WASHINGTON — The tattered Torah scroll fragments, Bibles and other religious texts found in a flooded Baghdad basement 10 years ago testify to a once-thriving Jewish population that's all but disappeared from Iraq.
Recovered from the Iraqi intelligence headquarters and shipped to the United States for years of painstaking conservation was a literary trove of more than 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents that are being digitized and put online. A sample of that treasure is being displayed for the first time this fall at the National Archives in Washington.
"One thing that is particularly touching about them, or particularly interesting about them, is that they connect to a community that no longer lives in Iraq," said Doris Hamburg, the National Archives' director of preservation programs.
The exhibit of two dozen items offers a rare glimpse into a Jewish population that dates to antiquity but dispersed after Israel was created in 1948. But the decision to return the collection to Iraq after its display here has raised bitter feelings among Iraqi Jews in the United States and stirred debate about to whom the materials belong: the country where they were found or the people that once owned them?
Iraqi Jews consider the artifacts part of their heritage and say a nation that decades ago drove out its Jewish citizens doesn't deserve to recover sacred objects of an exiled population. Some also fear there's no constituency of Jews remaining in Iraq to ensure the books are maintained, especially in a country still riven by violent conflict.