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Inscribed on the Memory of the World Regional Register for Latin America and the Caribbean in 2007 and on the MoW International Register in 2009, this collection of 16,000 volumes, most of them in Yiddish and Hebrew, but also in other languages such as Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian and Russian, preserves the culture of the Jewish people, which was close to disappearing during the persecution of the pogroms at the end of the 19th century, and especially in the Nazi era. The Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Comunidad Askenazi, CDICA was created to act as custodian, conservator and disseminator of the historical memory of the Jewish minority in Mexico that had arrived at the end of the 19th century from Central and Eastern Europe, and whose migratory flow intensified during World War II. Due to the systematic destruction of their cultural centers in Europe, the Ashkenazi Jewish community came close to extinction and it was in Latin America, especially in Mexico, where holocaust survivors assumed the responsibility not only of saving themselves but of saving their Jewish identity, threatened by ghettos, concentration camps and extermination.
Due to the imposition of quotas established in 1921 for entry into the United States, the migratory flow of the Jewish community was redirected towards Latin America. Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela and Costa Rica were the countries in the region that attracted immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century. The Ashkenazi who arrived were looking for places to survive economically and safeguard their Jewish identity, culture and traditions. In the first decades of the 20th century, Jews from Russia, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and France were received. They brought with them reservoirs of universal knowledge and culture through their printed collections.
When the Holocaust caused the disappearance of religious and cultural centers, only remains of collections rescued by the Allied Forces in 1945 survived. Returning them to their original institutions was impossible due to the extermination to which they were subjected. It was then agreed to resort to the communities established in Latin America. Thus, the Ashkenazi Centre in Mexico was the recipient of a thousand volumes rescued by the Allies. The conservation of the Ashkenazi tradition was assumed by this community that did not hesitate to organise to save the culture of their ancestors. To preserve their identity and continue their legacy, they founded communities with similar functions to those they had left behind in Europe. The Ashkenazi community, in accordance with their way of praying and their traditions, became autonomous and sponsored a number of social assistance and wellbeing institutions as well as schools and synagogues.