14,000-Item Guenzburg Trove Of Hebrew Manuscripts Goes Online After Deal With Russia
One of the most treasured collections of ancient Hebrew manuscripts and books will be digitized and available for public view online under an agreement by the state libraries of Russia and Israel announced on Tuesday.
Israel has long sought the transfer to its national library of the 14,000-item Guenzburg collection in the Russian State Library in Moscow, and the digitisation compromise effectively shelves a century-old ownership dispute.
The collection includes medieval books, rare works of Jewish ritual law and mysticism, prayer books and biblical commentaries amassed by three generations of the Russian-Jewish Guenzburg family.
It was purchased by Zionist activists in 1917 for shipment to Jerusalem that was delayed by fighting during World War One and was ultimately seized by Soviet authorities after the Russian Revolution.
Under what the National Library of Israel described in a statement as “an historic agreement” with the Russian State Library, thousands of “new high quality images” of the ancient Hebrew texts will be integrated into the Israeli institution’s online Ktiv manuscript site.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO