(Jewish Group)In Iraqi Kurdistan, a one-man museum celebrates the region's Jewish history...
In Iraqi Kurdistan, a one-man museum celebrates the regions Jewish history and ethnic diversity
For more than 27 centuries, Jews lived in the region around Erbil, the capital of Iraqs semi-independent Kurdish Regional Government.
Once home to a Jewish community numbering in the tens of thousands, the Kurdistan region and wider area of Northern Iraq is also, many believe, the final resting place of the prophets Nahum and Jonah and where lived one of the first female rabbinic figures, Asaneth Barzani. The city of Erbil was even once the capital of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, after the conversion of its Queen Helene and her son Monobaz in the first century AD.
Today however, no native Jewish community remains.
Along with the rest of Iraqs Jews, most Kurdish Jews left in the 1950s under pressure from the government following the establishment of the State of Israel.
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