Baghdad Burial Ledger 1949-2001

BACKGROUND

Following the American takeover of Baghdad in 2003 a copy of the burial ledger of Baghdadi Jews between 1949-2001 was deposited in the Israel State Archive. It is composed of 75 handwritten pages in Arabic containing 1,856 entries arranged by a given name, father's name, grandfather's name and /or a surname. Many Baghdadi Jews did not have surnames or were buried with using them in case that they had one. The ledger records the general or secular (non-Jewish) date of death and the grave number. It should be taken into consideration that the graves were transferred to a new location in the 1970s and it is not clear how the original numbers of graves were preserved or not.

This is a database that is the work of the genealogist Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch

DATABASE

This database includes 1,856 Jewish burials in Baghdad.

The fields in the database are:

• Surname
• Given name
• Father's Name
• Date of Death
• Grave Location
• Register Number
• Comments

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The information contained in this database was transcribed by Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch. He is an independent consultant in demographic mapping. Prior to his retirement in 2015, he was the Senior Counselor, Center for Political Research in Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rosen is a veteran diplomat, having served as Israel's ambassador to Jordan from 2006 to 2009. His other diplomatic posts include in Atlanta, New Delhi, Cairo, New York, London, and Hauge. In November 2002, he took up the post of Political Advisor for International Affairs to the Mayor of Jerusalem. He is a member of the executive of the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy. Rosen was born in Poland and immigrated to Israel at the age of 9. He served in the IDF from 1966 to 1969 and then went on to earn his B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University. He is fluent in Polish, Dutch, English, Arabic, and Hebrew and is the author of Crossing the Jordan River: The Journeys of an Israeli Diplomat (Atlanta, 2004)

November 2025