When the German Army took Lublin during World War II, they stripped the interior and may have burned the vast library in the town square.

An officer who witnessed the event reported that a brass band played while a Jewish throng loudly wept as the books burned.

[5] After the war, in the autumn of 1945, the property was taken over by the state as an abandoned possession and assigned to the newly established Maria Curie-Skłodowska University.

[10] In order to pass the entrance exams for the yeshiva, candidates had to meet very high standards both in terms of knowledge (memorizing 400 pages from the Talmud) and moral conduct.

The core of everyday instruction was memorizing the daily folio of the Talmud, and then studying pertinent commentaries by scholars from the medieval and modern period.

[11] The head spiritual student supervisor (משגיח הרוחני הראשי) was Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Sholom Mintzberg.

[12] [13] The yeshiva library which was long thought to have been destroyed in 1940, was determined to have survived based on a report from 1944, when the Soviet Army liberated Lublin.

[4][14] In April 1941, the head of the Staatsbibliothek of Lublin, Wasyl Kutschabsky hired Rabbi Aron Lebwhol to catalogue the collection, up until Lebwohl was deported and murdered at Majdanek concentration camp in 1942.

[14] Many instances of books bearing the stamp of the Yeshiva were documented in Israel and the United States since the 2000s, often in antique bookshops and Judaica based auctions.

[14] Recent findings and current whereabouts include: A yeshiva named Chachmei Lublin was established in Detroit, Michigan, by Rabbi Moshe Rothenberg in the 1940s.

Mr. Sam (Shlomo Leib) and Mrs. Leah Bookstein provided the funding to help purchase the building on the corner of Elmhurst and Linwood Streets.

Rabbi Rothenberg was able to get young men who escaped Europe and made it to Shanghai to come to the United States to study at the Yeshiva.