Memory of the World; 2012 - unesdoc - Unesco

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Collection of the Center
of Documentation and
Investigation of the Ashkenazi
community in Mexico
(16th to 20th centuries)
Inscribed 2009
What is it
A collection of books, manuscripts and other historical
items in different languages from the Ashkenazi Jewish
Community of Mexico.
Why was it inscribed
It is a unique heritage of Ashkenazi culture in Mexico
and a testament to the extraordinary historic saga that
brought it from Europe. It is the memory of a cultural
minority that was persecuted in Europe but found
survival in the Americas.
Where is it
Comunidad Ashkenazí de México,
Lomas de Chapultepec, Mexico City, Mexico
The Center of Documentation and Investigation
of the Ashkenazi Community of Mexico preserves
and disseminates the Ashkenazi culture, which nearly
disappeared during the Nazi era in Germany between 1933
and 1945. It also safeguards the historic memory of the
Jewish minority in Mexico that arrived from Central and
Eastern Europe.
The collection consists of 16,000 volumes, mostly in
Yiddish and Hebrew, but also in Polish, Lithuanian,
Hungarian, Russian and other languages relating to
Ashkenazi culture.
From the end of the 19th century the Jews of Central
and Eastern Europe decided to emigrate towards America
to find better living conditions, resulting in large groups
of Jews cutting their ties to the lands in which they had
developed a way of life, a language (Yiddish) and a manner
of being: the Ashkenazi.
In the first two decades of the last century, many Jews
coming from countries such as Russia, Poland, Romania,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany and France
settled in Mexico. To retain their identity and continuity for
later generations, they founded the Nidjei Israel (1922), a
� Illustration from Fonen
und Blunt (‘Flags and
Blood’) by Jacobo Glantz,
1936.
community very similar in its functions to what they had
left behind in Europe.
Their former life was ended forever by the pogroms
unleashed at the dawn of the 20th century, by the First
World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, and by the rise
of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s.
When the religious and cultural centres finally
disappeared during the Holocaust, the responsibility
for preserving the Ashkenazi culture fell on the
shoulders of Latin American communities.
In 1945, thousands of books that had been confiscated
by the Nazis were rescued by the Allies near Offenbach in
Germany. Returning them to their original libraries was
impossible, so it was decided to contact the established
Jewish communities in Latin America. The Ashkenazi
community in Mexico received 1000 of those books, which
became the starting point for a new collection of Ashkenazi
and wider Jewish culture in Mexico.
The CDICA now has more than 16,000 volumes dating
from the 16th to the 20th centuries, the greater part
of them written in Yiddish and Hebrew, and a few in
other languages including Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian
and Russian. It also has all the manuscripts from the
Ashkenazi institutions in Mexico. The books focus mainly
on the humanities, Jewish studies and cultural history.
The collection is unique for two main reasons: the first,
because it is the only one of its kind in Mexico and the
second, because of the extraordinary historic saga that
brought it from Europe.
Collection of the Center of Documentation and Investigation of the Ashkenazi community in Mexico 179