By Aaron Bandler
NEW YORK — When Hebrew Union College hired Sharon Liberman Mintz to appraise its library, the president and administration of the Reform seminary made “very clear” that they did not plan to sell but were “only trying to better understand the value of their very important collection,” says the senior Judaica consultant at Sotheby’s New York.
“Evaluating rare collections is normal exercise for a library with important material that needs to understand how to properly insure and maintain the collection,” said Liberman Mintz, who is curator of Jewish art at the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
“Even when I asked them afterwards if there was any future sale planned, they told me quite firmly that this was not an option that they were considering.”
The Ohio attorney general had a different view and sued HUC.
A settlement with the seminary was announced on Oct. 3,.
Matthew Kraus, associate professor and head of the Judaic studies department at University of Cincinnati, said that it was “nauseating” that HUC saw “dollar signs” where “the Cincinnati community sees the sacred vessels of the Jewish people” and that it is “shameful” that the state had “to defend the destruction of an irreplaceable Jewish library from an HUC administration that has lost sight of its mission and purpose and has commodified Jewish tradition.”
Andrew Rehfeld, president of HUC and a professor of political thought, says that claims the seminary aimed to sell rare texts are “false” and “baseless.”
HUC also assessed its library holdings in 2019, according to Rehfeld. “We have a fiduciary obligation to insure these objects, and in order to insure it, you need to provide insurance with figures of their value,” he said.
“We never intended to sell. We never developed plans to sell. We never thought about developing plans to intend to sell.”
Dominic Binkley, deputy press secretary for Dave Yost, the Ohio attorney general, said that “when we received information that Hebrew Union College was considering a sale of rare books from its historic collection, we filed suit to prevent the loss of these charitable assets and obtained a preliminary injunction barring any sale.
“To resolve our claims, the college agreed to inventory its library asset items and to provide our office with notice before attempting to sell any assets with charitable donor-restrictions,” Binkley said.
“Under this agreement, we’ve accomplished our goal of protecting the library’s rare-book collection for the benefit of the public.”
HUC shared an email from January, 2024 in which Rehfeld tells someone, whose name is redacted, that the seminary had no plans to sell rare books.
In the email, the HUC president said “an independent consultant with expertise in collections assessment and management of rare Judaica and Hebrew books” was enlisted “to understand the value of our holdings,” as part of “several steps to ensure we fulfill our stewardship responsibility.”
In the email, Rehfeld called the process “standard practice” and said that if the assessment found holdings that are “redundant or not central to our mission, it is possible we would consider deaccessioning it in keeping with rare book library and museum best practices.”
He said that any such decision would require the board’s approval, which provides “an important fiduciary check on any administration ensuring transparency required of good and responsible governance.”
“We take extremely seriously the role of preserving these rare and precious materials. They are a precious legacy of the Jewish people, and they need to be kept together. They need to be maintained for that reason and for the sake of scholarship.”
Rehfeld said that the state attorney general’s inquiry did not substantiate any of the allegations against the seminary and that HUC agreed to the settlement, because the “costs of continuing were too high, and there’s nothing in the settlement that we weren’t doing anyway and we weren’t going to do anyway.
“There are two ways that we could sell them. One is we could just sell them willy-nilly and buy some Maseratis or a private plane collection or spruce up the plumbing — which is what we’re being accused of,” he said.
“We could also sell them or transfer them to somebody who is going to preserve them and maintain access for them. What the focus on selling is doing is making an idol out of ownership, rather than focusing, as we are and have been, on the preservation of these rare documents.”
