— Long-lost documents and artifacts illuminating 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland, the cradle of Judaism in Europe, will be available to scholars and researchers for the first time under the terms of an agreement signed today by the University of Warsaw and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC).
Polish diplomatic officials, Jewish scholars and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Joseph Duffey, were among some 75 persons who watched as Professor Henryk Samsonowicz, rector of the University of Warsaw, and Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the UAHC, signed the two-page agreement at the House of Living Judaism, headquarters of the Reform Jewish congregational group.
Believed to be the first between a university in Eastern Europe and a Jewish religious body, the agreement will for the first time provide American scholars with access to and the right to copy materials currently in the possession of the Polish government, the Catholic Church in Poland and various Polish universities.
These materials include works of art, literature, history, law, music and philosophy, along with official Jewish community archives, such as the records of the Judenrat of Lublin during the Nazi occupation.
AGREEMENT CALLS FOR JOINT RESEARCH
The agreement signed today also calls for “joint research” by the University of Warsaw and the UAHC in specified areas of Jewish scholarship, including “historical problems of Judaism.”
The agreement was worked out during negotiations in the United States and Poland among Rabbi Philip Hiat, assistant to the president of the UAHC; Philip Miller, librarian at the New York branch of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion; and Professor Witold Tyloch, chairman of the department of Hebrew studies in the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw. Assisting in the negotiations were representatives of IREX, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute.
SCHINDLER HAILS AGREEMENT
Hailing the agreement, Schindler said at a reception following the signing that within a period of 60 months the Nazis put to death three million Jews and destroyed all that had been created over the course of 1000 years. “What the Jewish community left behind will now be studied by scholars who will have immediate access to the relics of a life that is no more– but that is our sacred duty to preserve, “he said.
Schindler displayed fragments of Torah scrolls and Megilloth (Scrolls of Esther, read during the Jewish holiday of Purim) that had survived the Nazi occupation of Poland. He said Polish university officials in Krakow and Warsaw had presented the scrolls as a gift to the UAHC. The fragments will be given, in turn, to a number of Reform synagogues around the country “as a memorial to the vanished communities from which they come, “Schindler said.
An exhibition of some 100 different relics of Jewish religious and cultural life in Poland will be displayed at Harvard University’s Widener Library in December, during the UAHC’s national biennial convention, Schindler said. Later, the exhibition will be sent to other cities, especially those with sizeable populations of Polish-Americans.
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