Repairing Vestiges of the Past at Museum of Jewish Heritage

A conservator uses a light box to make final repairs to tears on a page from “The Glory of Vigils,” a prayer book used during the Jewish festival of Shavuot, that was published in Livorno, Italy in 1795. Courtesy of the National Archives

At first, it seemed no more than a footnote to the calamitous war. In May 2003, a few months after U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq, the Coalition Pro­visional Authority (CPA), which had taken control of Baghdad, heard a tip from a former member of the Iraqi intelligence: there was an ancient Torah, made of parchment, in the basement of the Iraqi intelligence headquarters.

An American army unit went to check it out.

A bomb had been dropped on the intelligence headquarters but had missed its mark. Unexploded, it had landed nearby and knocked a hole in the building’s water system. When the soldiers arrived, the water in the basement was four-feet deep.

Led by the tipster, the group sloshed their way through the fetid water to one of the rooms. There, they made a remarkable discovery. Floating in the water were hundreds of books and documents that once belonged to the Iraqi Jewish community.

The story of the voyage of these water-logged items—researchers would later learn that there were 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents—to the highly sophisticated conservation laboratory of the National Archives at College Park, MD., is the subject of “History Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage,” an exhibition at the Museum of Jew­ish Heritage that opens on Feb. 4. Although just 24 of the items that were found in the muddy waters are on display (some of them are reproductions), the exhibit also tells the equally riveting story of the loving hands that helped bring them back to life.

Doris Ham­burg, director of Preservation Pro­grams at the Col­lege Park facility, received the first call for help.

“I got an email from the CPA about a group of books and documents from the Iraq Jewish community that were in a flood and what to do and how to preserve them,” Ham­burg recalled.

A week later she and Mary Lynn Ritz­enthaler, chief of the Document Cons­ervation Laboratory boarded a military plane to Baghdad. “We had seen a few photos and we had a little bit of a sense of the material,” Hamburg said.

What they did not know was the damage that had already been done. After the basement was drained, the materials were thrown into sacks and dragged upstairs. There, they were spread out on the grass to dry. But the combination of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees and high humidity was an ideal condition for mold, which quickly began eating away at the fragile documents and invading the pages of the age-old books. Then, before the material was completely dry, it was packed into 27 trunks.

When Hamburg and Ritzenthaler arrived in Baghdad they were driven to a warehouse along the Tigris Riv­er. Hamburg had advised the CPA rep­resentative that the material be frozen as soon as possible to stop further deterioration.
There, in a freezer truck, were the 27 trunks.

“When we opened the door of the truck, there was an overpowering  smell of mold.” Hamburg recalled. “The materials had been thrown willy-nilly into the trunks, and they were one solid mass with ice around them. Everything was distorted and dirty. It was very sad, but we could see that there was hope and that they could be rescued and preserved.”

Soon afterwards, the frozen trunks were shipped to a vacuum freeze-drying facility in Texas. (Under an agreement with the Iraqi government, the materials were released to the U.S. with the stipulation that they be re­turned.)

After everything was dried, the material was sent to the National Archives labs where, in a specially isolated room, the books and documents, still covered in mold, were unpacked by conservationists wearing fume hoods, aprons and gloves.

And then began the next steps: finding out what was in the collection, assessing  the condition, photographing covers and title pages and beginning to make a basic catalogue.

All the material had been seized by security forces of Saddam Hussein from Jewish schools, synagogues and community centers in Bagdad.

No one knows for sure why the materials were taken, but starting in the 1930s, under the sway of Nazism and after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Jews had faced harsh discrimination policies. Once a thriving Jewish community that had lived in the area since the 7th century (in 1910, a quarter of Baghdad’s population was Jewish), by 2003, it was thought that only five Jews remained in the city.

Most of the collection was an unrelated assortment of 19th- and 20th- century items—prayer books, volumes on Jewish law, fragments from Torah scrolls, childrens’ school books, correspondences and legal documents. There was a 1918 letter from the British military governor in Bag­hdad to the chief rabbi about the allotment of sheep for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and a 1948 writ issued by the  Iraqi government ordering the freezing of  assets of all Jews who had left the country. 

The oldest books were a Bible published in Venice in 1568 and a Babylonian Talmud printed in Vienna in 1793. (No ancient Torah was ever uncovered.)

As of June 1, every item that has been digitized (less than 18 percent of the books and all the documents) will be available online at ija.archives.gov. Most of it is up now—as is the entire exhibit—and it is well worth a visit.

Beyond the dramatic discovery of the material, the exhibit is a showcase for the wonderful facilities of the National Arch­ives Preservation Program and the talents of all who worked on this project. In the videos, one can see the story unfold from the beginning—photos of the flooded basement, the frozen trunks piled high with books and their arrival in the U.S. There are videos that show the step-by-step process to preserve and restore the material, the infinite patience of the conservators who sorted through bags of bits of torn pages and pieced them together, removed mold, washed out water stains, mended and patched the fragile paper.

There are also videos on how the material was photographed and digitized, and the personal story of one Iraqi Jew who escaped with his family. Take a look, too, at the interesting “before and after” conservation treatment photos,

Through no fault of anyone’s is the limitations of the show’s material, and that it cannot tell us more about the Jewish contributions to Iraqi society.

“The collection does not reflect the longevity or the vitality of the Iraqi Jewish Community for 2,000 years,” noted Dr.  Jane Gerber, Professor of History at City University of New York who was a consultant on the project. “The material in some ways reflects the last days of Iraq Jewry. It is an echo of what it had been.”

“History Discovery and Recovery: Pre­serving Iraqi Jewish Heritage,” at the Mu­seum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Pl., Feb. 4 to May 18. $12, $10 seniors, $7 students, under 12 free. Free on Wednesdays, 4 pm to 8 pm.