When the Nazis Stole Lea Goldberg’s Doctoral Thesis

What did the famous Israeli poet Lea Goldberg have to do with medieval translations of the Torah? Why did her doctoral thesis focus on this subject? And how did it fall into Nazi hands before eventually ending up at the National Library of Israel?

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Lea Goldberg, photo: the Meitar Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel

Many of us know Lea Goldberg primarily as a poet and children’s author. But she was also a playwright, painter, editor, translator, teacher, and literary scholar. She produced a myriad of classic Hebrew poems and stories, many of which remain present and popular in Israeli culture to this day.

It’s for this reason that it’s somewhat surprising to learn that she also wrote “The Samaritan Translation of the Pentateuch [the Torah] – A Study of the Manuscript Source”. Not exactly the usual fare of her poems and stories, nor the Shakespeare and Moliere plays she translated into Hebrew. But this was indeed one of her first works.

Specifically, it is her doctoral thesis, written in German. In it, she studied medieval manuscripts in order to compare the Onkelos translation of the Jewish Torah into Aramaic with translations of the Samaritan Torah into the same language.

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Cover of Lea Goldberg’s doctoral thesis, University of Bonn, 1935

Her subject was chosen for her by her supervisor, Professor Paul Kahle of the University of Bonn in Germany, where she studied in 1932-1933. She very much liked Prof. Kahle, a world-renowned scholar of biblical linguistics, but she was less thrilled with the subject she had been tasked with researching. Prof. Kahle got her photocopies of Samaritan manuscripts from the University of Cambridge and elsewhere, which she analyzed in order to understand the character of known translations of the Torah.

After Goldberg made Aliyah to the Land of Israel in 1935, the Bonn University Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies printed and distributed her study as part of a series of publications by the institute. A number of copies of her thesis ultimately reached the collection of the National Library of Israel. All the copies are identical – except one which contains various stamps and marks hinting at a long and complicated journey. This unusual copy intrigued me, so I decided to try and understand what it had been through.

The cover page of this copy features a square stamp with writing in German. The stamp belongs to the “The Institute for Research on the Jewish Question” (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage) of the “Reich Institute for the History of New Germany” (Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands).

The institute was founded in 1935, and had opened a research division to study the “Jewish question” in the city of Munich. As a “research institute,” its directors tried to build up a respectable library, most of which was looted from Jewish libraries in Nazi Germany.

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Stamps of the Reich Institute for the History of New Germany

In the years before WWII, institute director Walter Frank tried to build up a professional library containing a collection focused on the Jewish question, and he would not suffice with shelves laden with random Jewish books. During the war, the collection had between 25,000 and 30,000 books, which even included a number of incunabula – rare early printed books, produced in the first few decades after the invention of the printing press. The institute collected first editions and various printings of the literature of the Jewish sages, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah codex, the Shulchan Aruch law code, and the literature of Jewish movements including Hasidism, Haskalah, Karaism, and Zionism.

Despite support from the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, the institute suffered from financial instability, making it difficult to maintain the collection. Frank wanted to get his hands on the important Jewish library in Frankfurt, and when he failed, he tried to get ahold of other libraries in Berlin and Breslau. The library staff took care to stamp all of its books with the institute’s seal. The institute had two stamps: One was rectangular and simply presented the institute’s title, while the second was circular and featured the Nazi eagle emblem, the Reichsadler. Each book was also given a serial number made up of a Latin letter and a number, glued to the corner of the book. The copy of Lea Goldberg’s thesis also had one – T552.

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The serial number of Lea Goldberg’s doctoral thesis at the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Munich

Despite its efforts to accumulate as many looted Jewish books as possible, the institute’s library had difficulty competing with stronger bodies such as the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and the Advanced School of the Nazi Party (Hohe Schule der NSDAP) which had its own “Institute for Research on the Jewish question” in Frankfurt. These different Nazi bodies looted millions of books from institutions and personal collections throughout Europe during the war.

A substantial number of looted books were discovered after the war by American forces, who transferred the stolen items to a large warehouse in the city of Offenbach, near Frankfurt. There, they were cataloged with the aim of returning them to the countries they were stolen from. As part of the process, some of them were given the warehouse’s stamp.

