O.64.2/SCH - The Zeev Scheck Collection Provenance of the Collection: Born in Olomouc (Czechoslovakia) in 1920, Zeev (Wilhelm) Sheck was active in the Maccabi Hatzair youth movement, and worked as a Hebrew teacher in Prague. On 19 November 1943, he was deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and from there to concentration camps. He was liberated in the spring of 1945 and he returned to Prague. Zeev Sheck founded and directed Dokumentační Akcee (The Prague Documentation Project). The Project documented the fate of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia during the Holocaust, and [concentrated] mainly [on] the history of the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Sheck made aliya to Eretz Israel, bringing with him most of the documentation regarding the ghetto which he had gathered until his aliya in 1947. After the establishment of the State of Israel, Sheck served as a Secretary in the Israeli Embassy in Prague, 1950-1953, and in 1956 in London. In 1960 he served as the head of the Foreign Ministry Western Europe Department. In 1967 Sheck served as the Israeli Ambassador in Vienna. He established the Beit Theresienstadt Museum in 1975, and was its first director. In 1977 Sheck was sent to serve as Israeli Ambassador in Rome where he died in 1978. History of the Collection: Zeev Sheck was a member of the Hechalutz Center, which conducted underground activities in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, from 1943. Sheck and his associates collected diverse documentation: documents from the ghetto administration, legal and illegal activity plans; supplemental material for educational and cultural activities and reports about these activities; notes, entrance tickets to events, drawings, sketches and literary works by writers and amateur artists. Towards the end of 1943, a decree prohibiting the collection and possession of such material without the permission of ghetto headquarters was first issued. At the meeting of the (underground) Cultural Committee it was decided that the Hechalutz members would carry out a reduced collection plan. In October 1944, before Sheck was deported from the ghetto, he entrusted the collection to Alice Ehrmann, with the instructions that she preserve the material and continue to collect additional documents. Ehrmann, who later became his wife, was not included among the deportees, and indeed, she filled her mission under great personal danger. In the spring of 1945, when the ghetto was under the threat of liquidation, Ehrmann hid the documentation in two boxes in the wall of the ghetto. Only a small number of people knew the actual location. Alice Ehrmann was liberated in May 1945, and she took the documentation with her to Prague. Zeev Sheck survived the Holocaust and returned to Prague in May 1945. He decided to set up the Documentation Project with the knowledge and support of the World Administration of the Jewish Agency, the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish community in Prague. From July 1945 Zeev Sheck managed the Project . The material gathered by the members of the Hechalutz movement in the Theresienstadt Ghetto served as the basis of the Project documentation. Within the framework of the Prague Documentation Project, documentation regarding the ghetto administration, documentation belonging to former inmates and documents attesting to the fate of the Jews and communities in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia during the Holocaust was gathered. The Project workers copied most of the original documentation which was gathered in the ghetto and transferred the copies to the archives of the Jewish community in Prague. Documents for which there were two original copies or more were divided between the Documentation Project and the Prague Jewish Community Archive. Dr. H. G. Adler, who collected documentation regarding the Theresienstadt Ghetto after the war, added his material to the Prague Jewish Community Collection, where it has remained. The workers at the Prague Documentation Project did not make copies of the original documentation regarding the activities of the Hechalutz movement in the Theresienstadt Ghetto because Zeev Sheck took this documentation with him to Eretz Israel along with other original documentation in February 1946. While Sheck was aboard the ship to Eretz Israel, he met Gershom (Gustav) Schocken, the Chief Editor and Publisher of the "Ha'aretz" newspaper. Sheck told Schocken about the documentation collection project that the Hechalutz members had carried out in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Schocken, who was impressed by the project, helped Sheck make contact with Dr. George Herlitz, the Director of the Central Zionist Archives, which received the collection for a short time. From there the Collection was transferred to the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People at Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. At this stage, Zeev Sheck was still adding more documentation to the Collection. In 1961 relevant documents were selected from the Collection in preparation for the Eichmann Trial. In November 1976 some of the documentation was entrusted to Yad Vashem for permanent safekeeping. Some of the visual documentation (photographs, pictures and so on) have remained in the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People, and another part was transferred to Beit Theresienstadt. Until his death in 1978, Zeev Sheck continued to collect documents which were added to the documentation submitted to Yad Vashem. His widow Alice (Ehrmann) Sheck added more documentation, and afterwards the Collection was closed and no more new material was added. Structure of the Collection: The Collection has been catalogued as files and divided into 10 sub-collections in the following order: File Number Sub-File 1-23 A. Ältestenrat (Council of Elders) in the Theresienstadt Ghetto; 24-66 B. Jüdischen Selbstverwaltung (Jewish Self-Government) Departments 24 - Zentralsekretariat (Central Secretariat) 25-26 - Post und Verkehr (Postal and Transport) - postal services 27 - Bank der Jüdischen Selbstverwaltung (Jewish Self-Government Bank) 28 - Das Recht des jüdischen Siedlungsgebietes (the Jewish Self-Government Constitution) 29 - Raumwirtschaft, Gebäudeverwaltung, Matrik und Beerdigungswesen (Housing and Population Registry) 30-33 - Zentralevidenz (Central Registration Unit) 34-40 - Arbeitszentrale (Work Center) 41-45 - Technische Abteilung (Technical Department) 46-49 - Transportabteilung (Transport Department) 50-56 - Gesundheitswesen (Health Department) 57-64 - Jugendfürsorge (Youth Department) 65-66 - Freizeitgestaltung (Leisure Time Department); 67-81 C. Artists in Theresienstadt; 82-86 D. Zeev Sheck, articles, manuscripts, drafts for lectures; 87-95 E. Personalities; 96-99 F. Personal Documentation; 100-103 G. Karl Löwenstein, Head of the Security Services; 104-105 H. Testimonies and memoirs; 106 I. The International Red Cross; 107-110 J. Camp Headquarters. The Collection contains documentation of the ghetto Ältestenrat, including a collection of 500 Orders of the Day from December 1941 through April 1945, as well as surveys and reports presented to the ghetto headquarters, documentation of the Jüdischen Selbstverwaltung Departments according to areas of activity, medical research, works created by ghetto artists, and issues of newspapers and publications by ghetto inmates. Additionally, the collection includes the files of the Jugendfürsorge, including articles regarding education written by teachers and youth leaders in the ghetto, papers and essays by written children in the ghetto, reports from the "Yad Tomechet" (Helping Hand) aid project and poems/songs, musical scores, plays and stories by artists deported to the ghetto, among them Petr Ginz, Ilse Weber, Viktor Ullmann and Karel Fleischmann. Bibliography: Yad Vashem Archives, Files O.64/82-83; Aran, Esther, "The Underground Archive in the Theresienstadt Ghetto", Yad Vashem Archives, Record Group O.64, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 5746 (1986); Shendar, Yehudit, "Sketch the Contour of My Own Shadow”, Last Portrait: Painting for Posterity, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Tel-Aviv, 2012, pp. 204-195 (sic).