18 May, 2006
Berlin's leading library has announced that it had repaired 17 books belonging to one of the nation's great pre-World War II rabbis and that it had returned them to his grand-daughter, who lives in New York. Leo Baeck, who was president of the German Council of Jews in 1933, lost his private library in Berlin when he was arrested by the Nazis in 1943 and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He survived the Holocaust but most of the books were never found. The 17 that have come to light were located in the Berlin State Library and sent to Marianne C. Dreyfus after conservation work. They included a 1939 essay by Baeck, a leading voice of German liberal Judaism, as well as books in Yiddish by other authors. The Prussian Cultural Foundation, which owns the Berlin library, said it had not been able to establish how the library had received the books. No compensation had ever been paid to Baeck for his loss. Baeck (1873-1956) lived in London after the Second World War, founding the Leo Baeck Institute to study the history and culture of Jews in Germany.
