Iraq opens Jewish heritage museum in Baghdad

A museum dedicated to the history and heritage of Iraqi Jewry opened this month in Baghdad, in a building that formerly housed Shamash, a Jewish high school founded in 1928.

Video of the school was posted to X by the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s official Arabic X account, which described it as the first of its kind in Iraq.

The exhibits at the Shamash Museum include photos of Jewish families and academic certificates of students who attended the school. One of the walls displays a portrait of Jacob Shamash, the school’s founder.

One thousand people attended the museum’s opening day, according to news reports, the ministry’s X account said. The opening took place on Oct. 22, according to social media posts.

The Shamash School building is located on the Iraqi capital’s Al-Rashid Street. At its peak in 1939, more than 900 students attended. In the spring of 1951, the school moved from its original building on Al-Rashid Street to the Frank Inni School building, where studies continued under the name Shamash Secondary School, the ministry said.

The museum includes exhibition halls with display cases with documents and certificates from the period of the school’s activity, photographs of rabbis and community leaders in the past, as well as various traditional elements that commemorate Jewish life in Iraq.

In 2025, Iraq restored the tomb of Rabbi Yitzhak Gaon, in the Qanbar Ali (or al-Kifah) neighborhood of central Baghdad, at an estimated cost of $150,000. “It was a garbage dump and we were not allowed to restore it,” Khalida Elyahu, 62, head of Iraq’s Jewish community, told AFP in May of last year during the restoration.

Iraq’s Jewish history dates back to 586 BCE, when King Nebuchadnezzar II conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple and sent a large number of Judeans into exile to Babylonia, present-day Iraq.

The Jewish community lived in the region for 2,500 years. A Baghdad pogrom by the Muslim majority in Iraq in 1941, known as the Farhud, followed by official government persecution led to Iraq’s Jews fleeing the country in two mass airlifts in 1951 and 1952 organized by the State of Israel.

The Iraqi government forced them to leave behind assets of $34 billion in today’s currency, according to a February 2025 report by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, (JJAC), a group that catalogs the assets, institutions and property left behind or expropriated from the roughly 135,000 Jews who left Iraq between 1941 and the 1960s.

“The grand and impressive Jewish community in Iraq was persecuted, imprisoned, expelled and ultimately destroyed,” Sylvain Abitbol, co-president of JJAC, told JNS. “To ignore this fact is to erase 2,500 years of Jewish life and culture. We compiled this report so that the Jews of Iraq will not be forgotten and their contributions to the region are duly recorded.”