Bergen-Belsen ledger allowing Holocaust survivors to remarry to be auctioned

Marcy Oster

JERUSALEM (JTA) — A ledger listing eye-witness accounts of the deaths of Jews in Nazi camps was kept at Bergen Belsen in order to allow their surviving spouses to remarry.

The Bergen-Belsen rabbinical court collected the testimonies at the end of World War II and lists deaths in Nazi camps including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen.

It will go on sale next week at the Kedem auction house in Jerusalem at an opening price of $4,000.

The ledger, which has more than 100 pages,  was compiled so that women and men would not become agunot and agunim, or chained spouses and would be free to remarry.

The list was kept in a German technical notebook. Each page included a testimony signed by witnesses and then a signed marriage permit for a remarriage, and is signed by known rabbis of the day.

The testimonies included information on selections for the gas chambers, the liquidation of ghettos and death marches, gas chambers, and the crematorium and shootings.

“It is a unique document that represents the important and great efforts in observing the law of releasing Agunot throughout history, as well as a symbol of the people who survived the most difficult inferno and moved on with all their might, ” Meron Eren, owner of Kedem auction house, said in a statement.