Dozens of visitors began to flock to the "Shamash" Museum, which was opened by the Jewish community last month on Al-Rasheed Street in downtown Baghdad, making it the first museum of its kind in Iraq, in a step aimed at reviving Jewish heritage and preserving historical evidence of its presence in the country.
The museum includes a hall containing documents, photographs, and school records belonging to Iraqi Jews, as well as images of prominent figures, including Sassoon Eskell, the first Minister of Finance in Iraq, and the doctor Dhafer Fouad Eliyahu, who became known for providing free medical services.
Attorney Ammar Al-Tamimi, a member of the Iraqi Jewish Community's administrative committee, stated that the "Shamash" Museum is the only museum dedicated to the Jewish community in Iraq, noting that it has begun to attract interest and visitors from both Iraqis and foreigners.
The building dates back to 1928, when Yaqub Shlomo Shamash established the school with his own funding to provide education in English to students from various sects, especially Jewish ones. In the 1970s, the state confiscated the school and transformed it into a government institution, before a court ruling in 1992 ordered it to be returned to the Jewish community.
Attempts to revive the school and other Jewish sites faced numerous challenges, including economic sanctions in the 1990s, the American invasion in 2003, sectarian violence, as well as the takeover by ISIS of large areas of the country.
In recent years, community representatives have worked to restore several shrines, temples, and historical sites that had fallen into neglect or had been turned into storage facilities, while some were destroyed during the conflicts that Iraq experienced.
The roots of the Jewish presence in Iraq go back about 2600 years, as the Jewish community was one of the largest communities in the Middle East before its numbers dwindled after the Farhud events in 1941 and the large-scale emigration that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948.
The number of Jews currently residing in Iraq does not exceed a few dozen, most of whom are in the Kurdistan Region, while several temples and Jewish sites still exist, mostly concentrated in Baghdad and Hilla in Babil Governorate.