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The Offenbach book warehouse. Photos from the Yad Vashem photographic collection

In 1947, American forces found the books looted by Frank’s library and transferred them to Offenbach. Among these books was a copy of Lea Goldberg’s doctoral thesis. Workers at the Offenbach warehouse added their own circular stamp, making the cover of the thesis a kind of symbolic battleground between the Nazis and the Allies. At first, the Americans didn’t know what to do with the half a million or so books in the warehouse, including Goldberg’s work. Who should they return them to? Who were they stolen from?

In general, this is how the Offenbach warehouse operated: The books whose prior ownership was unknown remained in the warehouse. In 1949, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organization sent representatives who were given the responsibility of distributing the remaining books.

The Hebrew University’s “Committee for the Salvaging of Diaspora Treasures” was among the leading components of the JCR. The Hebrew University and its library – which later became the National Library of Israel – sent representatives to Germany to help catalog and select items from those remaining at the warehouses. Ultimately, some 200,000 books were sent to the young State of Israel.

For the next twenty years, representatives of the National Library, sometimes in tandem with the Ministry of Religions, worked to bring hundreds of thousands more books to Israel. The National Library kept those items which were missing from its collection, and the rest were sent to other institutions in Israel.

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Logo of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organization

Each and every book handled by the JCR contains a label with the organization’s logo, informing the book’s readers that it was originally stolen by the Nazis. Lea Goldberg’s book contains such a label, which is very familiar to staff at the National Library of Israel. Once the National Library received the book, the Library’s own stamp was also added. We don’t know if Goldberg herself ever saw this particular copy of her work, but she certainly knew of the National Library’s efforts to bring Jewish books from Europe to Israel after the Holocaust.

How do we know? In the early fifties, Goldberg wrote the play Lady of the Castle (Hebrew), whose debut performance took place in September 1955 at the Cameri theater. The play tells of two Zionist emissaries from the Land of Israel who arrive at a castle in the middle of a European forest one stormy night. There, they discover a young Jewish girl and try to convince her to come with them to the Land of Israel. The two emissaries are Dora Ringel, a representative of the “Youth Aliyah” movement who is seeking out children who survived the Holocaust, and the librarian Michael Zand, who is sent by the National Library to bring back books stolen by the Nazis to Israel.

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Cover of Lady of the Castle (Hebrew), published by Sifriyat Po’alim

The figure of Michael Zand is reminiscent of Shlomo Shunami, who for many years served as one of the National Library’s senior librarians. Aside from his extensive work as a librarian, Shunami also travelled across Europe to seek out books from Jewish libraries and private collections which survived the Holocaust. In most cases, the owners and users of these collections and libraries were murdered by the Nazis and their helpers.

In some cases, the only testaments to their lives and their communal institutions are these books, some of which serve as silent monuments of paper on the shelves of the National Library of Israel.

Marc Chagall’s Gift: A Mosaic of Generosity

The French artist once designed something special for his friends’ garden in Washington, D.C. In turn, they provided a unique experience for congregants of a synagogue across the street.

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Marc Chagall and his mosaic, "Orphée" (Chagall photo by Rudi Weissenstein, the Pri-Or PhotoHouse, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection; "Orphée" is part of the John U. and Evelyn S. Nef Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)

For about four decades through 2009, worshippers at Kesher Israel Congregation enjoyed a cultural experience unique to Washington, D.C.

It occurred once each year, always during the afternoon break in the Yom Kippur prayer services, when they could view a massive, Marc Chagall-designed mosaic affixed to a brick wall in the shaded garden of a home across the street. The house belonged to a widow who, along with her husband, knew the famed French artist.

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A portrait photo of Marc Chagall, likely taken in Paris in the early 1920s. The signature of the photographer, Henri Manuel, appears below. The Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel

In the early 1990s, Fran Kritz, a synagogue congregant then, saw Bible scholar Nahum Sarna studying Talmud there.

“It felt like different moments of Jewish history coming together,” she said. “You’d have thought there was no way to elevate this beautiful garden.”

The hostess, Evelyn Nef, didn’t attend the synagogue, never explained her invitation to its leadership and rarely was present during the visits. She simply sent a note before each year’s High Holy Days to extend the offer, then left the gate open on the appointed afternoon.

