An ambitious international project to find and recover Jewish Books looted by the Nazis is about to begin in Israel.
The “Have you seen this book?” » searches for volumes from the library of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin, closed by the Nazis in 1942. Many of the 60,000 titles it contained were destroyed or have joins libraries and private collections around the world.
Before World War II, the Hochschule was one of the leading rabbinical schools in Germany. Founded in 1872, it had become one of the main centers of interest for intellectuals such as Rabbi Leo Baeck, Moritz Abraham Levy, Julius First and Abraham Geiger, one of the founding fathers of Reform Judaism.
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The initiative encourages the public to provide information through a dedicated website, where it is verified by the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem and displayed on a map, online, in real time.
The launch of the initiative today at the Ariela House in Tel Aviv will also be the occasion for the opening of the Library of Lost Books, an exhibition presented in several cities in which the Hochschule’s books have been found.
This exhibition allows you to discover a map with information on the Hochschule library, the stolen books and previous attempts to recover them. To date, nearly 5,000 books and journals out of the 60,000 that the Hochschule contained have been found.
“The Hochschule was one of the most important institutes of liberal German Jewry in the interwar period,” explains David Rechter, president of the Leo Baeck Institute in London. “This exhibition will allow us to show the great diversity of German Jewish society before the Shoah. »
The exhibition recently won Germany’s Grimme Online Award for outstanding projects of public importance and educational value in the fields of journalism, culture, entertainment and information.
This project is the work of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem and its London counterpart. It is carried out jointly with the Association of Friends of the Leo Baeck Institute in Germany, with the financial support of the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation (EVZ), subsidized by the German Ministry of Finance.
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