Since 2021, UCLA Jewish and Israel Studies Librarian Dr. Diane Mizrachi has been uncovering Nazi-looted books in the UCLA Library collection.
While the repatriation of Nazi-looted art has been a subject of debate, there has been a dearth of academic scholarship on Nazi-looted books. Repatriation is the process of returning stolen items to their respective owner or country of origin. The term is often used in relation to the return of Nazi-looted valuables, especially art. When Mizrachi discovered six books looted by the Nazis from the Jewish Religious Community Library in Prague (JRCLP) in the UCLA Library, she created a library administration guide to process the repatriation of these books. Additionally, enlisting the help of Professor David Myers’s Jewish History seminar, Mizrachi alongside UCLA students utilized the digital database HathiTrust to identify other Nazi-looted books in the UCLA collection. This process has inspired other institutions, like the Colby College. Mizrachi hopes this work will inspire more conversation regarding the repatriation of looted books.
“By broaching this, opening the conversation, and setting guidelines, other institutions are joining the conversation,” Mizrachi said.
Finding books belonging to the Jewish Religious Community Library in Prague opened up the question of how Nazi-looted books and Judaica ended up at UCLA, and universities across the United States. Many of the uncovered books are from the Cummings Collection, which consists of the acquisition of the entire 1963 inventory of the Bamberger and Warhmann bookstore in Jerusalem, enabled by a generous donation from the Cummings family of Beverly Hills. While Mizrachi is not certain how these books ended up in the Bamberger and Warhmann bookstore, it is believed that books may have been purchased by collectors or dealers from Nazis during the war. Additionally, many Allies took books as ‘souvenirs’ and later donated them to collections.
While the UCLA Library has created a relationship with the Jewish Religious Community Library in Prague through the repatriation of several Nazi-looted books, not every uncovered book is a candidate for repatriation, Mizrachi said. For example, several books originally belonged to European Jewish organizations that no longer exist. The UCLA Library has uncovered several looted books from the Rabbenu Seminary in Berlin, which disbanded. However, with this project, Mizrachi and her team have increased awareness about the history of these books, and have made this information available to the UCLA community.
“I don’t think students are very aware that we have looted books in our collections. Now, they’ll be able to learn more about the history of these books, which increases awareness about Nazi-looting,” Liana Karapetyan, a fourth-year history student who participated in the Looted Book Project, said.
By working to create consistent repatriation guidelines, Mizrachi hopes to avoid unhelpful repatriation as well. The US Military’s process of repatriation was to return looted Jewish items to their country of origin, which often no longer had a sizable Jewish population.
“Why return Jewish books to a vacuum where there’s no Jews?” Mizrachi said.
After that, pushes to repatriate looted Jewish belongings to Israel and North America began, which is where a lot of these looted books have been uncovered.
Alongside this, the increased digitization of libraries has allowed researchers to ascertain the locations of looted books, and uncover the book’s provenance information. The ‘Looted Books at UCLA’ project utilized digital libraries like HathiTrust to identity looted books in the UCLA collection. Additionally, Mizrachi and her colleagues have created a digital exhibition telling the story of the looted books.
Uncovering these looted books was an emotionally taxing experience for those involved, Mizrachi said. The gravity of the stories contained within the collection, and the importance of sharing their history inspired both Mizrachi and the students who worked alongside her. However, Mizrachi found it important to not let this overwhelm her, and approach her work from an ‘archaeological’ perspective.
“If I let my emotions get carried away, I would never get any work done,” Mizrachi said, “But sometimes, when you pick up a new book, it’s overwhelming. Who owned this, what were they thinking, what kind of Nazi picked it up, and who was the prisoner who put this tag on it? A lot of thoughts like that.”
Since 2021, the UCLA Library has engaged in several public events highlighting the discovery of looted books, and their repatriation efforts. For example, the UCLA Library held a “hand-over” reception with members of both the Czech and Israeli Consulates in Los Angeles. Looking forward, Mizrachi hopes to organize an exhibit in the fall displaying several of the books, and possibly enlist the help of more students in uncovering more potentially looted books in the UCLA Library collections.
“I think it’s great when students are provided opportunities like this, where they’re working in collaboration under a professor,” Karapetyan said about her experience working with Mizrachi in this project.
While in Dr. Myer’s seminar, Karpetyan uncovered ten Nazi-looted books in the UCLA Library. Through analysis of the stamps on these books, Karpetyan was able to uncover the history of ownership of these books. Amongst the books she uncovered, several belonged to European -Jewish institutions like “The Beit Midrash of the Ashkenazim in Amsterdam”, the Israelitsch-Theologische Lehranstalt, the leading Jewish theological seminary in Vienna, the Library of the Jewish Community of Vienna, the Judisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, Germany, and To’elet, a Hebrew literary society founded in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Several books uncovered also contain a ‘Theresendiat’ stamp, a concentration camp and ghetto, meaning these books were directly confiscated from prisoners.
“If a student were to look at one of these books before the ‘Looted Books at UCLA’ project, they would have no idea where they came from. So our job was to find provenance information to help identify these books,” Karapetyan said.
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Cover Image: Provided by UCLA Librarian Dr. Diane Mizrachi
Birkat Avraham : perush Rabaʻ ʻal Sefer Mishle / [hotsi le-or] Ḥayim Meʼir Horoṿits (1884). The yellow tag shows that this book was sorted by prisoner librarians at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The upside-down and partially blackened ownership stamp shows that it once belonged to the Cossmann Werner Bibliothek, part of the Munich Jewish Community Library that was destroyed during Kristallnacht.
