Baghdad (AFP) - Dozens of visitors began arriving to a museum opened by the Jewish community in Iraq, the first of its kind, in light of the minority's continued efforts to preserve its heritage.

Published on: 03/11/2026 - 12:13

The roots of Iraqi Jews go back 2,600 years, but tens of thousands of them left after what was known as the “Farhud” massacre in 1941, when more than a hundred Jews were killed during crowds attacking and looting their homes, as well as after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

The Jewish community in Iraq was one of the largest in the Middle East. However, the number of its members has decreased in the sectarian and ethnically diverse country, where the population exceeds 46 million, to only dozens, most of whom are in the Kurdistan region in the north and do not profess their religion openly.

However, they have been working for years to restore their shrines and temples, which suffer from great neglect, and many of which were turned into warehouses or were destroyed during the conflicts that Iraq has witnessed for decades.

Last month, the "Shamash" Museum was opened on Al-Rashid Street in Baghdad, and it is "the only museum in Iraq for the Jewish community," according to what Ammar Al-Tamimi, a lawyer in the Administrative Committee for Iraqi Jews, told Agence France-Presse.

The museum, with a huge wooden entrance topped with candlesticks and geometric shapes in stained glass, consists of one hall containing documents and pictures of Iraqi Jews and their school certificates, and it has begun to attract wide interest from Iraqis and foreigners.

On its walls are pictures of prominent Jewish figures, including the first Minister of Finance in Iraq, Sasson Haskel (1860-1932), and Dr. Zafer Fuad Eliyahu (1960-2021), who was famous in Iraq for providing free services.

Basically, the Shamash Museum was a school bearing the same name that was founded in 1928 with funding from the Iraqi Jew Yaakov Shlomo Shamash and provided education in the English language to students from various sects, especially Judaism.

In the seventies, the school became public after the state confiscated it, until “a judicial decision was issued that returned it to the Jewish community” in 1992, according to Al-Tamimi.

Adverse circumstances continued to revive the school, from an economic blockade in the 1990s, to an American invasion in 2003, sectarian fighting between 2006 and 2007, and then the Islamic State’s control over large areas of the country between 2014 and 2017.

But since Iraq finally began to witness relative stability, which reflects a thirst for entertainment and culture, representatives of the Jewish community, led by Khalida Fuad Eliyahu (63 years old), began reviving a number of sites, including “Shamash.”

During his visit to the museum, “which is important for remembering the history of the Jews and their civilization,” Ramzi Al-Saadi (74 years old) recalled his Jewish neighbors when he was a child on Al-Kifah Street in Baghdad, telling Agence France-Presse, “They were good and simple people who did not harm anyone.”

Today, only less than 50 Jewish synagogues and sites remain in Iraq, most of them in the cities of Baghdad and Hilla, the center of Babylon Governorate, to which a large number of Jews were forcibly taken during what was known as the “Babylonian Captivity” in the sixth century BC.

© 2026 AFP

The content you want to browse is no longer in service or is currently unavailable.