars as well as to any Jews who may be interested in their own history.
In the meantime, a highly contentious Al-Jazeera piece by Dalia Hakuta suggests, as an outraged Julius puts it...
...that the archive is the property of Iraq, and that it is the Americans who have stolen it from their rightful owners. Nowhere does the author explain that the archive is comprised of books and documents seized and stolen from Jewish homes, schools, synagogues and communal offices by the Iraqi regime in the 1960s and 70s.
Nor does the article explain that if it is returned to Iraq, there is little chance that descendants of Iraqi Jews, 90% of whom fled to Israel, will be able to even visit the archive.
But read all of what she has to say.
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