Dan Rabinowitz, “The Lost Library: The Legacy of Vilna’s Strashun Library in the Aftermath of the Holocaust”

May 24, 2019 by Alex Grobman

By Alex Grobman, PhD

In 1892, the Strashun Library of Vilna, created through the generosity of Mattityahu Strashun (1817-1885), a Talmudic scholar, philanthropist, and communal leader of the Vilna-Jewish community, opened. Before it was forced to close in 1941, it contained more than 8,000 volumes, including not only traditional religious texts, but also works from all other Jewish and secular fields. It was the first modern Jewish public library in Europe.

Dan Rabinowitz, founder and editor-in-chief of the Seforim Blog (seforim.blogspot.com), a website dedicated to the study of Hebrew books, has written a fascinating work about Vilna’s Strashun Library, bringing to light this institution which serviced a wide diversity of Jewish men and women and changed the nature of what a public library’s function could be.

Before the Strashun Library, similar institutions were invariably private. Even when they were funded through community resources and, thus, allowed wider public access, they were legally designated as private. These libraries were usually owned by synagogues, Jewish schools, societies, or institutions. Often, they were part of yeshiva study halls.

Breaking Tradition

The Strashun Library broke this tradition. In 1938, a visitor observed that in its 100-seat reading room, “venerable long-bearded men, wearing hats, studying Talmudic texts” could be found “elbow to elbow with bareheaded young men” and “even young women, bare-armed sometimes on warm days, studying their texts.” In 1935, an estimated 25 percent of the library’s patrons were women.

These incongruous assemblages were only fitting. Before the Holocaust, Vilna was the home of many Jewish sectors, with movements, organizations and institutions serving the religious, agnostic, secular, intellectual, political, and anti-religious communities. The Strashun Library became the one neutral meeting ground for all these disparate groups. In effect, it was Vilna’s very concrete and symbolic study hall.

In endowing the library, Mr. Strashun envisioned it as a testament to scholarship and, as such, wanted it developed to become one of Vilna’s most esteemed institutions, an embodiment of peerless status within the European-Jewish community. To achieve this goal, he willed his own personal library to the Vilna community, granting its residents complete and permanent control of the collection. He also pledged funds and property to maintain and expand the building. As a result, according to Mr. Rabinowitz, his library eventually became “a unique institution for public culture” in Europe.

Looting

During the Holocaust, the Nazis looted the Strashun Library and destroyed its building, but they did not obliterate its contents. They wanted the books and Jewish cultural items for the institute and research library they created in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, known as the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage). Therefore, a substantial portion of the library’s collection of books and manuscripts remained intact.

In all, the Nazis stole about five million books written in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, French, English, and German from Jewish families and Jewish libraries and institutions throughout the Europe.

In 1945, much of the Strashun Library was found by the American Army, but two distinct Jewish groups then set about destroying it. Both the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York and Heichal Shlomo, the former seat of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem, saw themselves as the library’s rightful heirs.

Lost Sight of the Meaning

According to Rabinowitz, in the ensuing struggle to obtain control over the library, the protagonists “nearly wiped out its unique symbolism and legacy.”

They “lost sight of the meaning of Vilna and its Strashun Library,” he says.

By uncovering the legacy of Vilna’s Strashun Library, Rabinowitz has added another dimension to our understanding of the city that is known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania and its place in the history of European Jewry.

Dr. Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.