16th century Hebrew Bible stolen by Nazis returned to its owners

The Di Gara Text was discovered after being put up for sale on a rare books-dealing site.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A sixteenth century Hebrew Bible is being returned to its rightful owners in Hungary exactly eight decades after being stolen from them by the Nazis.

The Hebrew Di Gara Text includes the Five Books of Moses and the Haftarot, the sections from the Prophets that are read on the Sabbath in synagogue following the reading of the Torah portion of the week.

It was printed by a Hebrew book publisher in Venice, Giovanni di Gara, in the late 1500s, and eventually came into the hands of a nineteenth century rabbi named Lelio Della Torre, who put his stamp in the leatherbound tome.

His heirs sold it along with other books in his library to the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary in 1877.

According to a press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), “In 1944, in the midst of World War II and the Jewish Holocaust, Nazi forces invaded Budapest and seized and occupied the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, looting its holdings. The Di Gara Text is believed to have disappeared during this period.”

It is not known how the ancient tome came to the United States.

Its current possessor, a Judaica collector from New York named Meir Turner, bought it in the 1980s. The SDNY statement said that Turner, whom it simply called “Vendor 1,” had stated that he did not know its recent history and that it had been stolen.

After keeping it for some 40 years, he put it up for sale on a rare books site called AbeBooks.com for a modest $19,000.

That’s where Hungarian officials saw the posting in March last year and contacted the Department of Homeland Security, which then located Turner.

He said that he was prepared to give up the book if ordered to do so by the court. A forfeiture warrant was duly issued by a U.S. District Court, and Homeland Security agents picked it up from him some ten days ago.

“With this forfeiture, a small, but meaningful, piece of the history of the Jewish faith will be returned to its rightful owner, the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary,” SDNY U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

“My Office retains its firm commitment to protecting priceless cultural property and, where it has been illegally taken, returning it to its rightful peoples.”

After being used as a Nazi prison during the German occupation of Hungary, the Rabbinical Seminary reopened after the war and regained its original function of training rabbinical leaders even under Communist rule.

Other books from the Seminary’s collection have reappeared over the years, and the institution has never removed any from its catalogue.