When Amos Guiora saw the email drop into his inbox he had no idea what to make of it. 

He didn’t recognize the sender, but the subject line startled him: Schlomo Nathan Goldberg, the name of his paternal grandfather who perished in Auschwitz in 1944.

“It was 11:30 at night and the subject line was my grandfather’s name,” recalled the law professor, who splits his time between Salt Lake City and Israel. “I had tears in my eyes — I was blown away.”

The message, which he received while home in Israel, came from an amateur genealogist who was volunteering with the Looted Books Project, a joint initiative of JewishGen’s Kalikow Genealogy Center at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Leo Baeck Institute, both in New York. 

The project has come to the aid of Leibl Rosenberg, an official representative of the Jewish community in Nuremberg, Germany, who has made it his life’s mission to restitute 9,000 books that were looted from victims of the Nazi regime and found in the library of a notorious Nazi, Julius Streicher, at the end of World War II. 

Rosenberg has spent more than 30 years researching the provenance of these books, which are currently held at the Nuremberg Municipal Library, in order to return them to their rightful heirs. The number of books being repatriated is now on the rise thanks to the scores of volunteers who have come onboard. In just three months they have tracked down 87 heirs — some of whom are inheriting multiple titles — including Guiora.

Guiora is now eagerly awaiting the arrival of four volumes of Talmudic text, all of which bear his grandfather’s name in Hebrew and are being dispatched at the expense of the German government.

“To call it overwhelming is the mother of all understatements,” he said. 

Born in the 1950s, Guiora never got to meet his paternal grandparents, both of whom were murdered at Auschwitz. He is the only child of two Hungarian Holocaust survivors who shielded him from their dark past, he told Jewish Insider. 

“When I was 12 my father took me canoeing and told me that he would spend one minute telling me his Holocaust story and another minute on my mother’s Holocaust story — and that would be the first and last time we would ever have that conversation.”

His parents were true to their word and never spoke about it again. “The word Holocaust was never mentioned and there were no books about the Holocaust in our house,” said Guiora, who knew almost nothing of his grandfather and has never seen a picture of him.

The genealogists employed some “amazing detective work,” according to the professor, whose father changed his surname from Goldberg to Guiora after the war. 

Testimony of of Goldberg’s murder was lodged at Israel’s Yad Vashem in 1981 by his son Alexander Guiora, the younger Guiora’s father. Alexander Guiora, a psychology professor, died in 2015, but a simple Google search led the researcher to his son.

The younger Guiora, who in recent years has conducted extensive research on the Holocaust and written two books about it, said, “There are no words that can sufficiently describe the degree of my gratitude.”

Murder and violence were not the only ways by which the Nazis sought to annihilate the Jews. As part of a broad effort to wipe out Jewish culture, Nazis looted books from Jewish owners, libraries, universities and private collections. 

Many of the items were destroyed, but some were saved for institutions the Nazis planned to establish in order to study and “scientifically” prove Jewish inferiority. After World War II ended in Nazi defeat, many thousands of looted books were left abandoned for decades.

While looted art has long made headlines, the story of seized books has received little attention. This is, in part, because they are not generally so valuable but also because ownership cannot always be easily determined.

The collection amassed by Streicher, publisher of the virulently antisemitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, has been entrusted to Nuremberg’s Jewish community and is held at the city’s library.

Rosenberg has spent years identifying the rightful owners of the books — some of which were seized from other enemies of the regime, including freemasons and trade unionists. Only about a third of the collection is identifiable thanks to book plates and other provenance markers. 

In recent months, Karen Franklin, director of family research at the LBI, has been mobilizing volunteer genealogists to support Rosenberg, now in his 80s. The response to a webinar she ran on JewishGen, which hosts a database of the collection, was overwhelming and her team has so far, in the space of three months, contacted 87 descendants — some of whom have inherited several books. 

“It’s extraordinary,” she told JI. “These genealogists are all volunteering their time and I think it’s because the reward is so great.”

“The surprising part is that so many of these families are so easy to find because they’re all on MyHeritage, Geni, Ancestry, JewishGen,” said Franklin, who herself has inherited a book that belonged to a distant relative.

Someone else who has benefited is CBS News correspondent Martha Teichner. She was contacted by Franklin who noticed that one of the books bore a startlingly similar name: Marta Teichner. 

“It’s astonishing to me,” Teichner said of the book, which she described as a “real tangible connection” to the grandmother she never knew. “I had no idea it existed and knew nothing of this program to restitute these books.”

Teichner’s grandmother died in Germany in 1937, two years before the war and 11 years before her namesake was born in America. The only belongings Teichner has of her grandmother are a set of crystal glasses and a couple of photographs. 

“One is a picture of her standing with my grandfather in the middle of Piazza San Marco in Venice, covered with pigeons and with goofy grins upon their faces,” she said. 

Teichner’s father, Marta Teichner’s son, left for the U.S. soon after his mother died. Her grandfather spent part of the war in Germany before fleeing to Switzerland, but Teichner has no idea how the book might have ended up with Streicher. 

She said that the book arrived at her home “in a box so tightly packed with paper napkins that it couldn’t move even a smidgen.” She added: “It was with such intensity that it was packed up so nothing could happen to it.”

It’s a collection of letters by Gustav Landauer, a German anarchist who was murdered in custody in 1919 following an uprising in Bavaria. The book raised many questions for Teichner. 

“What were my grandmother’s reading tastes and intellectual tastes?” she said. 

“I look at the picture of this plump woman with a goofy grin on her face and pigeons all over the place and think, ‘Was she a socialist and an anarchist?’ I don’t know, I have nobody to ask. There are no letters, no living relatives and so this book is just an amazing source of curiosity for me.” 

The volunteers make contact after tracking down the heirs.

“We give the joy of notification to the people who’ve found them,” said Franklin. “We encourage them to make a call to let the person know because that’s the beauty of it.”

Janet Isenberg, the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, signed up after speaking to Franklin last summer. 

“It sounded like something that I would want someone to do for me — reuniting families with heirlooms from the people they had lost,” she said. “The excitement that the descendants feel when notified of a book to be returned is very gratifying. It is a small effort at tikkun olam (repairing the world).”

Lyn Hill had no experience with genealogy research, as her family history was already extensively documented by her uncle. But she was keen to participate and, with some expert advice from Franklin, has returned numerous books to their heirs.

“Because both of my parents were Holocaust refugees and my grandparents perished in the Holocaust, this project had special resonance for me,” she said.

“A few years ago, my aunt discovered the whereabouts of some looted paintings that had belonged to a cousin and, through her efforts, my family actually successfully had several pieces of art returned to us. So, although they do not usually have significant monetary value, the restitution of the books felt very important to me.”

Following the initial contact, each recipient is introduced to Rosenberg, who explains his research and arranges for the free return of the books. 

The recipients are often full of questions, not least about how the books ended up with Streicher. 

Answers are few and far between, but that does not detract from the project, as Rosenberg explained in correspondence to Guiora. 

“There are no ways to find out how his books – like most of the other looted items – came to Nürnberg into the hands of that horrible ‘Frankenführer’ Julius Streicher,” he wrote. “Today we can only stand in shame and humility before these testimonies of extinguished lives and sense their indescribable historical and emotional value.” 

“It is our unavoidable duty,” Rosenberg concluded, “to return these few memorials as a small gesture of justice to the descendants and legal successors of the robbed and abused people.”