GREETINGS TO INQUIRERS ABOUT THE BABYLONIAN JEWRY HERITAGE CENTER

Until the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center was founded there was no
organised research of Babylonian Jewry and there was no academic
institution in Israel that was concerned with the subject of Babylonian
Jewry, not in pedagogy and not in research. It is now two and a half
decades since the Center was founded, and with it the academic council that
directs and implements the research of Babylonian Jewry. We have laid down
an infrastructure of research in a number of areas; a library of rare books
and copies of them by Babylonian Jews that have been published, photocopies
of articles from newspapers in many languages, an archive of photographs, a
musical archive, an archive for oral documentation, and much more. This
material is available to any researcher who wishes to study it here at the
Center.

We have published about twenty monographs that describe the culture of
Babylonian Jewry over more than 2500 years. We have published video
cassettes documenting events in the lives of this community, as an example,
a Babylonian Jewish wedding in Baghdad as well as musical events, such as
"The Musicl Heritage of Iraqi Jews". We have also published taped cassettes of
the hymns and paeans of Iraqi Jews such as the paean of Abu
the ? Shummail Darzi ,as well as the songs of cantors in Israel who came
from Iraq such as songs of praise by the late cantor, Shlomo Mualim and the
cantor David Habbah. We have published two long-play records of the musical
heritage of Iraqi Jews, and much more.

As research on Babylonian Jewry develops and branches out, every year we
discover new and important source of information in manuscripts unknown
until now. The researchers have amassed a considerable
reservoir of informtion concerning the Babylonian Jews for further research
and for publication,

I ask all researchers and other interested persons who may have at their
disposal sources of information on this subject, to contact us here at the
Babylonian Jewry Research Institute of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage
Center,
Prof. Yitzhak Avishur
Scientific Director