A Second Round

David’s passion for giving seforim a new home was ignited 20 years ago, when the Strasbourg community, where he lived at the time, coordinated a largescale genizah event.

“The community buried 70 sifrei Torah, collected from various villages around that entire region,” he reminisces. “There were so many, and so many types of Jews there: parents, grandparents, people with ancestors rooted in the villages all around. We saw a layer of history being put to rest.”

Soon afterward, David moved to Saint-Louis, a charming French town in the easternmost part of the country. Located at the strategic tri-national border area known as Dreiländereck (the “three borders region”), Saint-Louis is adjacent to Basel, Switzerland, and connected to the German town of Weil am Rhein via the Passerelle des Trois Pays (Three Countries Bridge), an architectural landmark that spans the Rhine River.

The town combines typical Alsatian charm with multicultural influences, creating a unique crossroads where French, Swiss, and German cultures converge. The frum community is small, around 20 to 30 frum families, and revolves around the local yeshivah, established by Rav Moshe Meyer in 1967. It was transplanted from nearby Hegenheim in 1980 and is now run by Rav Yaakov Meyer, son of the first Rosh Yeshiva Rav Reuven Meyer, who is Rav Moshe Meyer’s cousin.

Frum Saint-Louis features a small but functional infrastructure. There is one main shul, a small primary school for the local children, and a bakery where select breads — usually the baguettes — are kosher. A yeshivah ketanah (high school) for boys has about 30 talmidim. It also has minyanim and a kosher store on site, which provides the yeshivah with some financial support.

When David settled in Saint-Louis, he discovered a desperate community need: Sheimos had been accumulating for years, with at least three decades-worth stored in the yeshivah attic. Impressed by the sheer magnitude, David remembered how moved he was by the genizah event in Strasbourg, and his appreciation for old seforim — for using old seforim — was reignited. While old unusable seforim need to be handled as sheimos, many old seforim in good condition can be given a second life. After consulting with a local rav about the laws of sheimos, David presented the community with his solution: a gemach that would pass usable seforim on to new homes and set aside unusable ones for genizah.

Soon, word of Fishman’s innovation spread to the kehillah in neighboring Basel, Switzerland, which also lacked a genizah solution and had an even greater stockpile than Saint-Louis. Members of the Basel kehillah approached David to join his initiative, sending him their used seforim. Then the president of a Zurich kehillah heard about it and asked David if they could join as well. Before long, word had spread to others in Lucerne and elsewhere — and the used seforim and documents started pouring in.

Soon it became clear that a more structured approach was needed, and David created a WhatsApp and email group for the purpose, which his wife Serach aptly named Adopt-a-Sefer.

Moving Along

At first, David picked up seforim from different communities and individuals with his car, but once Basel began sending him their genizah as well, the quantity of seforim and documents exceeded the vehicle’s capacity. He got hold of a camper van, attached it to his car, and used it to transport the seforim.

“We called it the Genizah Mobile,” David says.

When Zurich joined, he upgraded his Genizah Mobile to a rented 11-meter van, then later a 15-meter one. Even so, he’d often have to make two consecutive trips to transport all the items, and at this point, he goes to Switzerland at least twice a year to pick up seforim from different communities there.

Housing Crisis

Once David returns home to Strasbourg, where the Fishmans now reside, the next challenge is storing the seforim. When he first started, someone offered use of an inactive mortuary house in nearby Hegenheim. A local farmer with ties to the Jewish community also allowed David the use of an unoccupied barn. To protect certain seforim, he arranged for an old walk-in freezer equipped with a dehumidifier.

“People would never fathom that a local farmer managed to hold one of the larger Torah libraries in Europe for a time,” David says. “The farmer and his wife recognize the blessing in helping, and one year publicly proclaimed that while all the other farms in the area were lacking water, somehow theirs received enough rain, and their crops thrived that season, unlike the neighboring farms.”

Fifteen years later, David and the farmer are still on good terms, and despite his recent retirement, a small corner of that barn still temporarily houses boxes of seforim.

David also depends on the kindness of friends who offer space in their basements, though that’s far from ideal. The temperature and humidity in these areas need to be controlled to preserve the paper, and the rooms aren’t always easily accessible when he needs to go through the seforim. Whenever a community reaches out to him about picking up a new stockpile, David wonders how he can possibly find room for the material.

“Every time I’m asked, ‘When are you coming?’ I think to myself, How can I possibly stock all the new arrivals? There is absolutely no space for a van full of seforim,” David says. “I often try to push the pickup off, but in the end b’siyata d’Shmaya, things work out, time and time again.”

Unloading the books in Strasbourg is an operation in itself, and friends help David distribute the seforim between several basements, which are often full, as the inflow is faster than the outflow. Recently the Jewish owner of Les Cigognes Hotel near Strasbourg offered him a place to use for sorting and photographing seforim.

Getting the boxes into storage is only the first part of the gargantuan task facing David and his colleagues. Next is sorting them, an overwhelming job considering there are tens of thousands of seforim to look through.

