About 4,000 religious books looted from Jewish seminary in Berlin found in Prague

Admin I Friday, April 12, 2024

 

BERLIN – More than 4,000 books from the collection of a Jewish rabbinical seminary in Berlin that was looted by the Nazis have been discovered in Prague.

The books were found in the library of the Jewish Museum in the city, according to a spokeswoman for the museum on Friday.

The books had previously been thought lost.

At least the title page and the first few pages are now to be scanned and made available online, she said.

There are currently no plans to return the books to Berlin. The books came from the collection of Berlin’s Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, which was closed and looted by the Nazis in 1942.

The institution’s collection comprised around 60,000 volumes of religious and academic literature, most of which was written in German and Hebrew.

An ongoing international project, the “Library of Lost Books,” aims to locate the collection.

The effort sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute is aimed largely at younger people, urging them to work as “detectives” in libraries, antiquarian bookshops, private collections and archives to search for the lost writings.