Israel fears a thief stole bits of its musical legacy

It began with a late-night call one Friday in July. A woman from New York was asking Gila Flam...

It began with a late-night call one Friday in July. A woman from New York was asking Gila Flam, who runs the music section of Israel’s national library, about a century-old manuscript of a Swiss composer. Was it in the library’s collection?

When Flam checked, she discovered that the piece was in her inventory, but not in the folder where it belonged. Other items were also missing. She recalled users of the library had been complaining of being unable to find listed documents.

The library has determined that hundreds of items are missing, including photographs, manuscripts and letters by Yehudi Menuhin, Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss. Many items are also gone from the archive of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv and a historic music library in Haifa.

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The police have named as a suspect a 60-year-old Haifa architect who for several years, has been scouring the nation’s archives claiming to be a music buff doing personal research, slipping the documents among his own papers and selling them on eBay.

The case has broken at an especially awkward time for the national library. It has been accused for years by the Israeli press and an international committee of specialists of failing to protect the country’s documentary heritage because of its leaky ceilings, insufficient budgets, crowded storage space and outmoded technology.

Now it seems that poor security will be added to the list just as the library is hoping to reinvent itself. “This is very difficult because we are just now in the process of putting together a plan to build a high-tech, cutting-edge national library,” said Shmuel Har Noy, the library’s director general.

Bizanski, has been uncooperative with the police, who raided his house and found hundreds of items that the libraries and the orchestra say belong to them. Bizanski was first held in custody, then placed under house arrest. Bizanski declined an interview request. His lawyer responded with a short statement by e-mail saying that Bizanski was a collector of Judaica and had committed no crime. The lawyer, Gadi Tal, said he had legally bought everything in question. The archivists said they had never sold any of the items.

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Last November, Parliament passed a law setting up the National Library of Israel, the new name of the institution, and granting it a three-year transition away from university management. Har Noy, the national library’s director, said that with the papers of Einstein, Ben-Gurion and others, the library had great ambition and purpose.