Behind an inconspicuous wooden door in downtown Budapest, the Jewish Theological Seminary harbors one of the largest and most valuable Jewish book collections in Europe.
But about 20,000 books and many valuable manuscripts have been missing since the end of World War II. Adolf Eichmann, who oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jewish population to Auschwitz, arrived there on March 19, 1944, the day that German troops marched into Hungary. His men occupied the seminary, made arrests and seized books.
Now, more than 80 years later, the books are slowly returning to the 150-year-old seminary, the oldest institution of its kind in Central Europe — sometimes individually, sometimes in batches, some from Europe, some from further afield.
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