“She told me she was Jewish but that, at age 7, she lost all faith in religion,” said David Epstein, another congregant.

Just as Chagall created the work and presented it in 1971 as a gift to Nef and her husband, John (he died in 1989), she apparently decided to share it with the synagogue that still stands at the corner of 28th and N streets in the Georgetown neighborhood of the city’s northwest quadrant.

Chagall was born in Belarus on July 7, 1887. He spent most of his life in France and died in 1985.

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A portrait photo of Marc Chagall, taken in Paris in 1925. It features a handwritten dedication by Chagall to Abraham Schwadron. The Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel

The shul’s Chagall-viewing tradition began shortly after word emerged about the mosaic’s installation.

Ken Horowitz might have been the first congregant to see it, and perhaps inadvertently spurred Nef to issue the annual invitation.

Horowitz was among a handful of worshippers who, after services — he remembers it being a holiday, but not which one — jumped near the property’s outer wall trying to glimpse the art.

Nef invited them into the yard.

“It was well worth it. It was a gorgeous mosaic,” said Horowitz.

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Orphée by Marc Chagall, the John U. and Evelyn S. Nef Collection, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

It certainly was imposing: 10’ x 17’ (3m x 5.2m), mounted on a 30’-high (9m) brick wall that Chagall painted gray. Chagall had told the Nefs what it depicted, according to a story she wrote in The Washington Post in 1972. The main figures at the center come from Greek mythology: Orpheus playing a lute, ringed by the Three Graces and the winged horse Pegasus. In blue at the bottom-left lies a body of water at which people stand; Nef paraphrased Chagall as saying it symbolizes European Jewish refugees like himself who escaped the Nazis’ persecution for shelter in the United States. In the bottom-right, a man in blue-green and a woman in purple sit against a tree.

Nef asked Chagall whether the couple represents her and John.

“If you like,” he replied.

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Marc Chagall during a visit to Israel in 1951, photo by Rudi Weissenstein, all rights reserved to Pri-Or PhotoHouse, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel

The mosaic of stone and glass tiles was executed by Italian artist Lino Melano, who worked in a studio in Biot, a French village near Nice, close to Chagall’s studio in St. Paul de Vence. Melano, Chagall and Chagall’s wife Valentine visited Washington to oversee the installation of the mosaic’s 10 panels and attend a dedication ceremony where France’s ambassador spoke.

The Nefs hosted the Chagalls at least once before, in 1968. Chagall told them then he’d create art for their home to honor the couples’ friendship.

“Then, toward the end of the visit, Marc announced one morning at breakfast: ‘Nothing for the house. The house is perfect as it is. But I will do something for the garden. A mosaic,’ ” Nef wrote in the article.

The Chagalls and Nefs had vacationed together for several summers in southern France. In 1970, at his studio — “the holy of holies,” Nef wrote of visiting it — Chagall showed them a watercolor maquette, or scale model, of the mosaic.

“With some ceremony, Marc approached a large brown paper-covered rectangle on the wall,” she wrote. “After a short speech, he tore off the covering to reveal a stunning, brilliantly colored gouache design.”

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Marc Chagall during a visit to Israel in 1951, photo by Rudi Weissenstein, all rights reserved to Pri-Or PhotoHouse, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel

Viewing the work in the Nefs’ garden was a striking experience, said Epstein, because “sometimes, when the sun hit it, the gold in it would gleam.”

“It was amazing it was in somebody’s backyard,” said American diplomat Daniel Renna, who twice saw the mosaic while attending Kesher Israel between 1995 and 2001.

John Nef, a University of Chicago economics professor, had been collecting art, including two Chagalls, by the time he befriended Chagall after inviting him to lecture at the campus in 1946. A widower, he met the divorced-and-widowed Evelyn in Washington and married her in 1964. Neither had children.

She by then was an expert on Arctic exploration (her second husband’s field), and later became a psychotherapist. She was active in Washington’s social circles.

She died in 2009, bequeathing the mosaic and other pieces, including Chagall works, to Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Conservators in 2010 painstakingly disassembled the mosaic and transported it to the museum, where it’s been displayed since 2013 in a sculpture garden. It even acquired a name, Orphée. (It was untitled during the Nefs’ ownership.)

