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In Commemoration of D-Day: Treasures from the Hebraic Section

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(The following is a post by Ann Brener, Hebraic Area Specialist in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division.)

Mishna. Kodashim [Mishna: Sacred Things]. Berlin, 1869. Title-page with Nazi stamp. Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division.
They probably didn’t seem like treasures at the time. They were for the most part in fact rather ordinary: books for study, or for reading to children; posters about upcoming protests, hastily printed; newspaper articles and torn-out clippings. But they were singed by the fires of World War II, and that makes them precious to us today: precious as witnesses to the past, as symbols of hope, as testimony to that inner something that says “no” to tyranny.

The image to the right makes a good place to start, for it exemplifies the Nazi campaign not only against the Jewish people but against Jewish books and culture. We have all of us read about the burning of Jewish books under the Nazi regime, but not all the books were destined for the flames; some – and this may be one of them – were earmarked for the Nazi’s contemplated museum of “extinct Jewish culture.” The book seen here is a volume of the Mishna, the an