The Plight of Jewish Relics During WWII

While it's often difficult to think past the sheer human loss of the Holocaust, it's still relevant and deeply saddening to think of the Jewish history and culture lost at the same time. Amidst the extermination of millions of Jews, the destruction of synagogues and homes, we might not fully grasp the generations of tradition, the family relics that were also destroyed or abandoned - the scale of carnage is too great to see the details, like seeing the forest but not the trees. Between the wanton destruction of property to the transfer of it to non-Jews, surviving Jewish relics from before World War II are rare and more culturally important than ever before.

Of the artifacts that survived the war, one example is Chevrei Tzedek's scroll no. 345, only one of 22 Torah scrolls from synagogues around Prague that were allowed to be removed to relative safety during Nazi occupation. While its survival is enough to marvel at, the scroll is important for another reason - it was transcribed by a sofer from the Prague School of Kabbalists. It is stylistically distinct for the placement of small letters worked into large letters, but no one today knows why this was done since none of the members of this School survived the war. The congregation of Chevrei Tzedek hopes to fully restore the scroll to once again use it to celebrate bar or bat mitzvahs.

Some of the most important caches of Judaica have only been discovered in the last ten years, including an extensive collection of pre-World War II era Jewish funeral scrolls and manuscripts that were seized from a New York auction house. The vast majority of the owners of the looted property had been killed in the Holocaust; with no provenance or letters of conveyance, it is evident the items had been trafficked.

While efforts are made at restitution and repatriation of the objects, there are many factors that also prevent it including death of original owners and their communities, difficulty in tracking them down, and the passage of time in general. In 2016, the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project was created, a comprehensive and growing list of Jewish-owned art and cultural objects plundered by the Nazis. Its goal is to get more information on the victims and perpetrators of the thefts, details of the stolen objects, where the items were held, and even who may have benefited from the thefts. Unfortunately, while more and more of these objects are discovered each year, the chances of returning them to their original owners continues to dwindle.