The piece is “monumental,” among Chagall’s largest mosaics, said Harry Cooper, the National Gallery’s curator of modern art. Its acquisition “filled a major gap” in the museum’s Chagall holdings, he said.

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Orphée by Marc Chagall, the John U. and Evelyn S. Nef Collection, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

“The flying figures is pure Chagall. The flowing colors, beautiful colors — that’s Chagall,” Cooper said. “He gives people this sense of magic, freedom, flight — all these things we really need … as an escape from daily life. It’s a bit of the Mediterranean or Atlantic in our sculpture garden, whatever beautiful spot you want to think about.”

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A portrait of Marc Chagall drawn by fellow artist Hermann Struck. The portrait was donated to the National Library by Struck himself in 1930. The Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel

Kesher Israel congregants who enjoyed the Chagall mosaic on long-ago Yom Kippur afternoons praise Nef’s gesture today.

“It was a wonderful experience. I remember thinking how generous it was of her to allow a select public to come in,” said Jerusalem resident Ruth Frank, who saw the mosaic, in either the late 1980s or early 1990s, while attending the synagogue.

“It was a lovely place to spend the [Yom Kippur] break,” said Edith Gelfand, of Florida, who also viewed the mosaic once during her years in Washington.

Said Kritz: “It was a lovely invitation by this woman. To me, it became a holy opportunity.”

Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].

The Lost History of the Jews of Corfu

In memory of an ancient community snuffed out by the Holocaust.

The Corfu Jewish cemetery, photo: the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

On March 22, 1946, the Sephardic Jewish newspaper Hed HaMizrach (“Echo of the East”) published a pained Hebrew letter written by Haim Mizrachi (1901-1969), a resident of the island of Corfu and a Revisionist Zionist activist, parts of whose personal archive are kept at the National Library of Israel. The Jerusalem weekly didn’t make the letter a front-page affair, instead tucking it in between pages 9 and 10 of a 12-page publication, but the content remains difficult to stomach.

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The beginning of the Hed HaMizrach article. March 22, 1946. Click here for the full article.

In the text he wrote and published, Mizrachi mourned his community’s destruction in the Holocaust. He told of how on June 9, 1944, the Nazis, with the aid of Greek police officers, arrested most of the Jews on the island of Corfu and sent them to the Birkenau death camp. Of some 1,700 Jews on the island, only 200 survived – 80 of them managing to escape the Nazis altogether and 120 surviving the camps. The rest were murdered.

Mizrachi issued a desperate plea for aid to help for the remnant of Corfu Jewry – the orphans, widows, sick, and unemployed. They needed clothes, blankets, funds and assistance in rebuilding the one remaining synagogue, which was left “half-demolished.”

Mizrachi added that of the 200 surviving Jews, 30 had already made Aliyah to the Land of Israel and many more intended to follow “for they do not see any hope of rearranging their lives in the exile”. Thus did an ancient Jewish community, which had survived for over 700 years, come to an end. The story of the Corfu Jewish community, especially its final years, is not widely known to the public, and deserves elaboration.

The island of Corfu rests in the eastern Mediterranean, near the western shores of Greece and Albania, and not far from southern Italy, occupying a militarily and economically strategic point. As such, it has been conquered many times: by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Goths, the Venetians, the Kings of Sicily, the Ottoman Empire, and the armies of Napoleon. In 1815, it was occupied by Britain, which handed it over to the Kingdom of Greece in 1864.

Jews are known to have been present in Corfu since the Middle Ages. The famous traveler Benjamin of Tudela mentions visiting the island in the 12th century and encountering a Jew named Yosef, who worked as a dyer of fabrics. Two major communities lived on the island – one composed of Romaniote Jews and the other of Italian Jews.

In a letter published in the Berlin-based Hebrew weekly HaMagid on September 24, 1891, a Corfu Jew named Halevi said the following of his community:

 “…the Jews of Corfu separated here into two communities regarding matters of worshipping God. The first, the smaller of the two, includes the descendants of the first exiles from the time of the exile of the First Temple, and it has a synagogue built according to tradition in the first year of the Christian calendar, and the second community includes the children of the exiles of Spain and Neapol (Naples – N.G.), and it has three synagogues and its prayer is according to the Sephardic rite. The two communities conduct themselves according to special committees, which occasionally meet when needed in matters regarding the public.”

