Voices from the Archive Community Engagement with the Iraqi Jewish Archive

About the Project

Voices from the Archive: Community Engagement with the Iraqi Jewish Archive is an online platform dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of the Iraqi Jewish community through community transcription, translation, and engagement with rare historical documents. The project draws on the Iraqi Jewish Archive — a collection of approximately 2,700 Jewish books and tens of thousands of documents discovered in May 2003 by U.S. Army personnel in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat (intelligence services) headquarters in Baghdad. These materials, originally belonging to synagogues and Jewish community institutions in Baghdad, span the 16th through the 20th centuries and include religious texts, school records, community correspondence, and personal documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and English.

The Iraqi Jewish Archive: Background

Jews have lived in Iraq for approximately 2,500 years. By 1910, Jews constituted roughly a quarter of Baghdad's population. The community dwindled dramatically in the mid-20th century, particularly during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, when most Iraqi Jews emigrated to Israel. The materials discovered in 2003 were preserved, cataloged, and digitized by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of State, the Center for Jewish History, and other partners. The archive is accessible online through NARA's Iraqi Jewish Archive portal at ijarchive.org.

Community Engagement

The Voices from the Archive platform (judeoiraq.org) was developed to engage the global Iraqi Jewish diaspora and broader public in exploring the archive using AI-powered tools. The platform invites community members to interact with the digitized documents, providing cultural context and fostering collective memory. It represents a collaborative approach to preserving and interpreting a community's heritage.

Access and Usage

The platform is fully online and accessible at judeoiraq.org. The broader Iraqi Jewish Archive collection is searchable at ijarchive.org. Both platforms are free to use and require no registration for general access.