A bible hidden in an attic as Nazis invaded was reunited with family’s heirs after 80 years. It was found by a family who was renovating their home in 1990 where they found a double wall in the attic and found a chest. In the chest was a gilded Jewish bible that was 22 pounds and 30 inches high by three inches high.  Embossed on the front are the words: “Die Heilige Schrift der Israeliten” — the Holy Scriptures of the Israelites.

The son of the family who found it held on to it for 30 years and then decided to sell it on eBay for $75. It was found that the bible belonged to Eduard and Ernestine Leiter, a Jewish couple from Stuttgart killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust when they were sent to Theresienstadt, a ghetto and concentration camp outside Prague. The Leiters were send to Treblinka where they were murdered. Their son Sali was the lone family survivor.

When it went up for sale on eBay an art historian and artist saw it, purchased it and donated it to a local synagogue near where it was found.

Several years later someone working on behalf of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) heard about the Bible. A research and reference librarian  at the USHMM decided to research it and find its rightful lineage so it could be returned to the family’s descendants. Through her research she found Sali Leiter had survived, changed his name and moved to the United States. He had a son and that son had two children and three grandchildren.

Through LinkedIn she found one of the grandchildren whose grandmother, also a survivor, was still alive. The German synagogue found someone who would bring it personally to the United States and delivered it to the family.

To read the story see:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/08/24/family-hid-their-bible-an-attic-nazis-invaded-some-80-years-later-it-was-reunited-with-familys-heirs/

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee

Yad Vashem has placed an online exhibit Last Letters from the Holocaust – 1942.  Go to: https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/last-letters/1942/index.asp

The letters displayed here were sent from Belarus, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Ukraine, and were written in a variety of languages: Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Polish, Russian and Yiddish. Each letter and postcard reveals the last remaining fragment – physical, personal and unique – of the victims: their handwriting.

Relatives of the murdered Jews donated these last letters to Yad Vashem for perpetuity, together with photographs of their loved ones.

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee

The Jewish Museum in New York City, NY has opened an exhibit entitled: Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art to run through January 9, 2022. The exhibit traces the timelines of individual object as they passed through hands and sites, during, and after World War ll.

During World War II, untold numbers of artworks and pieces of cultural property were stolen by Nazi forces. After the war, an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books were recovered. Many more were destroyed. This exhibition chronicles the layered stories of the objects that survived, exploring the circumstances of their theft, their post-war rescue, and their afterlives in museums and private collections.

Afterlives includes objects looted from Jewish collections during the war, including works by such renowned artists as Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Camille Pissarro. 

75 years after the Second World War, Afterlives explores how surviving artworks and other precious objects were changed by those events, and how they have moved through time, bearing witness to profound historical ruptures while also acting as enduring carriers of individual expression, knowledge, and creativity. The exhibition follows the paths taken by works of art across national borders, through military depots, and in and out of networks of collectors, looters, ideologues, and restitution organizations.

 The Jewish Museum has also commissioned four contemporary artists to create new works that address the resonance of the exhibition’s themes: Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez, and Lisa Oppenheim. Treasured pieces of Judaica, including rare examples of Jewish ceremonial objects from destroyed synagogues, will also be on view, as well as rarely seen archival photographs and documents that connect the objects to history.

To read more see: https://thejewishmuseum.org/index.php/exhibitions/afterlives-recovering-the-lost-stories-of-looted-art

There is an audio guide transcript available  through the above URL.  There is also a transcript that may be downloaded accessible through the aforementioned URL.

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee