[MSN] Curator ferried damaged relics from Baghdad

[MSN]

Curator ferried damaged relics from Baghdad
Peggy Lim, Staff Writer

RALEIGH - During her 10-month deployment to Baghdad in 2003, Army Reserve
Maj. Cori Wegener helped repair the recently looted Iraq National Museum,
clean artifacts fetched from cesspools and rescue Jewish-Iraqi archives
soaked from flooded basements.

It was the challenge of preventing wet books from growing mold in 120-
degree weather that has pushed her to provide more military training on
protecting cultural artifacts. She addressed the topic Sunday before about
265 people at the N.C. Museum of Art.


John Coffey, curator of the museum's Judaica gallery, said he had originally
planned on asking Wegener to speak about the Judaic collection she curates
at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. But after talking with her, Coffey
thought her Baghdad experiences would make a more interesting topic for the
North Carolina museum's ninth annual Kanof lecture.

Wegener said Iraq has not been like previous wars. In World War II, a team
of about 300 Americans and Europeans, trained as art historians, architects
and archaeologists, mapped monuments to protect them from bombing and
repatriated pieces Hitler's army had pillaged.

Wegener, who retired from the reserves in 2005, said she stayed with the
military for 21 years because she provided skills the Army normally would
not have. When she watched the looting of the Iraq National Museum on CNN in
April 2003, Wegener was confident she was the only arts curator in the U.S.
Army.

"Why aren't they calling me?" she remembers thinking. Soon, they were.

Among Wegener's early assignments in Baghdad was assisting Ambassador Paul
Bremer's team with saving Hebrew and Arabic texts, dating from the 16th
century to 1950s, found in the flooded basement of an Iraqi secret police
building that the United States had bombed.

Until the 1940s, Iraq had a large Jewish community, as much as 20 percent of
the population around Baghdad, Wegener said. After a series of pogroms, most
Jews fled. But the secret police held onto its collection of
Israeli-Palestinian documents.

Before Wegener was called in, members of Bremer's team spread the wet items
out to dry. But the documents started to grow mold. Wegener knew that to
stop the destruction, they needed to be frozen immediately.

She got a freezer truck from Jordan to store the documents. But the truck
barely stayed below freezing, and the documents needed to be below 20
degrees, she said. Finally, Wegener got permission to fly the documents to
the United States.

"I felt torn, because that's one of the principles of international law,"
she said. "Don't remove cultural property."

But she knew if she didn't act, the documents would be lost.

On the way to America, she encountered a delay on the tarmac in Spain. She
called the Pentagon to request a new flight crew. Then, she ran into a local
officer.

"What you got in that box, ma'am, human hearts?" the Navy lieutenant asked.

"It's none of your business ... , lieutenant," answered a famished and
exhausted Wegener, pulling her senior rank.

But then Wegener noticed the yarmulke the lieutenant was wearing and changed
her tone.

"What I have is what's left of the cultural heritage of the Jewish people of
Iraq," she said.

In a heartbeat, the lieutenant asked how he could help.

"I need a Spanish electrician to hook up a Kuwaiti generator," she replied.
"And a hamburger."

Her work continues

After serving in Iraq, Wegener was convinced the U.S. military needed better
training on protecting cultural property. She co-authored a training manual
for the Army in 2004. She also founded in 2006 the U.S. Committee of the
Blue Shield as the American branch of the UNESCO-affiliated organization to
protect cultural property during wartime. And in the past year she has given
about a dozen training talks, including one in January at Fort Bragg.

"All soldiers are not heart surgeons, but they can do first aid," she said.
The same concept can work with preserving cultural relics, she said.

The Jewish-Iraqi artifacts are at the National Archives in College Park, Md.
The mold stopped growing after being freeze-dried for 30 days. But money for
mold removal has been hard to come by, she said, as questions remain of who
will ultimately own the artifacts.

The Kanof lecture honors Abram and Frances Pascher Kanof, who established
the North Carolina museum's Judaic art collection in 1983. The lecture
series started the year Abram Kanof died at age 95.

"He was able to do tours at the Judaica gallery up to two weeks before his
death," said daughter Liz Kanof Levine, 72, who greeted many Jewish
community members Sunday with hugs.

peggy.lim at newsobserver.com or (919) 836-5799