Haaretz earlier this week, in a report from AP, discloses a complex dispute between U.S. and Iraqi officials over the return to Iraq of a trove of Jewish books, photos and religious materials which U.S. forces discovered in 2003 in a basement used by Saddam Hussein's secret police. Found by a U.S. military team searching for weapons of mass destruction, the collection was sent to the United States for restoration and safekeeping under an agreement entered in 2003 between the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority and the National Archives and Records Administration. Under the agreement, the U.S. would restore and display the collection, but would return it to Iraq whenever the Iraqi government requested. At a meeting held in June 2010 between U.S. officials and the head of Iraq's National Library and Archives, it was decided that half the material would be returned by the end of 2010, and the rest only after it was restored and displayed in the United States. However, the U.S. failed to meet the 2010 deadline, and Iraq's deputy culture minister, Taher Naser al-Hmood, is demanding that the materials be returned.
The State Department says it has only recently received the $3 million in funding to do the restoration work. Some fear that once the material is returned to Iraq, it will not be accessible to Jewish scholars, particularly Israeli ones. However Iraq says it will digitize the material so it is available to those outside Iraq. The situation is complicated by Iraqi suspicions that American Jewish groups are pressing the State Department not to return the materials. Those suspicions also interfered with attempts by Iraqi Jewish exiles to use these negotiations to also raise issues such as protecting Jewish cemeteries and shrines in Iraq.
