For decades after World War II, a famed Jewish house of study in Poland was consigned to oblivion.
The Nazis set fire to thousands of books stored at the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva in 1939, the popular story went, leaving no trace of its enormous library even as its students were sent to their deaths.
But while Lublin’s Jews were murdered, that great bonfire never occurred, according to Lublin local Piotr Nazaruk, who researches the city’s Jewish history at the Grodzka Gate-NN Theater Center. Nazaruk was fascinated by a set of mysteries cloaking the Lublin Yeshiva, once among the largest Jewish educational institutions in the world, whose yellow building still stands in the former Jewish quarter — now mostly empty of Jews.
“We’ve all seen images of books being burned by the Nazis during the war,” Nazaruk told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But if this yeshiva and its library were so famous, and it was such a prestigious thing for the Nazis to destroy it, why are there no traces — no photos or documents — actually proving that it happened?” And if there were no fire, might those books still be available today, in attics, private collections and on the shelves of people unaware of their tragic provenance?
There are about 40 Jews in Lublin today, but over 40,000 lived there before the Holocaust, roughly one third of the city’s population. Nazaruk, who is not Jewish, became fascinated with Poland’s Jewish history over 10 years ago. He happened upon a series of Yiddish newspapers at a library in his hometown of Biała Podlaska, north of Lublin. The discovery inspired him to study Yiddish.
“For me, this Jewish, Yiddish-speaking world of prewar Poland is almost like a parallel universe,” he said. “It happened in places that I know, on streets I walk. It was like discovering a hidden history of places I know very well.”
Nazaruk threw himself into investigating the disappearance of the Lublin Yeshiva Library. He had on his side other skeptics of the bonfire story, including Adam Kopciowski, a Lublin historian at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University who found five of the yeshiva’s books at the former Chevra Nosim synagogue — Lublin’s only surviving prewar synagogue — in the early 2000s.
