It’s quite certain that the yeshivah library was not destroyed by the Germans
It’s axiomatic for those discussing Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin on Jewish history tours of Poland that the famed yeshivah’s library was burned by the Nazis following their occupation of the city in September 1939. That’s what was reported by the Deutsche Jugend-Zeitung newspaper in February 1940. Or so alleged the Hatzofeh newspaper in Palestine in January 1941, citing the Nazi newspaper’s dispatch from a year earlier. The German article supposedly described the 30,000-volume collection being burned publicly in the yeshivah courtyard, saying that “the Jews stood and cried as the flames burned for 24 hours. Their cries almost deafened us. We brought an army band and the joyous tones of the military music covered the cries of the Jews.”
There’s only one problem with the story: It never happened.
Chachmei Lublin founder Rav Meir Shapiro’s grandiose vision for the yeshivah included amassing the largest seforim library in Poland. In a 1926 interview with journalists on a fundraising trip to the United States, Rav Meir Shapiro proudly shared his plans:
We have space for 1,000 students to learn and for 500 to sleep and eat. The library on the day of its opening will hold 20,000 volumes. The yeshivah was established to facilitate the best in the Jewish young man. The conditions in which he finds himself must be adequate to allow him to develop to the maximum.
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