(Talmud, Babylonian). A Complete Set, in Nineteen Volumes

A Complete Set of the Historic Sheartith Hapleitah Shas. This edition of the Talmud was published, with Herculean efforts, soon after the Liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny by the American Military Command together with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Germany. It was dedicated to the United States Army “[who] played a major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation.” See A.J. Karp, Library of Congress Catalogue pp. 52-5 (illustrated) for the details of this monumental publishing feat, produced under extraordinary historic circumstances NEXT SALE USE THIS REFERENCE: Restoring Jewish life in Europe meant reproducing and distributing the Talmud. In 1946, a delegation of DP rabbis led by chief rabbi Samuel Jakob Rose, a Dachau survivor, approached General Joseph McNarney, commander of the American Zone of Occupied Germany, asking that the Army publish a Talmud. The sympathetic McNarney understood the symbolic significance of their request. Despite severe shortages of paper, he commanded that the Talmud be printed. With guidance from US Army chaplain rabbis Philip Bernstein and Herbert Friedman, the project began. As no complete set of the Talmud could be found in Germany, two sets were brought from New York and engravings were made from those. The Army requisitioned the Carl Winter Printing Plant in Heidelberg, which during the war had printed Nazi propaganda. After two years of work, approximately 500 sets appeared in 1948, the only time in modern history that a national government published an edition of the Talmud. A preface contains the work's only words of English: This edition of the Talmud is dedicated to the United States Army. The Army played a major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation, and their defeat of Hitler bore the major burden of sustaining the DP s of the Jewish faith. This special edition of the Talmud, published in the very land where, but a short time ago, everything Jewish and of Jewish inspiration was anathema, will remain a symbol of the indestructibility of the Torah. The Jewish DP s will never forget the generous impulses and the unprecedented humanitarianism of the American forces, to whom they owe so much. TAKEN FROM: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/Army_Torah.html