The community of Corfu is mentioned in rabbinic literature, and some of its pinkasim (community ledgers), piyutim (liturgical hymns) and songs have survived. In the 19th century, a Jewish printing press operated in Corfu owned by the Nachmoli family, which printed religious books.

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Sefer Arvit and Hagaddah. Joseph Nachmoli Publishing, Corfu, 1876, the Rare Books Collection at the National Library of Israel

The Jews of Corfu dealt primarily in trade, and some of them became prominent in trading in etrogim (citrons) grown on the island, which were considered particularly aesthetic and beautiful and therefore appropriate for the holiday of Sukkot. The Jewish traders tended to acquire the etrogim from Christian farmers and then export them throughout the Jewish world. During the 19th century, a religious debate raged across Jewish communities worldwide regarding the kosher status of these etrogim, and some communities preferred to acquire etrogim from other sources, instead.

In 1864, after Corfu was handed over to Greece, local Jews were emancipated and received civil rights. They lived in relative freedom and comfort, and made great efforts to be on good terms with the majority Christian population. Nevertheless, from time to time they did suffer from both overt and covert expressions of antisemitism.

A particularly serious incident happened in 1891, when a blood libel was spread against the local Jews. The story began shortly after Passover, when a young Jewish girl named Rubina Sardas, the daughter of a tailor, went missing and was eventually found dead in a sack. A report that her father was seen with other Jews while carrying the bloody sack in the middle of the night caused a firestorm.

A rumor spread among local Christians that the girl was actually a Christian orphan named Maria Desylla, who worked for the Sardas household, and that the Jews murdered her as part of their religious rituals. Although the legal investigation produced no damning evidence against the Jews, not all the Christians were appeased and some began to attack Jewish homes and businesses. The local police made little effort to stop the rioters, and even helped to spread the rumors that the murder victim was Christian.

On May 12, 1891, the Warsaw-based Hebrew daily HaTzfira reported that

 “from the day of April 14 until today the Jews of Corfu sit imprisoned in their homes as if in jail, for their windows are also closed, and none go outside out of great fear. They are forced to purchase their vital provisions early in the morning from cruel merchants who demand triple the price. Poverty has greatly increased among these miserable souls. From the day of April 23, all the houses of prayer are sealed shut. When one of the Jews died, they could not bring him to a grave but sixty hours later, and twenty soldiers went beside the bed to guard it. Commerce has ceased. The common folk’s hatred of the downtrodden has greatly increased, and the soldiers born of the city help the masses incite evil against the Jews.”

22 Jews were killed in the pogroms.

Eight days later, HaTzfira reported that in response to these events, Austria, France, and England sent warships to the area to protect their citizens. In addition, representatives of France, the Ottoman Empire, and other countries were instructed to protest the Greek government’s failure to rein in the riots, with the German central bank even warning Greece that continued unrest could harm the value of its currency.

In the end, the authorities in Athens sent military units to Corfu, driving away the rioters with gunfire. The Greek government stressed that

“the Jews have since then shared one constitution and one law with all the residents of the country. The government is very saddened by the incidents, but its heart is confident that its actions will prove to all nations that the good of all its servants under its wing is close to its heart” (HaTzfira, May 21, 1891).

The events took the Jewish world by storm. On May 21, 1891, HaMagid published an editorial full of harsh words for the Greek residents of Corfu, who made a fortune selling etrogim to the Jewish world while libeling and murdering the local Jews. The article claimed that the Jews’ main problem was their lack of any defensive force:

“And our hands are powerless to save them from their oppressors by force, for our hands do not pull back the bowstrings of heroes and we have no ships and no war stratagems to avenge the spilled blood of our brothers, for Israel is weak among the nations and its power is but in the mouth.”

Following the blood libel events, which Corfu Jews called “the evil decree,” about half of the Jews residing there left the island. Most of these were the wealthier sort, with many of them immigrating to Italy or Egypt. The Jews remaining in Corfu were mostly poor.

