While the project was approved in September 1946, delays in acquiring a complete set of the Talmud to work from, as well as obtaining printing materials, pushed off publication until 1949–1950, by which time most of the survivors had emigrated from Europe.
At the end of World War II, 250,000 to 300,000 Jewish survivors remained in Western and Central Europe, housed in DP camps.
The Vaad Hatzalah, an Orthodox rescue organization founded in 1939 to save rabbis and yeshiva students in Poland and Lithuania, printed hundreds of thousands of copies of these and other religious books to meet the survivors' needs, including 10,000 pocket-size editions of individual tractates of the Talmud.
Zone, and Samuel Jakob Rose, both survivors of the Dachau concentration camp, conceived the idea of printing an entire, full-size Talmud in Germany as a sign of the Jewish people's survival despite efforts to annihilate them.
Bernstein summed up the rabbis' request in a memorandum: "[Would the army provide] the tools for the perpetuation of religion, for the students who crave these texts spring from the strongly Orthodox element?
In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Nazi government had stolen, looted and burned many of the religious books belonging to German Jews,[2] and not one complete set of the Talmud could be located in Western Europe.
[1] The U.S. Army acquisitioned the Carl Winter Printing Plant in Heidelberg, Germany, which had produced Nazi propaganda literature during the war.
)[1] Another delay ensued when a material called collodion, which enables the transfer of page images to zinc photographic plates, was found to have been banned during the war and was only available in the city of Zwickau in the Soviet occupation zone.
[1] In a moving ceremony on 13 May 1949 in the Berlin headquarters of the U.S. Army, Rabbi Snieg presented the first copy of the Talmud to General Lucius Clay, Military Governor of the U.S.
Occupation Zone in Germany, with the words, "I bless your hand in presenting to you this volume embodying the highest spiritual wisdom of our people".
In the United States, a committee headed by Rabbi Leo Jung of Yeshiva University was responsible for choosing recipients; it sent complete sets of the Talmud to some religious and secular institutions in the U.S. and Canada, and single volumes to others.