By Adam Tiffen

 

As all of you know, for the last several years, I have been working with my colleagues at ARCH to restore an ancient synagogue that holds the tomb of the old-testament prophet Nahum in the christian town of Alqosh in Iraq. The restoration was an incredibly intense and complicated effort fraught with uncertainty. Its success the result of stubborn perseverance and a series of miracles.

 

To put things in context, when we began the restoration, ISIS was only 15km away and had recently launched an assault on the town of Alqosh. In 2017, there were times where we were close enough to hear the fighting and artillery strikes in Mosul.

I spent months away from home and traveled to Iraq on nearly a dozen occasions. Following the closure of air travel into Kurdistan, I flew to southern Turkey and crossed the border into Iraq on foot.

 

The journey took us from the front lines with ISIS to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. From the Kurdish souk in Tel Aviv to the south wing of the U.S. Capitol. From the cellars of a 350-year-old pub in Vienna to the Jewish quarter in Prague and a quiet cafe in Sophia Bulgaria.

 

If this had been a play, our cast of players would have been enormous. It included academics, engineers, conservation experts, scientists, consular and embassy officials of several governments, officials from numerous ministries and municipalities, security forces, priests of the Chaldean church, Kurdish and Iraqi Jews. Our diverse workforce in Iraq included Christians, Muslims, and even Yezidis, who had fled ISIS brutality and lived in IDP camps. The supporting cast included an entire class of graduate students from the Johns Hopkins University School of Museum Studies.

 

Members of the ancient Chaldean Christian community supported us while they were buckling under the pressure of ISIS, Iranian-backed militias, and the struggle to survive in a place with so much uncertainty and so little opportunity. They fed and housed us in a place where there are no hotels or restaurants. At times I slept at a mental health trauma center for Yezidi Refugees, run by a Chaldean priest with the support of an NGO in Michigan. At other times, I slept in a church rectory in a town that had once been occupied by ISIS and whose retaking cost the life of a U.S. service-member.

 

We navigated the complexities of working in a disputed territory with competing governments and competing agendas. We shunned publicity and promotion to prevent antagonizing powerful entities that would stop the restoration for political purposes, or to see the Jews erased from the history of Babylon.

 

We faced the impossible challenge of raising funds for a project while staying under the radar. We stubbornly pursued donations despite being turned away over and over again by those who thought our effort doomed to failure. We persevered through a global pandemic and multiple lockdowns.

 

We derailed the plans of individuals determined to stop us because if they could wrest away control of the Synagogue’s restoration, they believed they could use it to gain fame, power and wealth. We watched in disbelief as one of those individuals was subsequently arrested for murder while yet another claimed asylum in Europe to avoid arrest for fraud and theft.

 

We utilized the latest in technology, including carbon dating, laser photogrammetry, virtual reality photography, and drone imagery. We tapped into the collective memory of two ancient peoples – the Chaldeans and the Jews – by scouring academic records and speaking with those still alive whose memories could resurrect the past.

 

At the very end, we grieved over the loss of two of our team when Dr. Moti Zaken and Dr. Jihan Sindi passed within months of one another.

 

It was an epic undertaking that would read like a thriller, a tragedy and a bleak comedy if it were a novel. Its genre would be a cross between historical fiction and science fiction.

 

This past Friday, I traveled to Alqosh to see the completed Synagogue for myself. To say that it is breathtaking would be an understatement. Its fragile beauty is stunning. The Synagogue is unique in the world, and its restoration, unprecedented. Its humble grandeur is a testament to a vanishing bond between Jews and the land where their faith was born.

 

And it was all of it worth it—every last ounce of blood, sweat, and tears. If you look at the attached photos, you may come to understand why.

 

These before-and-after photos don’t do the Synagogue justice, but they will give you a sense of how extensive the reconstruction was and how close we had come to losing this ancient holy site forever.

 

I hope someday you have an opportunity to see it for yourself, and I am always willing to help make that happen.

 

Twitter @TiffenDC