Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act Report

The recently published Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act Report deals a.o. with the fate of the Biblioteca della Comunità Ebraica di Roma:

"In 1943, the Nazis seized the contents of two libraries located in Rome in the same building: the library of Rome’s Jewish community (4,728 books, 28 incunabula, and 183 books printed in the 16th century) and the library of the Italian Rabbinical College, a collection originally from Florence but later transferred to Rome (comprising 6,580 books and 1,760 booklets). The libraries contained prayer books, documents, prints, and manuscripts from all periods of Jewish history in Italy. The rabbinical library’s collection was recovered in Germany after the war, but the majority of the contents of the Rome community library disappeared. In 2003, the Italian government established a committee of inquiry. It was unable to determine the fate of most of the contents, although it identified some manuscripts held in the collections of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati as having come from the Rome libraries. UCEI representatives noted that there was little hope of recovering the books, as they did not contain permanent markings identifying them as part of the libraries and were most likely dispersed worldwide. The UCEI representatives also stated that the majority of movable property taken during the Holocaust era was believed to have been taken at the local level, without administrative orders from national fascist authorities, and therefore was difficult to trace systematically."

https://www.state.gov/reports/just-act-report-to-congress/