A Librarian and Holocaust Survivor Dedicated to Preserving the Jewish Past

Born in a rural Hungarian village in 1934, Menahem Schmelzer survived the Holocaust in a forced-labor camp. Continuing his Jewish education after the war, he was later arrested by the Hungarian Communist government for his Zionist activities, and left the country shortly after his release. He served from 1964 until 1987 as the chief librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, presiding over its vast collection of rare books and manuscripts. In his obituary for Schmelzer, who died earlier this month, Joseph Berger writes:

Professor Schmelzer looked after all these documents with striking tenderness. In 1984, he showed a Newsday reporter what he called, with tart humor, an “ugly manuscript—a battered volume of parchment pages that contained biographies of talmudic rabbis but that had no particular aesthetic appeal. It was written in about the year 1200, but what endeared Professor Schmelzer to it was its 20th-century history: it had been rescued from the destruction of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in Germany and Austria in November 1938 that burned down or vandalized 267 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish-owned stores and killed more than 90 Jews.

“This manuscript is a survivor, a real survivor,” he said. “It survived from 1200 to 1938, and in 1938 it survived the Kristallnacht. It’s a symbol of continuity, of how it survived the centuries and the tragedies.”

In his time as chief librarian, Professor Schmelzer, who spoke four languages fluently, taught seminary students, first as an assistant professor of medieval Hebrew literature and Jewish bibliography and then, after 1980, as a full professor. His particular expertise was in the liturgical Hebrew poetry known as piyyutim; when he received his doctorate at the seminary, his dissertation was about the work of an 11th-century Spanish rabbi famous for such poems.

Scholars from around the world consulted with Professor Schmelzer, often about arcane factual details, because of his familiarity with so many books and his near-photographic memory.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Holocaust, Jewish history, Jewish Theological Seminary, Libraries, Rare books

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF