Matatias Carp Collection

Matatias (Matatiahu) Carp, son of Horea Carp and Roza Schwartz, was born in 1904 in Bucharest, Romania. His father was a journalist, writer, translator, and a member of the Jewish political organization Union of Romanian Jews (Uniunea Evreilor Romani). Between the two World Wars, Horea Carp was a member of the Senate, the upper house of the Romanian Parliament.

Matatias Carp received his law degree in 1930 and established a private legal practice in Bucharest in 1932. That same year, he married Ella Cohen. In 1940, he was appointed one of the three chief secretaries of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania (Federatia Uniunilor de Comunitati Evreiesti din Romania), an organization led by Dr. Wilhelm Filderman. In this role, Carp began collecting documents concerning the plight of Romanian Jews. When the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania was closed in December 1941 and replaced by the Jewish Center (Centrala Evreilor - an institution modeled after the Judenrat), Matatias Carp left his position. According to his account, he hid part of the Federation’s archive. Carp continued documenting the situation of the Romanian Jews and collected materials from various sources: from Germans through bribery; from Romanian friends; from the Jewish community; and from the Romanian Ministry of Interior - where an acquaintance who worked there allowed him to copy official documents.

Between 1946 and 1948, Matatias Carp published three volumes of The Black Book - The Sufferings of Romanian Jews during 1940 - 1944 (Cartea Neagra. Suferintele evreilor din Romania 1940 - 1944). His work was based on material he collected during and immediately after the war, including materials from the Federation’s Archive and Wilhelm Filderman's Office. It covered topics such as the Legionnaires’ Rebellion and the Bucharest pogrom, the Iasi pogrom, and the Transnistria affair.

Matatias and Ella Carp immigrated to Israel in fall 1951. Through several channels, Carp managed to smuggle archival materials to Israel and to Wilhelm Filderman in Paris. Matatias Carp passed away in July 1952 in Jerusalem.

Only part of Carp's collection is located in the Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives.

After Carp's death, his widow Ella Carp sold the materials that had been smuggled to Israel to Itzhak Korn from the World Organization of Bessarabian Jews in Tel Aviv (Igud ha-ʻolami shel Yehude Bessarabia). According to Adrian Cioflanca, Romanian historian and the director of the "Wilhelm Filderman" Center for the Study of Jewish History in Romania (CSIER), Carp's archive was transferred in the 90s from Beit Bessarabia to Yad Vashem. For information on the main corpus of Carp's collection and the Federation Collection see the Romania Collection (0-11) and the Filderman Collection (P6) in the Yad Vashem Archive.

Matatias Carp’s archive may be seen as a complementary part of the archives of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania, along with the Wilhelm Filderman's Collection.

The materials were deposited between 1951-1952, before Matatias Carp's death. It remains uncertain whether they were donated by Carp himself (who visited GFH in winter 1951) or smuggled from Romania to Israel through the office of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Bucharest.