Israel fears that thief

JERUSALEM - 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 autographed 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 from the folder. In fact, she said she began to recall, users of the library had been increasingly complaining of being unable to find listed documents.

The library has found that hundreds of items are missing, including photographs, manuscripts and letters by Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz, Pablo Casals, Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss. Many items are also gone from the archive of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv and an historic music library in Haifa. The search of other musical archives is just getting started.

The police have named as a suspect a 60-year-old Haifa architect who, for several years, they say, has been scouring the nation's archives claiming to be an amiable music buff doing personal research, slipping the documents among his own papers and openly selling them on eBay, probably for a total of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"We are talking about the country's musical history that this guy has been strip mining," said Bill Ecker, a New York dealer who unknowingly bought a stolen 1879 letter from the suspect and helped lead the Israeli police to the arrest. "He has not just been stealing from a library, but from his nation."

The case has broken at an especially awkward time for the national library, depository of the world's largest collection of Jewish and Hebrew manuscripts. It has been accused for years by the Israeli press and an international committee of specialists of failing to properly 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 and bid for a number of major collections, including what may remain of Franz Kafka's papers in Tel Aviv.

"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," Shmuel Har Noy, the library's director-general said when asked about the missing documents.

The suspect in this case, Meir 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, according to the National Police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld. Much of the material was in a storehouse behind his residence, arranged by subject in boxes and on shelves, those who took part in the search recounted.

Bizanski was first held in custody, then placed under house arrest. Now, as the detectives assemble their case to file charges -- eBay says it will cooperate -- he is free on the condition that he not leave the country or contact musical archives.

Reached by telephone, Bizanski declined an interview request. His lawyer responded with a short statement by e-mail saying that Bizanski was a collector of Judaica who often visited libraries and archives and had committed no crime, and that the police did not understand how collectors operated. The lawyer, Gadi Tal, added by telephone that Bizanski had legally bought everything in question.

The archivists at both the national library and the orchestra said they had never sold any of the items. In theory, Bizanski could have been the victim of a thief from whom he bought the materials. But asked to provide any bills of sale for the goods, Tal declined.

The case began with Jude Lubrano, who along with her husband, Paul, has been running a music antiquarian business out of their home on the North Shore of Long Island for some 30 years. Lubrano said she bought four documents from him for $5,000.

When the documents arrived, she checked in reference books and found a photograph of one of them, a signed three-page manuscript by Arthur Honegger, a 20th-century Swiss-French composer. It said the manuscript belonged in an official collection in Israel. That is when she phoned Flam.

Lubrano wrote to Bizanski, telling him that he had sold her stolen goods and that she wanted her money back.

Har Noy, the national library's director, admitted that his institution, which until Aug. 1 was known as the Jewish National and University Library, had long been a kind of stepchild among national depositories because it never had the status or budget of something like the Library of Congress.

In fact, in 1998, a group of international specialists led by the librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, warned Israel that the library was in dis itself without a national library in all but name."

It took a decade to act, but last November the 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 said that with the papers of Einstein, Ben-Gurion and others, the national library had great ambition and purpose.

"This robbery has been awful," he said. "But we will learn from what has happened and make it better. Israel deserves a true national library and it will get it."