The video begins with some shots of a Brandeis students in a library, walking with a book cart through different halls filled with books. There is a pensive, reflective song in the background and we hear the voice of Lou Hartman; they say: “The project we’re working on is identifying books that we received through a program called the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Project.”
We see some shots of Lou working with a student. Lou continues; “So immediately after World War II, the U.S. military established a depot; to collect all of the materials that were looted by the Nazis.” We see some pictures of WWII era. Lou continues; “At that point, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Project Worked to find homes for the books that no longer had an identifiable owner. These materials were given to mostly Jewish institutions in the U.S. and Israel.”
We see more shots of Lou looking at books and working on cataloging them. Lou says: “A few in Europe, in the UK. We received approximately 11,000 books.” We then hear the voice of the student, she says: “Education and literacy are really big values in Judaism, we’re known as the people of the book and there’s a very important emphasis on learning and being intellectually curious and having a deep connection to our past. And those are values that I hold very dearly and I’m very passionate about Jewish education and to me, this project is me being able to act on those values and being able to contribute in this one way, to like the Jewish community.” The music comes to an end as we see a shot of Lou on the library.
The video then transitions to Lou working behind the computer while we hear a reflective song in the background. Lou says: “We’re going to do educational outreach, make a website. We want to share these things with the Brandeis community. Both so that we can learn more about them and so that we can teach other people about what we found, what we can learn from it, and just make these materials more accessible. There are a lot of ways in which this is important. Preserving the memory of these people, who most of them were murdered by the Nazis and this is a history where even the people who survived the Holocaust now were, you know, in their 90’s or hundreds. They’re just soon no longer going to be around to tell their stories. And these books tell a portion of that story that we can preserve.”
As Lou talks we see shot archival pictures of WWII as well as Lou working on their desk. Lou continues; “As I’m going through these books, as you might imagine, It can be really emotionally difficult to see all these stamps from people who were killed from institutions that don’t exist anymore, from literally Nazi stamps. And I’ll sort of get used to that and then I’ll pick up one and I’ll see that it used to be owned by Emma Mueller, and I just have to sit there and think about who this person might have been. And just knowing that they had a name somehow really connects me to that history.”
The video comes to an end as we see the Brandeis logo come in. Then the music and the video fade to black.