Congress is set to allocate $500,000 to Beth Medrash Govoha,
The Lakewood yeshiva, for the establishment of a "Holocaust
Library."
The grant was included in the 2004 Omnibus Appropriation
Conference Agreement that is expected to be signed by
President Bush later this month.
According to congressional staffers, New Jersey's two
senators, Democrats Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg,
inserted the money into the bill after being lobbied by Rav
Aryeh Malkiel Kotler, the rosh yeshiva.
Corzine staffer David Wald said: "We supported the
appropriation...to replace historically-important
documents."
Which documents would reside in the library is unclear. The
request for federal aid sent by Rav Kotler to the senators
requested funds for "Holocaust Memorial Libraries."
"Beth Medrash Govoha's Holocaust Memorial Libraries will
replace the institution's famous collections of books and
manuscripts that were destroyed in the Holocaust," Rav Kotler
wrote. "The collections will include the wartime archives of
U.S. and European community leaders, and thousands of
scholarly works, from the pre-Holocaust, Holocaust, and
immediate post-Holocaust eras.
"Exhibits on the Holocaust and other events from that era
will be a prominent activity at the Library/Memorial."
Rav Kotler said that he would be willing to discuss the
project at a later date.
Binyamin Speigel, the yeshiva's head librarian, said he could
not provide details regarding the library. "We don't have a
Holocaust library. It's in future plans," he said. "We don't
have exact plans."
Statements from Corzine's and Lautenberg's offices indicate
that both believe the library was meant to preserve documents
nearly lost in the Holocaust.
In a statement from Lautenberg, the senator declared: "I
worked to secure federal funding for this library, which will
house a large collection of historical documents, books and
other artifacts that survived the Holocaust." Corzine's aide,
Wald, said the funds would be used "to replace historically-
important documents."
