From 150,000 Jews to almost none: Iraq opens museum honoring its vanished Jewish community

Iraq has inaugurated its first museum dedicated entirely to Jewish history, restoring Baghdad’s historic Shamash School, founded in 1928, to preserve the legacy of one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities. More than 1,000 visitors reportedly attended its opening day.

The museum houses religious artifacts, family photographs, school records, and personal belongings, documenting over 2,500 years of Jewish life in Iraq, dating back to the Babylonian exile.

Once home to approximately 150,000 Jews, Iraq now has just four to six Jews remaining in Baghdad. Following the 1941 Farhud pogrom and subsequent persecution, roughly 120,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to Israel during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah in 1950–1951.

Khalida Elyahu, one of Baghdad’s last remaining Jews, heads the community’s administrative committee, which oversees surviving Jewish communal properties and has supported the restoration of historic religious sites.

Jewish advocacy group JIMENA welcomed the restoration but questioned its deeper meaning: “What does it mean to preserve a Jewish school that Jews cannot visit?” The organization warned that preserving Jewish heritage without including the descendants of those who once lived there risks turning history into “a display of Jewish absence rather than a restoration of Jewish presence.”