This Simchat Torah will bring special joy to Rabbi Shlomo Koves, who will dance with his Budapest community just weeks after completing a milestone cataloging project – one expected to finally return more than a hundred Torah scrolls and other Judaica to Hungarian Jewry after seventy years in Russian hands.
As a Chabad emissary and one of Hungary's most prominent Jewish leaders, Rabbi Koves has spent the past three years pushing this case toward resolution, and his newly finished research marks the clearest path yet to closing it.
The story behind the treasure begins in tragedy. More than half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and alongside the machinery of destruction, the Nazis plundered synagogues and private homes of their sacred objects. The Soviets, who later drove the Germans out of Hungary, took their own share as well, carting a portion of that plunder back to the Soviet Union and burying it in storage. Rabbi Koves traced this hidden trove to the archive of Nizhny Novgorod, launching the campaign that has now reached its turning point.
"A decade ago, I began searching for the Jewish treasure, after receiving precise information," he recounts. "After many efforts, I was permitted to enter the archive. For a long hour I examined the items, and I reached an unambiguous conclusion that they originated from Hungarian Jewry. There was a great number of Torah scrolls and other ancient scrolls, like the Scroll of Esther and the Scroll of Ecclesiastes, that were used by the country's Jews."
His account lines up with the public record: back in February 2014, Rabbi Koves announced he'd located over 100 pre-war Torah scrolls in Nizhny Novgorod's Lenin Scientific Library, about 400 kilometers east of Moscow, one of the largest caches of pre-war Judaica found in recent history. At a Budapest press conference, he said he had no doubt the scrolls belonged to Hungarian Jews, even though they'd been stripped of any markings that would confirm it outright. The find itself grew out of patient, years-long detective work: after Hungary recovered a cache of antique books from the same library in 2006, Koves suspected more community property might be sitting there too, and once he secured access to the archive, he was proven right.
The campaign has earned strong backing from Hungarian officials. "Senior ministers have committed to us that they will make every effort to return the treasure to the Jewish community," Rabbi Koves says. His argument rests on a legal principle: the items were seized as war loot during World War II and were never Russia's to keep. "According to Russian law regarding the seizure of war spoils, property of this kind is meant to be returned to the Jewish community in Hungary," he explains, noting that Russian restitution law tends to favor property that once belonged to religious or anti-Nazi groups. For him, ownership was always the secondary issue. As he put it when the scrolls first surfaced: "For seven decades they have been lying in those archives, while their only value is for a Jewish community to see them and use them every day."
The scale of the discovery only sharpens its weight. Around 550,000 Hungarian Jews perished in the Holocaust, and roughly 100,000 remain in the country today, numbers that make recovering even a fragment of that community's ritual heritage feel especially significant. Rabbi Koves has called it likely the first time in history that such a large collection of Judaica – some 100 Torah scrolls in a single place – had ever been found together, and he's pointed out that the original discovery landed in a year that marked seventy years since the 1944 deportations to Auschwitz – a detail he found especially poignant.
Now, a fresh development has pushed the case toward resolution. "The Hungarian Minister of Culture made a special visit to Russia, during which he met with senior government officials in Moscow," Rabbi Koves says. "Upon his return here, he informed me that he had reached an understanding with the Russians regarding the return of the Torah scrolls and the other Judaica items belonging to Hungarian Jewry." It's a familiar rhythm for these two countries – echoing the same slow, negotiation-driven path that brought over 100 antique books, some from the fifteenth century, back to Hungary from that very library in 2006.
At the minister's request, Rabbi Koves prepared the research study now cataloging the full scope of the community's lost property. "I thanked him, of course, for his great contribution to the struggle of the Jewish community," he says. "Thank G-d, the work has reached its conclusion, and we hope that in the near future we will receive the stolen Jewish property into our hands, and we will be able to once again use the Torah scrolls that were seized from the Jews seventy years ago."
Adapted from Sichat Shavua Magazine