Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. was established in 1947 to collect and distribute Jewish property plundered by the Nazis, and run for a time by political theorist Hannah Arendt. Under American law, JCR functioned as trustee for those Jewish cultural items whose owners or heirs could not be located. As a result, approximately 150,000 heirless books were sent to libraries in Israel, the U.S. and elsewhere, mostly from the Offenbach Archival Depot in the American Occupied Zone of Germany. This label was affixed to each book as a reminder that it is a surviving relic of the great spiritual legacy of European Jewry. JCR also distributed thousands of Torah scrolls and other ritual objects to libraries, museums and universities until it ceased operations in 1952. —David Matlow
