Behind an inconspicuous wooden door in downtown Budapest, the Jewish Theological Seminary harbors one of the largest and most valuable Jewish book collections in Europe.
But about 20,000 books and many valuable manuscripts have been missing since the end of World War II. Adolf Eichmann, who oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jewish population to Auschwitz, arrived there on March 19, 1944, the day that German troops marched into Hungary. His men occupied the seminary, made arrests and seized books.
Now, more than 80 years later, the books are slowly returning to the 150-year-old seminary, the oldest institution of its kind in Central Europe — sometimes individually, sometimes in batches, some from Europe, some from further afield.
One of them — a 16th-century Venetian miniature edition of the Chamisha Chumshei Torah, or Five Books of Moses, and the haftarot, selected texts from the books of the prophets — is scheduled to be returned by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York at a ceremony at the Hungarian Consulate in New York on Wednesday. A bookseller specialized in rare Judaica had offered the 500-year-old volume for sale for $19,000 on abebooks.com last year. After Hungarian officials notified Homeland Security Investigations, officers seized it from him.
The looted books may have been destined for the Nazi party’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, scholars say, but for reasons that remain unclear, never reached Germany. Instead, several thousand were stranded in Prague.
The Jewish Museum in Prague became a repository for confiscated Judaica during the war, and it returned about 3,000 books around the time of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. But three decades passed before more surfaced.
“A few years ago, I had the feeling the story had ended,” said Balazs Tamasi, the library director at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “But then in 2020, Heidelberg contacted us after they had done some research. That was the beginning.”
The Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies sent four rare, valuable 16th-century prints back to Budapest in 2023, and has since found three more that it plans to return, said Philipp Zschommler, a provenance researcher at the Heidelberg library. He believes that additional items may emerge there, too.
A provenance research project at the Jewish Museum in Prague has turned another 1,850 books looted from the Budapest library. They date from the 16th century to the 20th century; about half are in Hebrew. “We are now ready to negotiate their return home,” said Michal Busek, the museum’s chief librarian.
Agnes Peresztegi, a lawyer who specializes in Nazi-looted cultural property and is helping the library recover its losses, said that ownership stamps in the books, combined with the increasing availability of archive material online helps. And greater awareness of provenance among librarians and archivists has also contributed to the seminary’s success in recovering the confiscated books, particularly from other libraries.
“Now, libraries and archives are doing systematic provenance research,” she said. “Digitization helps a lot, because you can find things on the internet, but also because it means libraries and archives are going through their entire inventory and encountering the stamps of previous owners.”
The Chamisha Chumshei Torah to be returned in New York on Wednesday, for example, contains a stamp proving that it belonged to the library of Professor Lelio Della Torre, who died in 1871. A benefactor then bought the Della Torre library for the seminary in 1877.
The American bookseller who had advertised the Torah online relinquished it voluntarily when he became aware of its history, Peresztegi said.
“What we are most concerned about are the items that pop up on the used-book market,” she said, adding that the library’s priority was to ensure that the books are publicly available.
The seminary itself is also experiencing an upturn in its fortunes. Founded in 1877 to support the Neolog movement, a branch of Judaism specific to Hungary, the seminary is among the oldest institutions in the world training non-Orthodox rabbis and cantors.
Although it suffered neglect and some oppression during decades of communist rule, it remained a regional center for the Eastern Bloc, and students included the chief rabbis of Prague and Moscow.
Still housed in its original building, the seminary gained university status in 2000. As it approaches its 150th anniversary, a new generation of scholars who left Hungary to study abroad after the fall of communism has returned to teach and manage the institution.
Gabor Balazs, the rector since July, received his doctorate from Bar Ilan University in Israel. He said he aimed to build on the rabbinical seminary’s traditions “to become a regional center again” and to “re-establish its academic credibility and reputation.”
This academic year, the university has 200 students; 12 are training as rabbis and 10 as cantors. For the first time, the students include a handful of non-Hungarian speakers taking part in a new English-language program.
And Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pledged up to $28 million to renovate the dilapidated building, said Balazs, who noted that he was optimistic that the refurbishment can be completed in time for the seminary’s anniversary in 2027.
“You cannot receive a promise from a higher level than the prime minister, so we are hopeful it will happen,” Balazs said.
The building’s electric wiring dates from the early 20th century, and the plumbing is even older. Some rooms have been closed off because of dangerous mold. The roof leaks, and the sole, superannuated elevator creaks and shudders.
But a part of the library — about 45,000 old and rare books — will soon move into an archival space, equipped with the latest technology, that was installed with a grant from a private foundation.
“We are trying to do our best, and we have bits and pieces that function,” said Szonja Komoroczy, the university’s vice-rector, weaving a path through crates of books stacked up in columns along the corridor. “We can patch up some things, but we are now reaching a tipping point.”
The valuable library plays an important role in putting the university on the map, drawing scholars of Jewish religion and history from around the world, Balazs said. The university’s widening network and growing international profile are helping to recover lost books.
After Tamasi gave a talk at a conference of the Association of Jewish Libraries in June, Nadav Sharon, the Judaica librarian at the University of Toronto’s rare book library, searched its inventory. He discovered the Jewish Theological Seminary’s stamp in a book of Hebrew poetry published in London in 1766.
“Once it was confirmed that this volume had indeed been in that library,” Sharon said, “it was quite simple to make the decision to repatriate it.”
The next goal, Tamasi said, is to recruit a postgraduate researcher to study the pre-1944 inventories and compile a complete list.
“A lot of 16th-century works are missing,” he said. “We can see the losses, but we don’t yet have a comprehensive overview.”
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