How 80 years ago, Jewish teens rescued the Kaunas Ghetto’s holy books

Before Jews in Lithuania’s Kaunas Ghetto took up arms to resist the Nazis, the community’s adolescents helped rescue Torah scrolls and other books in response to the Germans’ so-called “Books Aktion.”

At the end of February 1942, the Nazis ordered the Jew of Kaunas — or Kovno, in Yiddish — to hand over every book in their possession. Torah scrolls and other religious texts were to be put aside for Germany’s future “museum of the destroyed Jewish race,” while secular literature would be recycled into paper.

“The Germans confiscated a lot of books, about 100,000, but quite a lot of books were hidden,” historian Samuel Kassow, an expert on Jewish resistance in the Kaunas Ghetto, told The Times of Israel.

By all accounts, adolescents were at the forefront of hiding and smuggling books. Some teenagers were already doing work suited to rescuing books, such as pushing wagons with supplies into and out of the ghetto.

“Many of the youth movements hid books, including burying books in the ground,” said Kassow.

Author of 2014’s “The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police,” Kassow said the book confiscation was a tool to eliminate Jewish cultural and spiritual life in the ghetto. In addition to rescuing books, some Jewish teachers operated an underground school in defiance of the ban on education.

One group of gutsy teens smuggled 1,000 “secular” books into a makeshift library comprised of books pilfered from the ghetto assembly point. Soon, at least one teacher associated with the pop-up library would pay the ultimate price for violating German edicts.

‘The threat of death’

As a 14-year old in the Kaunas Ghetto, Yitzchak Elhanan Gibraltar took part in the community’s underground response to the “Books Aktion.”

After the German order was issued, the rabbis of Kaunas fiercely debated what to do with the community’s holy books. Some rabbis concluded it was best to keep their ovens lit at all times, so as to destroy the books lest they fall into German hands.

Gibraltar, whose ancestors came to Lithuania after the Spanish Inquisition, worked as a courier for the Jewish Council. He was assigned to push a wagon around the ghetto and collect books, a task that provided him an opportunity to rescue a Torah by concealing the scroll in his wagon.

“I started going with the wagon full of sand and I ran, I pushed,” said Gibraltar in filmed post-war testimony. “I was sweating and pushing and my heart was beating like a tractor, terror. [But] the Torah was hidden in spite of the treat of death,” said the Holocaust survivor, who became a rabbi after the war.

Before the war, Gibraltar was a student at the legendary Slobodka yeshiva, where he learned that “the behavior of a yeshiva boy is expected to always sanctify the name of God.”

After the community’s books were delivered to German authorities, ghetto inmates with fluency in Hebrew were deployed to sort through the trove.

“Jewish [holy] books were to be given to the staff of the ‘Rosenberg Operation’ — the Nazi theft of Jews cultural treasures — so that they could be sorted pending shipment to Germany,” according to the Yad Vashem website. “Valuable books were boxed and sent to Germany, while the rest were sent to be processed into paper.”

Some of the holy books buried in the Kaunas Ghetto in 1942 were retrieved after the war, along with other buried caches of diaries, photos, and documents. These sources helped historians trace the evolution of the ghetto’s resistance movement, which would not become “unified” until 1943.

‘I became obsessed’

Not all efforts to rescue books that winter were aimed at Torah scrolls and Talmudic texts. For example, 14-year old diarist Solly Ganor wrote about hiding up to 1,000 “secular” books in an “abandoned house on the outskirts of the ghetto, which was off limits.”

Among the books collected by Ganor and his friends were texts in Yiddish, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Russian, French, German, and English. According to Ganor, his affinity for the printed page was tied to observing his mother derive solace from books following the death of Ganor’s brother, Herman.

“I became obsessed. I wanted more books for our library. It was a risky business, but life wasn’t worth living without books,” wrote Ganor, who called his collection “the Babel of eastern European Jewry.”

Working in the building where ghetto inmates deposited their books, Ganor and several friends managed to skim hundreds of volumes off the top. The teens were “avid readers” who each read one book a day, wrote Ganor.

“Some of the books were hard to understand, but we soon got used to the classics. I think that I got my education from these books,” wrote Ganor.

Ganor received another kind of education that winter after smuggling a Hebrew math textbook into the ghetto for his carpentry teacher, Mr. Edelstein. Like many other single men in the ghetto, Edelstein had “adopted” a fatherless family and traded his clothes to procure food for them, wrote Ganor.

“[My teacher] was so delighted that he gave me a big hug,” wrote Ganor. “That afternoon after school, I passed him at the gate, where I heard the Lithuanian guard shout, ‘What have you got hidden there, Jew boy. A book? I can shoot you for that!’”

Leaving the scene, Ganor heard an SS officer approach his teacher and the guard. After beating Edelstein, the German officer shot him to death — for possessing a smuggled geometry book.

“[Edelstein] was buried in the ghetto cemetery, but funerals and all religious practices were forbidden,” wrote Ganor. At the grave, the diarist observed the teacher’s adopted family in a state of inconsolable grief.

“I just stood there stunned, unable to utter a sound; I felt that his death was my fault,” wrote Ganor. “The next day we said Kaddish for Mr. Edelstein at his unmarked grave.”