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The history of our library dates back to 1877 when the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary was established. It was the period when David Kaufmann, one of the founding professors and first librarian of the Seminary acquired bequests of late professors and renowned rabbis, including Lelio Della Torre, David Oppenheim, Ede Ehrlich, Abraham Hochmuth and Samuel Lőw Brill.
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When the German troops entered Hungary on March 19, 1944, the SS took control over the building. Adolf Eichmann visited the Seminary on the same day. Subsequently, thousands of books of the library were seized, and the Nazis planned to transport them to Frankfurt am Main to an envisioned Museum of the Extinct Race. Yet, at the end of the war, the books were stranded in Prague on their way to Frankfurt. As many as 3,500 books were returned to Hungary not sooner than 1991 from the Jewish Museum of Prague.
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The collection suffered further great losses during the battles in Budapest in 1945 when 30-40 % of the collection was destroyed and the surviving documents were also partly damaged.
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From 1945, the library became the book archive of the Shoah victims. Books that had belonged to Jewish authorities, Jewish communities and Jewish schools in Hungary were then collected, causing resource and infrastructure problems during the communist period.
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Today, the library is the oldest still-functioning rabbinical seminary library in Continental Europe and the most active library within the Hungarian Jewish community.
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When the former Rabbinical Seminary became an accredited university in 2000, the status of the library was turned into a university library.
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It hosts the most numerous Jewish book collection in Hungary and Central Europe.
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Its maintainers are the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities and the university.
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The library consists of approximately one hundred and seventy thousand documents spanning from the 14th century to the 21st century.
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In particular, it hosts seventy thousand books in Hungarian, German and other European languages, and forty thousand books in Hebrew. The rest of the collection includes twenty thousand periodicals, fifteen thousand printed ephemera, and a manuscript collection of 650 volumes and folders. Moreover, the collection of remainders is also relatively large.
