A Daughter’s Letter Hidden in a Hebrew Book Reconnects a Family After 80 Years

When Judaist Jiří Blažek opened one of 700 uncatalogued Hebrew books in Prague’s National Library, a slip of paper fell out. It looked like an ordinary bookmark. In fact, it was a daughter’s letter to her rabbi father — a last trace of a family that vanished during the Holocaust.

The volume was part of a massive collection that Nazi agencies seized from Jewish communities, rabbinical seminaries and private libraries across occupied Europe. As Allied bombing threatened Berlin and Frankfurt, the regime moved hundreds of thousands of volumes to Sudeten castles in what is now the Czech Republic. After the war, roughly 250,000 of these books ended up in Prague, where they remain in the National Library’s storerooms today.

The Ideological Engine Behind the Nazi Judaica Library

The Perverse Mission of the Frankfurt Institute

The Nazis did not simply burn Jewish books. They aimed to build the world’s largest library of Judaica — for a future without Jews. The Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, part of Alfred Rosenberg’s plan for a Nazi party university, was to use the collection to “prove” anti-Semitic ideology after the genocide was complete. Rival agencies competed for the loot, and Jewish librarians — the very people marked for extermination — were forced to catalogue the volumes. The library was intended as a twisted archive, a source of pseudo-scientific authority for a world the Nazis imagined without any living Jews.

From War Chaos to a Prague Storeroom

When bombing intensified, thousands of books were shipped to Bohemian castles. After Germany’s collapse, no clear documentation explained how the collection entered the National Library. Today, researchers like Blažek painstakingly trace ownership through stamps, signatures and hidden notes. Of 685 Hebrew prints examined, about half have been identified. One rare 1575 Venetian edition of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, valued at around $20,000, remains ownerless, while another 16th‑century book will be returned to the Budapest rabbinical seminary from which it was looted. An exhibition in Prague’s Clementinum Gallery now presents these findings and the human stories behind the volumes.