The Rresearch Institute Dear Surfer,

Here at this site The Babylonian Jewry Research Institute offers you a
wide interesting window which allows you to experience a rich cultural
and practical experience and to garner information, through pictures,
text and voice presentations, concerning the heritage, history and
culture of the Babylonian Jews.

Until now it has been possible to visit this site only in English but now
we have opened the site in the Hebrew language as well including a wide
variety of subjects and possibilities.

Since we are speaking of both visual and audio presentations we have
endeavored to broaden the visual content by the addition of rare
photographs found in our collection, pictures that deal with the lives of
the Jews of Iraq and with scenes and sites in Iraq dating from the first
half of the 20th Century. There is also material from the museum of The
Babylonian Jewry Heritge Center, a museum that is unique and is visited by
a large number of visitors, many of them students, from Israel and abroad.

In the field of research we offer the surfer a wide variety of activities
of our research activities at the institute. The first and most important
of them is publication of the first scientific manuscript produced by the
institute, "Babylonian Jewry". We will also offer a choice selection of
articles by the researchers at the institute. We will also offer material
and articles from our publication "Nahardeya, which includes a broad
spectrum of knowledge and information on our varied activities, abridged
versions of memoirs by the senior members of the community, abstracts of
research projects, and information of communities of Jews originally from
Iraq, in Isreal and all over the world.
In order to present the range of our scientific research we give the surfer
a list of all our published material and those of them that are still in
stock may be purchased through the Center at a greatly reduced price.

We also offer the surfer a wide choice of works that are a part of the rich
musical heritage of Babylonian Jewry and the chance to enjoy a cultural and
auditory experience that is interesting and touching.

Surfers who desire to do so will be able to enjoy more active
participation. Professor Yitzhak Avishur, the Scientific Director of the
Center will be responsible for this part of the site.

In the very near future, all Jews whose families came from Iraq will be
invited to participate in a project "The Babylonian Families", designed to
locate and to record in a special computer program, all families in the
world whose ancestors were from Iraq. In order to do this we offer the
surfer a questionaire which can be filled out and we will enter the
information from it into our computer. In this computer there are already
nearly 90,000 Jews of Iraqi origin who came to Israel between 1930 and 1975
and we intend soon to have reached 120,000 names. We also have several
family trees that were prepared by Iraqi Jews at their own inititive, both
in Israel and abroad, and these will also be included in the program.

In order to be aware of additional activities in research and other areas,
please take note of the notices concerning activities that we organize in
order to keep surfers au courant with all our activities.

Happy Surfing,
Dr. Zvi Yehuda
Director,
The Babylonian Jewry Research Institute