Survivors' Talmud - Background

Background

At the end of World War II, 250,000 to 300,000 Jewish survivors remained in Western and Central Europe, housed in DP camps. These survivors, and the schools and yeshivas that sprang up to educate them, were in desperate need of sefarim (Torah books), siddurim (Jewish prayer books), and machzorim (High Holy Days prayer books). The Vaad Hatzalah, an Orthodox rescue organization founded in 1939 to save rabbis and yeshiva students in Poland and Lithuania, printed hundreds of thousands of copies of these and other religious books to meet the survivors' needs, including 10,000 pocket-size editions of individual tractates of the Talmud.

At the same time, a group of rabbis led by Samuel A. Snieg, chief rabbi of the U.S. Zone, and Samuel Jakob Rose, both survivors of the Dachau concentration camp, conceived the idea of printing an entire, full-size Talmud in Germany as a sign of the Jewish people's survival despite efforts to annihilate them. Snieg connected with Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, a New York Reform rabbi who served as adviser on Jewish affairs to General Joseph McNarney, Military Governor of Occupied Germany, and Bernstein arranged for the rabbis to meet with McNarney. Bernstein summed up the rabbis' request in a memorandum: " the tools for the perpetuation of religion, for the students who crave these texts spring from the strongly Orthodox element? ... A 1947 edition ... published in Germany under the auspices of the American Army of Occupation, would be an historic work". The general approved the request.

The signed agreement, titled "Agreement Between the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Rabbinical Council, U.S. Zone Germany, Regarding the Printing of the New Edition of the Talmud" and dated 11 September 1946, called for the project to be supervised by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the "Joint") and the U.S. Army, and for expenses to be covered by the Joint and the German government. According to the agreement, 3,000 copies of a 16-volume set of the Talmud would be printed within one year. The Talmud project would be managed by a team of government and military staffers.