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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a complaint against Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in the Court of Common Pleas of Hamilton County, seeking to prevent the institution from selling off rare Jewish books and manuscripts housed at its Cincinnati Klau Library.
The 149-year-old Jewish institution is experiencing financial challenges and struggling with long-term enrollment declines to such an extent that it announced in 2022 the impending closure of its residential rabbinical school program in Cincinnati.
The college has started valuing Klau Library’s extensive collection, according to the complaint. Yost argued that donations to the library have been given with the understanding that rare books and manuscripts would be preserved and made available to academic researchers and the Cincinnati public, so selling them to offset the college’s deficits would be a “breach of fiduciary duties.”
Representatives from Sotheby’s auction house came to the library to evaluate items in mid-March, reported The Cincy Jewfolk, a Cincinnati newspaper focused on the local Jewish community. Yoram Bitton, Hebrew Union's national director of libraries, also allegedly resigned earlier this year after being pressured by the institution’s administrators to sell rare books, though the college’s president has denied plans to do so.
The collection is home to a number of likely valuable items, including a 16th-century press-printed Talmud set, the only one of its kind publicly available in North America, according to The Cincy Jewfolk. Library staff are also reportedly steeling themselves for a cut to the library’s typical budget of roughly $2 million to half a million dollars in fiscal year 2025.
“Some elements of [HUC-JIR’s] institutional evolution, including academic program and library collection evaluation, are best practices at responsible institutions, but which had not previously been done,” read a statement from the college to the Cincinnati paper.
Yost told WTRF, an Ohio television station, that he wants to protect access to “religious and cultural treasures.”
“A library without its most precious artifacts and texts is like a body without a soul,” he said. “We are committed to ensuring that these irreplaceable items remain available to the public and are cared for as their donors intended.”
