Rome, 6 giu (Velino) - A passionate quest for the Rome Synagogue library stolen by German troops during World War, a story which could easily become the script for an Indiana Jones blockbuster, might at last be on the right path. And the 7,000 books, manuscripts and rare, centuries-old documents, which formed the second most important Jewish library in the world after the one in Jerusalem, could be lying somewhere in the immense territory of Russia. Italian nvestigators acting on a mandate issued by a special Italian Government committee that was created five years ago, have managed to follow the steps of the stolen library up to a certain point.
The library was loaded on trucks and then on trains on their way to Germany on the night of October 14, 1943, by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a special commando created in Third Reich with a precise task: to neutralise Jewish culture and then destroy it. In order to do that, the Jewish culture had to be studied in its details, so the library from Rome, like documents from many other occupied countries in Europe, were to be transported to Germany to be “analysed.” It is known that thousands of books were shipped to Frankfurt and other localities. Many of those were found and given back to Jewish communities all over Europe. Together with those books, many were found coming from another library, belonging to the Jewish Rabbinical College in Rome, stolen the same night. But no trace was found of the precious volumes from the Synagogue library. Many cases are known of rare volumes of the same kind surfacing in this or that museum or private collector around the world: but this did not happen for any of the books stolen in Rome.
Now Dario Tedeschi, a lawyer and director of the Italian Special committee, has come to the conclusion that the 7,000 volumes were found by the Soviet Army and taken back to Russia as a sort of war trophy, maybe without realising what those books meant for the Jewish community.
Now, with a donation of the Unicredit banking group, Mr Tedeschi and his staff hope to be able to extend their search, hoping that the books have not been dispersed, and they are still together in some underground depot in some