Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:40:58 +0200 From: Yael Penkower <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Dear Safranim, We are back in Israel, in the midst of a war on two fronts: the north and the south. Many people are being called up for armed reserve duty, while other citizens are still living their lives within proximity of a protective shelter. Yet my mind goes back to last week, in a very different mode. My husband, Monty, and I attended the eighth conference of the European Association of Jewish Studies, which met for the first time in Moscow. He gave a paper on Bialik in Eretz Israel, while I served as a chair for two sessions in conjunction with the AJL. A third such session was chaired by Edith Lubetski. The three sessions were very well attended. My first session focused upon the libraries and archives that had been confiscated during World War II by the Germans from the various Jewish communities that came under Nazi control. Most of these collections were brought by Adolph Rosenberg, head of Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and acting under an order from Hitler, to a central location in Dusseldorf. At the end of the war, as the Red Army advanced westward on Germany, these collections were dispersed. Many ended up in the basements of Moscow libraries; others were taken to the United States and Israel, as well as to other countries. The importance of these collections was discussed at these sessions. Particularly noteworthy among the excellent speakers in this regard was Dr. Patricia K. Grimsted, the world-reknown historian/"detective" and grande-dame in this field, who has roamed across Europe and the former Soviet Union for the past forty years in search of books, archives, and art that had been stolen by Germany during World War II. Two other papers dealt with the ERR exhibition at Ratibor in May 1944, and the recently located archives and libraries of Thessaloniki. This topic was continued in my second session, with a paper on the Holocaust Era collection at the University of Cape Town, recipient of some ERR-confiscated books. A second lecture, by the international scholar Albert van der Heide, examined Christophe Plantin, the leading printer of the second half of the sixteenth century and publisher of the Polyglot Bible (Bible regia), and the Christian Hebraists. The discussion, like that of the first session, proved stimulating and informative. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> Yael Penkower The Librarian Beit Morasha of Jerusalem Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: Hasafran @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
