MORE ON THE IRAQI JEWISH ARCHIVE, about which we have heard little in the last two and a half years. This article gives some addition details about the early moves to preserve the texts and says a little about their current status.

Curator ferried damaged relics from Baghdad


Peggy Lim, Staff Writer [Charlotte News & Observer]
RALEIGH - During her 10-month deployment to Baghdad in 2003, Army Reserve Maj. Cori Wegener helped repair the recently looted Iraq National Museum, clean artifacts fetched from cesspools and rescue Jewish-Iraqi archives soaked from flooded basements.

It was the challenge of preventing wet books from growing mold in 120- degree weather that has pushed her to provide more military training on protecting cultural artifacts. She addressed the topic Sunday before about 265 people at the N.C. Museum of Art.

John Coffey, curator of the museum's Judaica gallery, said he had originally planned on asking Wegener to speak about the Judaic collection she curates at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. But after talking with her, Coffey thought her Baghdad experiences would make a more interesting topic for the North Carolina museum's ninth annual Kanof lecture.

Wegener said Iraq has not been like previous wars. In World War II, a team of about 300 Americans and Europeans, trained as art historians, architects and archaeologists, mapped monuments to protect them from bombing and repatriated pieces Hitler's army had pillaged.

Wegener, who retired from the reserves in 2005, said she stayed with the military for 21 years because she provided skills the Army normally would not have. When she watched the looting of the Iraq National Museum on CNN in April 2003, Wegener was confident she was the only arts curator in the U.S. Army.

"Why aren't they calling me?" she remembers thinking. Soon, they were.

Among Wegener's early assignments in Baghdad was assisting Ambassador Paul Bremer's team with saving Hebrew and Arabic texts, dating from the 16th century to 1950s, found in the flooded basement of an Iraqi secret police building that the United States had bombed.

Until the 1940s, Iraq had a large Jewish community, as much as 20 percent of the population around Baghdad, Wegener said. After a series of pogroms, most Jews fled. But the secret police held onto its collection of Israeli-Palestinian documents.

Before Wegener was called in, members of Bremer's team spread the wet items out to dry. But the documents started to grow mold. Wegener knew that to stop the destruction, they needed to be frozen immediately.

She got a freezer truck from Jordan to store the documents. But the truck barely stayed below freezing, and the documents needed to be below 20 degrees, she said. Finally, Wegener got permission to fly the documents to the United States.

"I felt torn, because that's one of the principles of international law," she said. "Don't remove cultural property."

But she knew if she didn't act, the documents would be lost.

On the way to America, she encountered a delay on the tarmac in Spain. She called the Pentagon to request a new flight crew. Then, she ran into a local officer.

"What you got in that box, ma'am, human hearts?" the Navy lieutenant asked.

"It's none of your business ... , lieutenant," answered a famished and exhausted Wegener, pulling her senior rank.

But then Wegener noticed the yarmulke the lieutenant was wearing and changed her tone.

"What I have is what's left of the cultural heritage of the Jewish people of Iraq," she said.

In a heartbeat, the lieutenant asked how he could help.

"I need a Spanish electrician to hook up a Kuwaiti generator," she replied. "And a hamburger."

[...]

The Jewish-Iraqi artifacts are at the National Archives in College Park, Md. The mold stopped growing after being freeze-dried for 30 days. But money for mold removal has been hard to come by, she said, as questions remain of who will ultimately own the artifacts.

[...]

Background here, here, and here.

(Via Chuck Jones on the IraqCrisis list.)