Hebrew Union College Gets Valuable Collection Saved from Nazis

Valuable volumes of Judaica, collected by the Jews of Mannheim, Germany, over the centuries and dramatically preserved from Nazi looting and Allied bombing during World War II, have been presented to the library of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion at Cincinnati through Col. Henry Tavel, highest ranking Jewish army chaplain, who has just returned from a three-year tour of duty in Germany.

The collection of books, which includes some rare items dating back as early as 1500, had been seized by Hitlerites from Jewish institutions and families and assembled at a central depot. Gestapo officials instructed the custodian of the municipal library at Mannheim to select items of general interest for the city book shelves. The remainder were to be shipped to Nazi institutions for racist study.

The custodian made no selections. Instead, he stamped all the books and told the Gestapo he was incorporating the entire collection in the public library. Actually, he preserved the lot intact. As a result, during the very period when the owners of the books were being dispersed–in death and in concentration camps–their volumes of Jewish learning were preserved together. During Allied bombings, when Mannheim authorities buried city treasures for safety, the Jewish collection was buried too. After liberation, the books were restored to the small community of Jewish survivors, 90 old people, all that remains of a once-thriving Jewish population of 10,000.

To Col. Tavel, who served as their rabbi as well as the rabbi of Jewish GI’s, this community, without youth of its own, expressed the desire to pass its library on to an institution where the books might again serve Jewish learning and help in the development of new leaders of Judaism. In selecting the Hebrew Union College, Col. Tavel chose the school where he was ordained in 1929.