In the years following the “evil decree,” the lives of Corfu Jews were mostly peaceful. They loved life on the picturesque island, and author Albert Cohen, a native of Corfu, described it in longing terms in some of his works. Nata Osmo Gattegno (1923-2019), another Corfu native who survived the Holocaust, attested in her Hebrew autobiographical work From Corfu to Birkenau and Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Aked, 1999), that the community rabbi and the local Greek bishop had mutual respect for one another, with the bishop being invited to the synagogue on Jewish holidays as a guest of honor. However, when the dates of Passover and Easter fell in close proximity, tension between the two sides increased. In the week before Easter, the Greek Christians would shutter their windows, before later opening them and tossing ceramic vessels out into the street while crying out “On the heads of the Jews! On the heads of the Jews!”

On March 22, 1914, the Jerusalem daily Moriah reported on Greek rioters who smashed up the Corfu Jewish cemetery.

On April 21, 1930, Haim Mizrachi published a report in the Jerusalem daily Do’ar HaYom on another blood libel against the Jews of Corfu. Mizrachi told of how on Monday, April 7, 1930, a great panic arose in the Jewish neighborhood. The Jewish merchants who set out to sell their wares suddenly returned to their homes in fear. Local Christians had threatened to murder them in revenge for the alleged Jewish abduction of a Christian child, whose blood the Jews supposedly sought to use in a Passover ritual.

Community leaders responded by quickly appealing to the authorities to intervene. The situation became even more tense the next day, and some Jews were beaten by their Christian neighbors. The police and the Greek bishop, who Mizrachi called a “friend of the Jews,” intervened, and overnight guards and detectives were sent to protect the Jewish neighborhood. The police published a special pamphlet to calm the mob, explaining that an anonymous individual had tried to kidnap the child to sexually assault him.

Unfortunately, not all the Greek residents believed this statement and some continued with their attacks. Mizrachi claimed that the Jewish community attempted to conceal the incident so that it would not become widely known and damage Greece’s international reputation. He noted that the local educated public and press in Corfu strongly condemned the blood libels, which did not do credit to Greece.

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Opening of a Hebrew report on the blood libel. Do’ar HaYom, April 21, 1930. Click here for the full article.

During the 1930s, despite expressions of nationalism and antisemitism in Greece, Jewish life in Corfu went on as normal. The community had a rabbi, synagogues, a Hevra Kadisha burial society, charity associations, mikvah ritual baths, and even an elementary school with a modern curriculum which included the study of the Greek language.

In April 1933, Haim Mizrachi was given permission to use the matza-baking floor in the community building to set up a night school for young members of the community so that they could study Judaism and Hebrew. The community leadership demanded that Mizrachi, a Zionist activist, ensure that the children were studying both Jewish and Greek history, stressing that Jews living in Greece needed to be both law-abiding Greek citizens as well as “good Jews”.

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Approval by the Corfu Jewish community for Haim Mizrachi to establish a night school to study Judaism and Hebrew. April 21, 1933. From the Haim Mizrachi Collection on Revisionist Zionism in Greece. The collection has been cataloged and made accessible thanks to the kind donation of the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington.

The community also contained social organizations, one of which was the “Phoenix” association of Corfu Jews, founded in 1931.

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Invitation to the Jewish “Phoenix” association’s ball on February 4, 1935. From the Haim Mizrachi Collection on Revisionist Zionism in Greece. The collection has been cataloged and made accessible thanks to the kind donation of the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington.

There was also Zionist activity, of course. A number of Zionist organizations operated on the island from the beginning of the 20th century. Haim Mizrachi himself worked on organizing Revisionist Zionist activity. As a youth in 1913, Mizrachi organized a Zionist youth group called Tikvat Zion (Zion’s Hope), which operated for a few years before disbanding. In 1924, he established another movement named Theodor Herzl, which he later merged with the Revisionist Betar movement. He kept in regular contact with the global Betar movement, and had close ties to his colleagues in Saloniki and the Land of Israel. He died in Corfu in 1969.

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Haim Mizrachi. Photo courtesy of Guy Raz and the Eretz Israel Museum’s Israel Photography House
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Letter from the Revisionist Zionist leadership, headed by Jabotinsky, to the Revisionist branches in Europe. June 25, 1934. This copy was sent to the Betar branch in Corfu. From the Haim Mizrachi Collection on Revisionist Zionism in Greece. The collection has been cataloged and made accessible thanks to the kind donation of the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington.

