An Internet site with more than 650,000 Holocaust era property records was recently unveiled to help families around the world identify objects that were confiscated, looted or forcibly sold under the Nazi regime.
Called Project HEART, an acronym for Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce, the initiative comes at the behest of the Israeli government. Project HEART says it has collected information relating to some 500,000 stolen assets — from real estate, bank accounts, businesses and insurance policies to art and jewelry — and has handled 30,000 inquiries from survivors or heirs. Information on the site is available in 13 languages.
With its focus on countries that have not yet restituted prewar Jewish properties, Project Heart is yet another sign that the battle for restitution will not die with the survivors.
“To a large extent, we are empowering the next generation,” said Bobby Brown, director of Project HEART and a veteran of numerous restitution efforts. The idea, he said, is to “record whatever we can from this generation” of survivors and their children before their knowledge about prewar Jewish assets are taken to the grave.
The information is being collected and organized for by A.B. Data, a Milwaukee-based data management company that has been involved in other class-action Holocaust restitution settlements. The company has set up a 24-hour call center for the project with operators able to handle inquiries in 17 languages. It is mining newly available archives in Europe and elsewhere for information that might help substantiate Jewish claims.
The Project HEART database consists of property addresses, insurance policies, lists of homeowners, professions, lists of known confiscated properties, business directories, and other archival information that can assist potential applicants in their research. Archivists plan on releasing several million records, making HEART’s database the international community’s largest single-source database of lost Jewish property assets from the Holocaust era.
Once the database of stolen assets is compiled, Project HEART plans to use the information to pressure European countries to pay up or reach a settlement with Jewish heirs.
The major problem faced by Project HEART, like the one faced by the World Jewish Restitution Organization since its establishment in 1993, is how to compel European countries to pass restitution laws that are politically unpopular and against their economic self-interest.
Unlike Germany, which long has acknowledged its culpability and been cooperative on restitution issues, most European countries have been slow to sign on to any kind of agreement that would involve restituting property taken illegally from Jews during the World War II years.
More typically, Holocaust restitution negotiations are seen by the public in Eastern and Central European countries as depicted in a June 2009 cover of the Lithuanian tabloid Vakaro Zinios (The Evening News): The image shows an outsized American rabbi as a villainous Shylock demanding “give it now!” of a diminutive Lithuanian prime minister.
The establishment of Project HEART by Israel is an implicit indictment of the WJRO, which has been charged with recouping restitution from European countries other than Germany and Austria, but has made little headway.
It’s also a signal that the Israeli government, which is funding Project HEART with some $2.4 million annually for three years, is going on its own in seeking restitution rather than working through existing diaspora-led organizations.
With nearly $8 million guaranteed, Project HEART dwarfs the WJRO, which has a $600,000 annual budget funded by the Claims Conference, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency.
To participate in Project HEART, individuals need to fill out the questionnaire available on the website www.heartwebsite.org.