“There are hundreds of Chumashim, thousands of clean and usable birchonim, hundreds of Tehillim, Rishonim, Acharonim, and everyone’s latest Torah thoughts put to paper,” he says, giving me an idea of the items that are sent his way. Sometimes, he says, there are even sealed boxes of new seforim.

Last year, David had an assistant who helped him several hours a day, but he’s now away at yeshivah. Now he relies on help from a rotating pool of local men who volunteer their time to move boxes, sort, arrange, distribute, and take photos for his WhatsApp and email groups.

Anything that can be redistributed is set aside. About 40 percent of what is sent isn’t salvageable and is earmarked for genizah, but the remaining 60 percent can be passed on to a new owner, though it can take time to find many seforim a new home, often even several years.

Aside from its primary location in Strasbourg, the gemach has a secondary depot in Paris where people can pick up a Mishnah, halachah sefer, Nach, or volume of Gemara at any time. There are also large distributions sent out to the local communities and surrounding cities. Rabbi Binyamin Wattenberg of Paris’s Centre Alef has received some 60 boxes from David to date, which he personally peruses.

“The community service provided by David and his colleagues is extraordinary,” Rabbi Wattenberg says. “Apart from saving seforim from genizah and giving them a second life, it’s also a chance for people to have access to seforim that haven’t been on sale, sometimes for decades. The Adopt-a-Sefer association and its volunteers accumulate merit not only by saving seforim but also by disseminating Torah and enabling those interested in studying these seforim to have access to them.

“David’s collections,” he says emphatically, “contain real treasures.

“Not in the sense of treasures for financial value,” Rabbi Wattenberg qualifies. “They’re not old books of value, but they’re very valuable — for their text.”

Jewish Geography

The days when David went door to door searching for new homes for his finds have long passed. By now, it’s 15 years in, and the formerly small gemach has grown into a massive intercity operation, which David recently registered as a nonprofit to streamline the management and fundraising.

Adopt-a-Sefer publicizes its stock on WhatsApp and email, allowing them a wide reach. After sorting through the seforim, David uploads pictures, allowing potential “customers” from around the world to contact him directly.

Feedback has been enthusiastic, with comments ranging from, “My father passed away, I don’t have my own Talmud, and the Talmud you sent me is the same edition my father had,” to “I have been looking for that set for twenty years!”

When David comes across rare seforim of historical interest, he shares the photos and backstory with the group.

“We get wows all the time,” he says. “People discover things that they would never really discover otherwise. It shows the richness of Torah literature and Jewish history.”

David has come across a Tehillim from 1565, a Tur printed in Mezibuzh, and seforim that survived Bergen-Belsen and endured postwar refugee camps.

He travels a lot for work, and when he goes to places that once housed Jewish communities, he shares photos documenting the Jewish presence with his subscribers, whether a shul, monuments, or a special paroches. After a recent visit to Skopje, North Macedonia, he visited the shul and shared pictures of the paroches. A viewer confirmed that the writing stitched on the paroches was Ladino, sparking a global conversation about the community that was destroyed when they were deported to the Treblinka death camp in 1943. (Not a soul survived those deportations; the only Jewish survivors from Skopje were elsewhere at the time of the arrests.)

D

avid’s latest discovery is a siddur he found with the inscription: Bamberger, 1933 Frankfurt. David passed the siddur along to Indonesia’s Shaar Hashamayim Holocaust Museum, the first museum of its kind in Southeast Asia. After he shared the photo with his group, a viewer connected him to the family of the original owner, who told him that Bamberger had survived the Holocaust. David put the family in touch with the museum, and they are in the process of compiling a bio to be displayed with the siddur stating that the owner did survive the war.

David shares a moving encounter he had with a young man who had recently come closer to his Jewish roots and wanted to source seforim from David’s gemach.

The two got into a conversation, and the young man showed David a picture of an open, weathered sefer. While the pages are yellowed, the handwritten content is clearly visible, and one page is patched with orange paper stuck over another. The sefer, now located in the National Library of Israel, was written by Rabbi Nathan-Neta Olevskii, who served as a rav in Moscow for most of his life. Rabbi Olevskii had learned in Vilna, after which he was the rabbi in Irkutsk, Siberia, and known as the Irkutske Rav. During the Second World War, Rabbi Olevskii was exiled to Kazakhstan, where he and his wife lived in abject poverty. He collected paper from a Red Army military base to write his chiddushim.

David’s interlocutor told him that his family originated from Russia, and while the family’s Judaism had suffered over the years of Communist suppression, he did know that he was a descendent of Rabbi Olevskii. When he visited the National Library and found the sefer his ancestor had written, he took a picture, which he showed to David while stocking up for his library.

“I love the fact that I could help him,” David says. “I hope I’m helping his great-great-grandfather have nachas in Shamayim.”

All in a day’s work for David, ensuring that our Torah texts can be appreciated by a new generation, that any sefer that can be used will be used, and not laid to rest before its time.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1063)