The community of Corfu was wiped out in the Holocaust. In the letter published in Hed HaMizrach, mentioned at the start of this article, Haim Mizrachi described his community’s last moments: In April 1941, fascist Italy conquered Corfu, but the Italians made no distinction between Jew and Gentile and took no special steps against the former.

Things took a turn for the worse in October 1943, when the Italians left and the Nazi Wehrmacht took over. SS units under the command of Jurgen Stroop – who had previously served in Poland, ruthlessly putting down the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion – ordered the Jews to be registered in a special book and present themselves before a town official three times a week. The Jews were also burdened with a heavy tax to serve the Germans’ needs.

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Wehrmacht soldiers entering Corfu, Spring 1944. Photo: German Federal Archive.

In May 1944, a delegation from the Gestapo arrived in Corfu, tasked with planning the deportation of the Jews to the death camp in Birkenau. On June 9, 1944, all Jews were concentrated in the city square, and the Nazi soldiers, with the aid of Greek policemen, herded them into the local fortress at gunpoint. At the same time, pamphlets were published on the island declaring that “Corfu has been liberated from the Jewish monster” and demanding those hiding Jews or Jewish property to immediately surrender them or be executed. Consequently, another 100 Jews hiding among their Christian neighbors were handed over to the Nazis.

Nata Osmo Gattegno attested that at the same time, Greek Christians invaded the Jewish neighborhood and looted it. The Jews were deported from Corfu in boats to the Haidari concentration camp near Athens, and from there they were very quickly sent on trains to the Birkenau death camp. Most were murdered there. Of some 1,700 Jews living in Corfu at the time of the Nazi occupation, only 200 survived.

After the Holocaust, the Greek government ordered the governor of Corfu in 1946 to return all property to the Jewish community and residents without delay, including public buildings used by the community and private property such as homes and stores (HaMashkif, January 17, 1946). But much of the property was in ruins. On the eve of the Holocaust, there were four synagogues. After the war, only one was left standing, and that barely. It was later restored by local authorities together with Jewish organizations.

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The sole surviving synagogue on Corfu. Photo: Dan Lundberg

The ancient cemetery was also seriously damaged. Haim Mizrachi told of how after the war, the Greeks destroyed the cemetery’s fence, desecrated the graves, and turned it into a “place of trash and an abandoned field,” as he put it. In 1960, media outlets in Israel and around the world reported that the Jewish community in Corfu sold the cemetery land to the local authorities, which demolished it.

The Central Council of Greek Jewry denied this (Herut, January 1, 1961), explaining that in 1939, under pressure from local authorities, the community management had to give up a third of the cemetery plot for the sake of a children’s home and a hospital. The site was badly damaged during the war, most of the gravestones were destroyed, and one could only barely discern that this was indeed a cemetery.

After the war, the authorities expropriated the territory, began to level it, and even tossed bones into the sea. The community asked the authorities to stop their work, and in the end both sides reached an agreement to fence off a small part of the original cemetery and leave it alone.

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Corfu Jewish cemetery. Photo: Nikodem Nijaki

In an article published in April 1978 in BaMa’arachah magazine, author David Benvenisti reported on his visit to the community of Corfu. He wrote that the old cemetery was being destroyed, the building once used for the Jewish school now stood desolate, and the few Jewish children living on the island were receiving no Jewish education. As of the 2020s, just a few dozen Jews live there; the desolate synagogue is now more a tourist attraction than anything else, and it is mostly active on weekends and holidays.

The community now uses a new location for its cemetery in place of the old one. In it one can find a memorial plaque commemorating those murdered in the Holocaust.

The Corfu Jews who made Aliyah established a monument in the cemetery of the Israeli city of Holon, which is dedicated to the memory of their brethren murdered in the Holocaust. Every year, on the 8th of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, they conduct a ceremony in memory of the ancient Corfu Jewish community, which was wiped out.

Corfu Holon
Monument in memory of Corfu’s murdered Jews, Holon Cemetery. Photo: David Shai

The Haim Mizrachi Collection at the National Library of Israel has been cataloged and made accessible thanks to the kind donation of the Samis Foundation, Seattle, Washington, dedicated to the memory of Samuel Israel. Dr. Nimrod Gaatone is the director of the Samis Project, and is responsible for handling the Haim Mizrachi Collection.

