Jews seek return of historic manuscripts

A COLLECTION of more than 100,000 Hebrew and Yiddish publications, some dating back to the 17th century, has become the focus of a dispute between the National Library of Lithuania and Jewish scholars.

Lithuania was once the heartland of East European Jewish culture, so that Vilnius became called "the Jerusalem of the North". But almost 95 per cent of Lithuania's Jews perished during the Nazi occupation.

The publications now in dispute were brought together in the immediate postwar years on the initiative of Antanas Ulpis, the director of the Book Chamber of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was responsible for the receipt of statutory copyright copies.

When Lithuania became independent in 1991, the Book Chamber was taken over by the National Library and reshaped into its Bibliographic Centre, which is still responsible for the collection.

The books and manuscripts are still housed in a former church, as they were in Soviet times, together with other foreign-language material confiscated by the Soviets. The Catholic hierarchy would like the material returned.

Cataloguing has been going on since the 1950s but is still not complete. In Soviet times, cataloguing was not an easy matter. There were few Jews left in Lithuania with the necessary bibliographic knowledge.

As Regina Varnienie, head of the Bibliographic Centre says, the collection only survived because Lithuanian bibliographers and librarians were prepared to take "considerable risks" to save it.

Now, Alan Adler, director of research at the Institute for Jewish and Yiddish Culture, which was once based in Vilnius but relocated to New York after the war, is urging that the collection be removed from Lithuania and returned to its former owners.

The books, he says, came from various Jewish institutions and in most cases still bear the stamps and press marks of their former owners. Many of these institutions still exist, he says, and the books should be given back to them. The books are being stored in an "abysmal" way in the church, in some cases piled up on the floor.

However, Lithuanian law forbids the export of items of cultural importance produced in Lithuania and, according to Ms Varnienie, the books are not being neglected.

Over 100,000 items have already been catalogued, she says, and are available to bona fide scholars.

Future plans include microfilming the collection. One proposal, made by Emanuelis Zingeris, a member of the Lithuanian parliament and activist in the small surviving Jewish community, is to transfer the books from the church to the new Lithuanian State Jewish Museum, which was established largely on his initiative. The museum has space to house the books and for a study centre, but still lacks the money for the air conditioning necessary to preserve them properly.

Such a centre could serve as a "magnet" for Jewish scholars and act as a cornerstone for rebuilding a Jewish scholarly presence in the country, he says.