Bergen-Belsen survivors petition court to halt camp ledger sale

The organization insists the ledger is public not private property, that the private ownership of the document is illegitimate, and that it opposes “trade in the Holocaust.”

By JEREMY SHARON
A MEMORIAL at the Bergen- Belsen death camp. The book follows a survivor’s quest for revenge. (photo credit: REUTERS)
A MEMORIAL at the Bergen- Belsen death camp. The book follows a survivor’s quest for revenge.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
The Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court has put a hold on the sale at auction of a ledger from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp following a petition by the Organization of Bergen-Belsen Survivors in Israel.
The organization insists the ledger is public not private property, that the private ownership of the document is illegitimate, and that it opposes “trade in the Holocaust.”
The ledger in question is a record of some 100 pages detailing 85 incidents in which a rabbinical court of rabbis who survived the Holocaust released other survivors from being bound to their marriages because of the disappearance of their spouses.
In Jewish law, an individual whose spouse disappears becomes an agun or agunah, chained to their marriage, unless evidence of the death of their spouse is available.
Because Jews murdered by the Nazis were cremated or buried in mass graves, many survivors required rabbinical courts to formally release them from their marriages to allow them to marry again.
The rabbinical court summoned witnesses to testify about people whom they saw murdered, testimony which was then used as the basis of rulings freeing surviving spouses.
The ledger was scheduled to be sold at auction in the Kedem Auction House on Tuesday night, but the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court has issued a temporary injunction against that sale, and is scheduled to hold a hearing on the case on Tuesday afternoon.
“We are in principal against trade in the Holocaust,” Jochi Ritz-Olewski, deputy president of the Organization of Bergen-Belsen Survivors in Israel, told The Jerusalem Post. “Items of a historic nature about the Holocaust are not the property of private people, and the ledger needs to be given to Yad Vashem or an academic institution, since historic documents have research value, and because it is an important testimony that should be available to the public.”
Ritz-Olewski asserted that the document belonged to the descendants of the Bergen-Belsen survivors, since it was written by the Bergen-Belsen rabbinical court in relation to the marital status of their parents and grandparents.
She also expressed concern about who may buy the ledger, which has a starting price of $4,000, saying that if a Holocaust denier bought it, they could destroy an important piece of documentary evidence.
Attorneys David Fohrer and Limor Levy representing the Organization of Bergen-Belsen Survivors in Israel will argue that the ledger belongs to the camp survivors and their descendants; that any private individual currently in possession of the document has it in trust and that seeking to sell it violates that trust; and that as a historically important document it should be available for public access.
Ritz-Olewski was born in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp in 1947. Her parents were both survivors of Auschwitz, where her mother played in the female orchestra before ending up in Bergen-Belsen.
Her father was also in Auschwitz and survived a death march to Bergen-Belsen. They married after the camp was liberated on April 15, 1945, and their daughter was born two years later.
“My eyes darkened when I read about the proposed sale of the ledger,” said Ritz-Olewski. “Trade in the Holocaust is something awful. The place for this document – which is first-hand testimony about how Jews were murdered and which has unbelievable historic importance – is in Yad Vashem.”