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Rediscovered and Repatriated: UCLA Library’s Return of Nazi-Looted Books

Accession numbers

Accession numbers are sequential identifying numbers assigned to each book in a library’s collection.

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The Books: Rediscovery On June 22, 2021, Ivan Kohout, Curator of Rare Prints at the JMP, contacted Diane Mizrachi, Jewish and Israel Studies Librarian at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Kohout and his team had discovered that three books from the Prague JRC Library were held at UCLA. Kohout requested that the books be repatriated.
Since 2001, curators at the JMP have been attempting to locate looted materials. Referring to the historical collection's pre-WWII catalog, Kohout and his team actively search for missing titles in various databases and other sources. They identified the UCLA-held books by finding JRC Library accession numbers and ownership stamps (see left) in digital copies available through HathiTrust Digital Library—a vast collection of digitized books from numerous research institutions worldwide. UCLA was an early contributor to this program, so many volumes within the repository are copies of books from UCLA Library’s collections. Since HathiTrust displays the source book’s institution in each descriptive record, the JMP was able to identify UCLA as the books' most recent owner. The first set of books rediscovered were:
Sefer Yesod More ve-Sod Torah
Sefer Yesod More ve-Sod Torah (Treatise on the Foundation of Awe and the Secret of the Torah) (1833) by Rabbi Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra. Ibn Ezra (1092–1164) was a Sephardic Jew and notable scholar of the medieval period known for his biblical commentaries. Yesod expresses Ibn Ezra’s philosophical ideas on the meaning of the Torah and God’s commandments.

Sefer Teshuvat ha-Geonim
Sefer Teshuvat ha-Geonim (Responses of the Great Sages) (1865) by Judah Loew ben Bezalel and other sages. Judah Loew (1525–1609), or the Maharal of Prague, was an important scholar, mystic, and philosopher. He remains well known in Prague legend as the rabbi who created the golem—a clay being who protected the city’s Jews from antisemitism. Geonim is a collection of kabbalistic writings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Sefer ha-Shorashim ha-Mekhuneh Sefat Emet
Sefer ha-Shorashim ha-Mekhuneh Sefat Emet (The Book of Roots) (1803) by Isaac Satanow. Satanow (1732–1804) was a Polish scholar and poet. In writing Shorashim, a Hebrew-German lexicon, Satanow drew from one of the most popular Hebrew lexicons of the Middle Ages that was written by the notable rabbi and grammarian David Kimhi.