If you were to ask Dr. Michael Grunberger, curator of the Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress to name his favorite object in the entire collection, you would expect that it would be a difficult choice. After all, there are more than 150,000 items preserved in the collection.

Some are worth millions of dollars and his job is to preserve and care for all of them. Curiously, however, his favorite item is neither outstandingly rare, old, nor costly.

For him personally, the greatest treasure is what he calls the “Survivors’ Talmud.” It consists of 19 volumes printed in Hebrew in 1948. He treasures these 19 volumes beyond all the other items in the collection because they help to preserve an extraordinary story.

There are dozens of editions of the Talmud, so preserving the Talmud itself is not what was special about the “Survivors’ Talmud”. The Talmud, by the way, is an anthology of Rabbinic law and lore. It was compiled more than 1500 years ago, and despite it’s massive size, it remains one of the central core texts of Judaism.

If you open the “Survivors’ Talmud” to the title page, you can see a clue as to its history. It was printed in Germany, and the date reveals that it was published right after World War II. The edition had its beginning when a delegation of Jewish displaced persons came to the Commander of the American Zone of Occupation in Germany with an unusual proposal. The American Army had provided for the physical needs of the displaced persons. Would the Army be willing to sustain their spiritual needs as well? Would the Army support them in their efforts to publish the Talmud for use by the survivors in the camps? The American Commander, General McNarney, was not Jewish, be he recognized that man does not live by bread alone. He answered yes, and committed the United States Army to help publish the work.

In Grunberger’s view, this was an extraordinary act. “Whoever heard,” he asks, “of an army printing a massive religious text (50 sets, 19 volumes in each set) in a language incomprehensible to all but a handful of its soldiers?”.

There were many obstacles. Paper was exceedingly scarce and needed to be rounded up from throughout the zone. And because the publishers couldn’t find a complete edition locally, the had to send to New York for two sets of the Talmud to use for prototypes.

In gratitude, the survivors dedicated the edition to the United States Army. “This Army,” the dedication says, “played a major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation, and after the defeat of Hitler, bore the major burden of sustaining the displaced persons of Jewish faith.”

Grunberger is overwhelmingly proud that it was the U.S. Army that published this edition of the Talmud. For him, this symbolizes one of the things that is best about America. As the proverbial “land of immigrants,” we are hospitable not only to people, but to their cultures and civilizations as well. We honor spiritual needs as well as physical needs.

We are fortunate that treasures like this are preserved. You can see the “Survivors’ Talmud” in the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room , LJ210, in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington.

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