This photo taken Sept. 30, 2013 shows Dina Herbert, a librarian holding the Kol Bo book from the 1540's, that was one of the Iraqi Jewish documents being conserved at the National Archives in College Park, Md. The tattered Torah scroll fragments, Bibles and other religious texts found in a flooded Baghdad basement 10 years ago testify to a once-thriving Jewish population that's all but disappeared from Iraq. Recovered from the Iraqi intelligence headquarters and shipped to the United States for years of painstaking conservation was a literary trove of more than 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents that are being digitized and put online. A sample of that treasure is being displayed for the first time this fall at the National Archives in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The tattered Torah scroll fragments, Bibles and other religious texts found in a flooded Baghdad basement 10 years ago testify to a once-thriving Jewish population that's all but disappeared from Iraq. Read more...

The Jewish Week | Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, and Opinion

A Burial For The Books

Among Sandy’s casualties were 80 tons of sacred texts and ritual items, all requiring a respectful goodbye.

01/08/13

Stewart Ain

Staff Writer 

They too are the remnants of Sandy’s fury.

In the days after the superstorm flooded homes, synagogues and yeshivas, water-soaked Jewish holy books containing God’s name — known as shaimos — were brought by their owners to a truck in Far Rockaway,

Queens hired to transport them to a proper burial place. Read more...

Related articles

• The Jewish origins of multiculturalism in Sweden (theoccidentalobserver.net)
• Hungry Jews in America? Kosher food pantries report growing need (religionnews.com)
• the jewish woman.... the power of being female (findingmyjewishself.wordpress.com)
• Facing History and Ourselves Issues New Resource for Educators in a Jewish Setting "Sacred Texts, Modern Questions: Connecting Ethics and History Through a Jewish Lens" (facinghistory.org)
• Iranian Jewish man murdered in Tehran (jta.org)
• French Jewish leader: Anti-Semitism threatens Jewish presence in France (jta.org)
• Jewish Board's Participation With Oxfam Angers Members of UK Jewish Community (algemeiner.com)
• Israel: Not Jewish, not Democratic (amirmizroch.com)
• How and why Sweden became multicultural (destroyzionism.com)