The Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica was set up in the early 20th century in rooms above the Great Synagogue of Rome at Lungotevere De' Cenci.
[2] The lack of a proper catalogue may have been inspired in part by a desire to protect the contents from destruction by the Catholic church which, historically, had done so before to Jewish publications.
[2] The Central Registry of Looted Art quoted an expert, Attilio Milano, who stated in a letter that "no other Italian Jewish library had so many priceless books and very few outside Italy exceeded it".
According to an eyewitness, two uniformed men visited the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica and the Italian Rabbinical College library, located in the same building, on 30 September and 1 October 1943.
[2] Under the control of the German military administration, the contents of the library were loaded onto two railway cars by an Italian company and sent to Germany via Switzerland.
A letter by the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (ERR) from 21 January 1944, most likely referring to the second load of loot, stated that it had been delivered to an institute in Frankfurt am Main.
[3] The most likely theory as to the fate of the library contents is that they were stored during the war in an area that became part of the postwar Occupation Zone of the Soviet Union.
[2] In 2002, the Italian government established a special commission to pursue the recovery of the contents of the library, carrying out research in a number of European countries.
The Frankfurt option was seen as the less likely one as much of the looted books that had been stored there or at another deposit, at Hungen, also in Hesse, had fallen into the hands of American forces after the war and been returned, including prints from the Rabbinical College.
[2] The more likely option was that the contents went to Berlin and either remained there or were evacuated to Ratibor, Silesia (now Racibórz, Poland), where, at either place, they would eventually have come under control of the Soviet Union.