More Than 1 Million Jewish Books, Confiscated by Nazis, Recovered by an Israeli

One of the least known activities of the Nazi era was the confiscation of Jewish books which went into a special library where scholars of the Third Reich were assigned to interpret their contents in ways that would discredit Jews. Countless books and manuscripts disappeared into the Nazi archives. Many were destroyed during World War II or scattered all over Europe. But an Israeli bibliographer. Shlomo Shumani, working under the sponsorship of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has managed to track down and recover more than one million volumes, it was reported here. Mr. Shumani’s activities during the 25 years since World War II were described by Yeshiva University here which has appointed the 70-year-old bibliophile acting librarian at the university’s Mendel Gottesman Library of Hebraica-Judaica. Mr. Shumani’s efforts so far have resulted in the addition of more than one million volumes to libraries in Israel and-another 200,000 to the United States. In addition, hundreds of Hebrew manuscripts were recovered and sent to Jerusalem, Yeshiva University reported. The detective work took Mr. Shumani to West Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. More than 200,000 rabbinic volumes were salvaged from Poland and tens of thousands of books from other countries. Among the rarities recovered was a late 17th century Megillah Esther written in Spanish on parchment.