In May 2003, military personnel looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and following a lead for a missing valuable Jewish Talmud, searched the headquarters of the Mukhabahrat, the Iraqi secret police, in Baghdad. Instead of bombs, they found a collection of Judaica, including rare 16th-century books printed in Venice. The cache was pulled from the water-filled basement of the Iraqi secret police building and transferred to Washington, DC where it is now being conserved by specialists at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
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In the weeks after the discovery in May, personnel from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) retrieved printed and manuscript materials in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and English from the water, under working conditions made precarious by the presence of an unexploded bomb outside the building. Following removal, the objects were packed into sacks, partially dried, placed in metal trunks and frozen.
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The collection includes Hebrew-language materials such as the �Ketubin� volume of the monumental Third Rabbinic Bible, published in Venice by Giovanni di Gara in 1568; and what appears to be Abraham Brudo�s �Birkat Avraham,� published in Venice in 1696. Hebrew prayer books, Bibles, commentaries and books published in Baghdad, Warsaw, Livorno and Venice in the late 19th to early 20th century are also part of the cache. Arabic materials include hand-written and printed items relating to the Iraqi Jewish community, including a 1966 request for names for a board of directors of the Jewish community and 1930s documents.
The article also has two photos of material from the hoard.
UPDATE: Somehow two earlier drafts of this post were posted with it. I've deleted them. Sorry for the confusion.
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