Source : TNN
The Guenzburg collection is a library of nearly 2,000 manuscripts and some 14,000 books. Some of the collection are hundreds of years old including works of Aristotle and Jewish philosopher Maimonides. There are works on the Bible, Jewish law, mathematics, philosophy, science and art.
The owner was Baron David Guenzburg, a Russian Jewish who died over a century ago. It was considered “one of the largest and most important private collections in the world”, according to Aviad Stollman, head of Israel’s National Library collections.
The collection was bought from Guenzburg’s widow by Zionist Jews in 1917. They hoped ship it to the Holy Land library that would evolve into the National Library, Stollman said, but World War I was raging and prevented that possibility.
Since then the Israeli National Library attempted to retrieve the collection, but evidence of its purchase from David Guenzburg’s widow ‘does not satisfy the Russians’.
After the Russian Revolution, the collection was expropriated and eventually taken to the Russian State Library in Moscow, where it is still held.
However now the new agreement between Israeli and Russian libraries will allow the collection to be digitised and published.
The Russian library will take high resolution digital photographs of the collection and the photos will then be handed to the Israeli library who will post the collection on their Ktiv website, the vast digitised collection of Hebrew manuscripts from libraries and collections around the world.
