In 1944, Hungarian officials sat down with pen and paper and recorded by hand the seizure of 90 Torah scrolls from Jewish families. This was not wartime chaos, but deliberate, state-organized cultural erasure.

That document, buried for decades in microfilm archives, was recently made public for the first time through the Holocaust Art Recovery Initiative. It is a single page, handwritten in a steady but chilling script. It doesn’t describe battles or casualties. It inventories sacred scrolls stolen from Jews who were soon to be deported.

These 90 Torahs were part of a larger pattern of thousands of cultural, artistic and religious items looted by Nazi-allied regimes across Europe. In Hungary alone, tens of thousands of Jewish-owned artworks, books and ceremonial objects were systematically stolen, catalogued and in many cases absorbed into state museum collections. Families........

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