Lianne Kolirin, CNN
(CNN) — For weeks, months and even years before World War II broke out in September 1939, many Jewish people in Germany and beyond became increasingly fearful for their lives and frantically sought out ways to flee.
Now, more than 80 years after the end of the war, an incredible trove of documents from a prestigious art school has been unearthed, containing photographs, detailed letters and samples of artworks from nearly 100 applicants who hoped to escape Nazism.
Acceptance to the Bezalel art school (now Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design), first established in 1906, sometimes gave Jews fleeing Nazism the possibility of entering Palestine, immigration to which was tightly controlled under the British Mandate.
Only a fraction of those who applied were accepted, and among those even fewer were able to undertake the journey.
The documents were discovered on the shelves of the municipal archives of Jerusalem in 2022 by staff from Bezalel’s archive who were researching the institution’s history. What they found amazed them: Dozens of detailed applications dating back to the 1930s which had never been digitized or even researched.
They reached out to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, in the hope of preserving evidence of what, for many, turned out to be a last-ditch attempt to find a safe haven.
Yad Vashem’s researchers set about researching the applicants, comparing details in the file with information in their extensive databases.
“It’s very, very special to find such a huge collection that hasn’t been touched or researched before,” said Orit Noiman, head of Yad Vashem’s “Gathering the Fragments” initiative, which collects, preserves and catalogues Holocaust-era artifacts from personal collections. While some of those were found to have survived, “most of the applicants we’ve looked at up until now were killed,” she explained in a video call.
Applications came from across Europe, including Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Łódź. Most date from the 1930s, although several were made during and even after the war.
It’s unclear how the files came to be in the archives, located in Jerusalem’s city hall, but Noiman believes they may have been accidentally left behind when Bezalel moved premises in 1990.
Noiman believes the submitted portfolios indicate that while some aspiring artists applied, many did so not out of a lifelong desire to pursue a career in art, but their desperate hope of fleeing the Nazis.
“They might have known how to paint or make something with their hands, but they weren’t really artists. It’s clear they wanted to try and find a way out,” she said.
A fuller picture is drawn from another element in the paperwork: a slew of correspondence between Bezalel’s then director Josef Budko, the Jewish Agency and other organizations that hoped to facilitate a large-scale rescue of persecuted Jews.
“There are letters from Budko which show they tried to find ways to help these young people,” said Noiman.
Lital Spivak and Neta Eran-Cohen were the two Bezalel researchers who made the discovery.
“We were both astonished and deeply moved,” Spivak, now an art historian working on a PhD at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that incorporates the research, told CNN in an email. She detailed correspondence showing Budko attempting to obtain immigration certificates as well as financial support for accepted candidates – which in many cases proved successful.
Spivak said the archive featured 88 personal files, but that around 40 further individuals were mentioned in Budko’s correspondence. A total of 49 candidates were accepted, she said, but only 27 succeeded in traveling to Jerusalem to study at Bezalel.
“Others emigrated e