Library of the Jewish Museum in Prague
Communal libraries that were founded by JRCs first started cropping up in Italy, then in German-speaking countries, in the nineteenth century. One of the earliest of these was the Prague JRC Library, which opened in 1874 and was initially composed of almost 3,500 books and a few manuscripts donated by community leaders. By 1935, it held about 25,000 volumes (divided into Hebraica, Judaica, and periodicals), 300 manuscripts, and a reference section. The library ceased operations in 1939 with the arrival of the Nazis, who confiscated the collections and temporarily deposited them in the Oriental Seminar of the Law Faculty in Prague before taking them to the Zlatá Koruna Monastery in South Bohemia. The JMP reacquired a portion of the looted books (around 15,000 items) in 1946, but the rest of the collection remained lost. This pre-war JRC Library, or the “historical collection,” forms the core of today’s JMP Library. The catalog created by Tobias Jakobovits, its last head librarian, in 1938 continues to be an important bibliographic aid to this collection, providing curators at the JMP with a way to track down the missing items (17).
In 1941, the town of Terezín was transformed into the Ghetto Theresienstadt, a reception and transit concentration camp for Jews. In 1942, a library was established there. It soon grew to about 200,000 volumes and included books confiscated from newly-arrived Jews and liquidated libraries. The Central Library and the Library for Youth were accessible to the public, but the Hebrew Library, consisting of roughly 60,000 items and meant to create a representative library of Hebraica and Judaica, was not. After the war, approximately 100,000 books from the Terezín library were sent to the JMP, though only a small percentage stayed in its collection (18).
The JMP received other books confiscated from Jewish communities and individuals during the occupation, as well as books from German JRCs stored in castles in Mimoň and other localities. During the immediate post-war period (1945-1950), while almost 200,000 volumes came to the museum, approximately 160,000 were transferred to other institutions, restituted, or sold (19). Today, the JMP Library has 130,000 volumes and includes a reading room, a research room, and a multimedia centre (20).
