The Prague Post Online: Tempo: In a book collection, an inspirational story of survival

May 16th, 2008

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In a book collection, an inspirational story of survival

Library exhibit recounts the harrowing history of Jewish literature in Prague

By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
August 22nd, 2007 issue

Hope is on the Next Page

Robert Guttmann Gallery
U Staré školy 3, Prague 1Old Town
Through Oct. 21
Open daily 9 a.m.6 p.m., closed Saturdays

“How high the culture of Prague Jewry must have been then at the beginning of the 16th century if it could already produce such unrivalled printed creations.”

The writer Sholem Asch arrived at this conclusion in 1936, upon a visit to the Library of the Jewish Religious Community in Prague. After spending only two hours perusing the institution’s collection of historic manuscripts and printed books, Asch was struck by the great literary tradition of this city’s Jewish population.

With a new exhibit at The Robert Guttmann Gallery, “Hope is on the Next Page,” the Library hopes to immerse visitors in its history, sharing with them the same sense of wonder that Asch experienced more than 70 years ago.

“The exhibit tells a story of the book holdings in Jewish Prague,” says curator Michal Bušek, and the meanings to be found in that community’s efforts to preserve the collection through years of hardship. More than a year of research and six months of assembly went into preparing the exhibit, a series of panels outfitted with essays on the library’s history interspersed with nonbook items, including an old card catalog and a Hebrew typewriter.

Three men are at the core of the exhibit: library pioneer Solomon Hugo Lieben, wartime stalwart Tobias Jakobovits and devoted protector Otto Muneles. Their respective eras of service to Prague’s Jewish literature and community serve as a timeline for the exhibit.

Lieben was a key figure in protecting materials slated for destruction in the late 19th-century razing of Prague’s Jewish ghetto. For centuries, Jews throughout Europe had preferred to keep books and other religious documents at home in personal collections, for fear of destructive persecution. Lieben and other leaders pushed for a means of celebrating, gathering and making readily available the culture’s literary history.

Jakobovits was part of the Jewish Central Museum established by the Nazis in 1942 (as was Lieben, briefly, until his death in late 1942). Prior to the German invasion, Jakobovits had been employed as chief librarian of the Jewish Community in Prague, as well as serving as a rabbi and teacher at German Jewish schools. He and his wife, Berta, also an employee of the museum, were deported to Auschwitz in the fall of 1944, where both were murdered.

Another version of a Jewish library was created at Terezín, the holding camp for victims on their way to Auschwitz. It was overseen by a handpicked group of specialists dubbed the Talmudkommando, who worked from the summer of 1943 through the end of the war to label and catalog books. Muneles headed the group.

Muneles was an honored scholar prior to the war from an established Prague Jewish family. After the liberation of Terezín, he learned of the murder of his wife and sons at the hands of the Nazis, and lost his faith in Judaism. Despite this, he continued working toward the preservation of its literary history in Prague as chief librarian of the State Jewish Museum (SŽM) founded in 1950.

“After the war, the Jewish Museum was the center for all the books from around the region,” Bušek notes.

Muneles and other librarians at the SŽM had their hands full after the war, coping with the dauntingly massive influx of books to the museum’s library that had been accumulated by the Nazis. Hundreds of thousands of volumes were returned to previous owners or transferred to other institutions, but there still was not enough space at the SŽM facility on Jáchymova street to hold the entire collection. The few staff members allotted to the library worked to catalog the volumes, scattered among depositories throughout Prague.

“There was no space, no money — it was not a priority,” Bušek says.

Muneles helmed the SŽM library from 1950 until his death in 1967 (his private library of approximately 3,000 books is now part of the current library collection).

During Czechoslovakia’s communist rule, the Jewish Museum library was a quiet, isolated place. All visitors were suspect, with what they read reported to the state. Employees from this period interviewed for the exhibit estimate that only 200 to 250 people visited per year. The government created a list of “forbidden books” to be removed from the collections, thankfully not destroyed but kept inaccessible until after the Velvet Revolution.

Following 1989, major changes came quickly. Interest and investment in the library grew in the 1990s as Hebrew and Jewish studies returned to Prague. When the Jewish Museum in Prague was founded in 1994, the Jewish community’s literary holdings assumed great importance.

Today, the library is an independent department of the larger museum, with facilities on U staré školy that include climate-controlled storage, a rare book room, a reference center and a reading room. Its holdings total about 135,000 volumes, available for public viewing and use. To further its reach, the library is in the midst of putting these resources online for international access. “In the future, people can just go on the Internet,” Bušek says.

“But it is very important for people to realize that behind this there are people who did a lot of work.” In particular, he cites the efforts of Lieben, Jakobovits, Muneles and others who preserved Prague’s Jewish books from destruction at the hands of Nazis and communists. “It contributed to the continuation of Hebrew studies.”

Ultimately, the story of the library of the Jewish Museum in Prague is more than a tale of a cultural depository. It’s about the survival of an entire community, and, in a larger sense, an inspirational story of triumph over oppression.

Brooke Edge can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com

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