‘Like sending back art Nazis looted’: Iraqi Jews who fled persecution fight to stop U.S.

‘Like sending back art Nazis looted’: Iraqi Jews who fled persecution fight to stop U.S. from returning stolen artifacts to Baghdad

Dr. Caroline Bassoon-Zaltzman was an exemplary student at Menahem Daniel Elementary school in Baghdad. She had a 94 in Arabic, 90 in math and science and 100 in English, grades that stood her first overall in her Grade 6 class and a point of youthful, scholarly pride, that the 56-year-old Iraqi-born Jew, now a Canadian physician living in suburban Toronto, had not really thought about for over 40 years until a friend and former classmate, Lily Shor, in Israel, sent her an email on Nov. 20 at 12:55 a.m.

“Dear Caroline!!” the email reads. “Have you seen this??”

“This” was a web link. Dr. Bassoon-Zaltzman clicked on it and up popped her Grade 6 report card, along with her school photo, two items that, unbeknownst to the top student at Menahem Daniel were recovered — along with thousands of other Jewish documents and books — from the flooded basement of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s secret police headquarters in Baghdad by American forces in May, 2003.

The Americans struck a deal with the Iraqi provisional government of the day that the items would be transported to the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., to be restored, and preserved, with the agreement they be returned to Iraq at some future date. Now, a decade later, a sampling of the artifacts — Torah scrolls, a Babylonian Talmud, Hebrew calendars and rabbinic commentaries — are on display at the Archives while thousands more, including a young girl’s report card, have been catalogued Online as part of an exhibit examining Iraqi Jewish heritage. The salvaged items are due back in Iraq in 2014.

Finding her old report card in an archive that houses the Declaration of Independence was “kind of cool” for Dr. Bassoon-Zaltzman. But mostly it wasn’t cool. Mostly it made her angry, and sad, and brought back a tide of bad memories from her childhood, from the Iraq of the 1960s where a once vital Iraqi Jewish community lived in fear, never knowing who would be arrested next.


http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/11/29/iraqi-jews-who-fled-persecution-fight-to-stop-u-s-from-returning-stolen-artifacts-to-baghdad/