Thanks to Dr. Shay Eshel and Meytal Solomon for their help with the Greek.

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Franz Kafka on His Deathbed

On the author's last days, and some of the last words that he was able to put in writing.

Franz Kafka

In the early 20th century, tuberculosis was a fairly common disease. At that point in time, an effective treatment had yet to be developed. The disease mainly spread among populations that suffered from nutritional deficiencies. War could often lead to significant parts of the population suffering from malnutrition, and so it isn’t surprising that Franz Kafka contracted tuberculosis in 1917 – in the midst of the First World War.

At first, Kafka tried a very simple method of treatment; he figured a few months of rest outside the city at his sister Ottilie’s home might help. During his years of illness, Kafka occasionally returned to work at the insurance company in Prague where he was employed but he found he increasingly needed long breaks, which he took at various sanatoriums in Bohemia and Austria. During his last weeks, he stayed at a sanatorium in the town of Kierling near Vienna, Austria. Many of the patients there were in the terminal stages of tuberculosis and had hardly any chance of leaving in a reasonably healthy state. For Kafka, the disease had spread to his throat, preventing him from speaking and he switched to exclusively written communication.

The author sent letters and postcards to his friends, like the ones pictured here that he sent to Max Brod in April and May 1924:

Photo By Ardon Bar Hama
Photo By Ardon Bar Hama
Photo By Ardon Bar Hama
Photo By Ardon Bar Hama
The last postcards sent by Kafka to Max Brod. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

In these postcards, Kafka wrote about his own literary interests, the works of other authors, and also his unpleasant experiences due to the difficult treatments he was receiving, for example, injections of alcohol. At best, these injections offered a bit of relief.

About 40 “conversation sheets” from this difficult period have been preserved. They contain the ideas Kafka wrote down and the words he wished to express to the people who surrounded him: his friend and lover Dora Diamant, the doctor Robert Klopstock, Max Brod, and possibly others. After Kafka’s death on June 3, 1924, these pages were distributed among his friends, with five of them given to Max Brod. These items were brought to the National Library of Israel, along with Max Brod’s personal archive and a number of Kafka’s writings which were in Brod’s possession. While reading the pages (which were never published), it is not always easy to understand who exactly Kafka was “conversing” with when he wrote a certain line on the page, or what exactly the conversation was about. Some interesting references can be found among the pages, for example, his memories of experiences he had with his father when he was a child:

“When I was a little boy, before I learned to swim, I sometimes went with my father, who also can’t swim, to the shallow-water pool. Then we sat together naked at the buffet, each with a sausage and a half liter of beer. My father used to bring the sausages from home, because at the swimming school, they were too expensive.”

Photo By Ardon Bar Hama
Photo By Ardon Bar Hama
Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

Elsewhere in these pages, two lines reveal Kafka’s concern for the flowers that were brought to his room in the sanatorium:

“Not cold water, but not too hot either, so that they don’t get sick.”

“And they should have made sure the flowers that were pushed to the bottom of the vase were not damaged. How can they do that?

Kafka also had comments about his diet: “It makes sense that in the hospital, dinner was between six and seven-thirty, after lying down all day, you can’t eat at half past eight” and “after all, a round of meals without fruit is unbearable over time.” In his deteriorated condition, it wasn’t easy for him to drink, either: “Milk? I drank sour milk for too long, then vinegar. The agony that drinking milk causes, now.

Of course, his illness and the treatments also became an issue: “It was from a cough at the time. I’m still burning from the oil. The injections don’t excite me anymore either, it’s too confusing.”

The exact order of the pages isn’t clear, nor is it clear if they contain all the content of Kafka’s written conversations in his last days or if there were more.

Despite his health and mental condition, he put together several short stories for a final collection he prepared, entitled A Hunger Artist. Proofreading the pages may have been the last literary act Kafka undertook. His friend Brod completed the process of getting it published. Franz Kafka never got to see it in print.

Photo By Ardon Bar Hama
Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama
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These and many other items will be displayed in the National Library of Israel’s exhibition on Franz Kafka, which will open towards the end of 2024.