When commercial counselor Jonas Fraenckl died in Wroclaw in 1846, he bequeathed his entire estate to charity. Most of it was designated for the establishment of “a seminary for the education of rabbis and teachers”, which was created shortly afterwards, as the Jewish Theological Seminary of the Freanckl Foundation. Its administrators allocated 5 thousand thalers (equivalent at the time to 15 thousand marks) for the purchase of the library of Leon Vit Savaral, a well-known Jewish book collector from Trieste. The library arrived in Wroclaw in 1854, where it operated for many years, its collection systematically expanded. Its most valuable part consisted of medieval manuscripts and incunabula (prints predating 1501).
In 1939 the Seminary library was confiscated by the Reichsvereinigung der Deutschen Juden, a German Nazi institution that seized the property of Jewish institutions. In 1944 the library was moved outside Wroclaw. After wartime hostilities ended, part of the collection hidden in Kłodzk was handed over by the Polish authorities to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Another part of the library was requisitioned by Soviet troops and removed to the USSR. Yet another part of the collection found its way to the university library in Prague (currently – the National Library). It remained there for years, unrecognized. It was not until the Nineties that a group of Czech Hebrew-studies experts and specialists from Jerusalem University library began to exmine the works. They identified 34 manuscripts and 6 incunabula that had once belonged to the Wroclaw Seminary.
In April 2003, the Jewish religious community of Wroclaw, heir to the Theological Seminary, asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for help in recovering the collection discovered in Prague. The Czech side declared its willingness to return the works. An appropriate bilateral agreement was concluded and on December 7 2004 – during a visit to Prague by the Polish President – the 40 works identified at the National Library were handed over. Shortly afterwards, the manuscripts and incunabula were returned to Wroclaw, where the Jewish community deposited them at the University Library.
