NEW YORK (JTA) — Alan Nadler’s face contorted in horror as he saw dozens of deteriorating Torah scrolls lying naked and untended, like body bags, on steel cabinets in a converted Roman Catholic Church in Vilna, Lithuania.
There were nearly 100 of the badly damaged sacred texts, each one identified by a numbered tag hanging from its wooden handle.
They gathered dust underneath a fresco of the Virgin Mary, in an Eastern European city that before the Holocaust was one of the great centers of Jewish learning.
“It was like in a morgue,” said Nadler, director of research at YIVO, the institute devoted to Jewish and Yiddish culture, when he saw the parchment texts, which included smaller scrolls that could have been of Esther and Ruth.
“They were in terrible condition. It was a desecration.”
Outraged, he protested to the custodians of the scrolls, officials from the Lithuanian National Library. That was in 1990.
When Nadler returned in 1992, the Torahs were gone, never to be seen again.
“The head of the library assured me they were properly being taken care of,” Nadler said. “But he would not take me to see them. They had vanished.”
Last week, Nadler, for the first time, met with representatives of a number of American Jewish national agencies to discuss the fate of the Torahs, as well as the tens of thousands of rare but crumbling 200-year-old Hebrew and Yiddish books and records — the legacy of the nearly destroyed Jewish culture of Vilna.
Many of the texts are lying unidentified in the dilapidated church that now serves as a warehouse for the Lithuanian library system.
The unprecedented meeting, called by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, included representatives from about 25 agencies, including the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the American Jewish Committee, the Telse Yeshiva in Cleveland, the United Jewish Appeal Chicago office and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. A representative from the Library of Congress and U.S. Sen.-elect Richard Durbin (D-Mich.) also were present.
After a two-hour meeting at the Manhattan headquarters of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the group agreed to establish a central coordinating body to ensure that the disparate agencies not act at cross purposes, according to Jerome Chanes, program director at the National Foundation.
The group agreed to establish a steering committee that would act as the coordinating body and information clearinghouse for the coalition. The committee will consist of Chanes, Max Gitter of YIVO and Mark Levin from the Conference of Presidents.
The coalition also agreed to establish priorities for surveying and cataloging the texts and for other “archival needs.”
“I think the meeting was a productive one,” said Chanes, adding that for the first time, the premier experts on this subject had gathered in one room.
“There was a lot of information shared, and a lot of intensive discussion” about the complex background of the situation, he added, including navigating Vilna’s political leadership, which claims the books.
Chanes said it was clear YIVO would be the central agency in the coalition.
The group also discussed strategies and tactics. “As far as tactical matters, there are disagreements,” he said.
It was not clear how the establishment of the coordinating body would affect the individual efforts of its members, such as YIVO, to win the release of the archives.
For more than seven years, YIVO has been negotiating with the constantly changing leadership in the Lithuanian government for the return of the books and archives — with limited success.
Nadler said the rightful owners of the texts are the functioning heirs of the Lithuanian Jewish organizations that survived the Holocaust.
Lithuanian leaders and some in Vilna’s surviving Jewish community of about 4,000 argue that the texts must stay in the city, even if it means building a state-of-the-art library building with essential climate control features to prevent further deterioration of the texts.
To be sure, the organizations come with their own agendas. The groups also have differing strategies on how to preserve the books and texts and on how to ensure that they will be properly catalogued and made accessible to scholars worldwide.
For example, Nadler is calling for the texts to be brought to America and returned to YIVO, to the Telse Yeshiva and to other Jewish organizations. The yeshiva owned some of the books that have been identified.
But Israeli scholars are calling for the texts to be permanently housed in Israel.
Other groups, such as the American Jewish Congress, have supported the notion of keeping the texts in Vilna, an idea Nadler abhors.
“That would be like someone coming and robbing your house, taking your VCR and television and stereo and calling a few years later saying, `I don’t have a decent house, so can you build a house for me for your stuff?'” he said.
Nadler said he had “a pretty clear-cut agenda” going into the meeting. The most immediate need, he said, is to ensure the safety of the books. Second is to microfilm the numerous organizational records, letters and personal correspondence from the Jewish community from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But with all the complex and delicate political negotiations that lie ahead, Nadler’s sense of urgency rises when discussing the missing Vilna Torah scrolls, perhaps the greatest symbol of survival of the Vilna Jews.
“There is really a sacred obligation to rescue them,” he said. “They are in terrible condition, but a lot of them are salvageable.”
Nadler believes that maybe two or three Torahs should be given to the remaining synagogues in Vilna. There were more than 100 at the turn of the century.
“The rest,” he said, “should be given to Jewish institutions in America — synagogues founded by Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors. They should be the beneficiary of these Torah scrolls.”