B’nai B’rith helping survivors recover looted artwork

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- It's been described, with some hyperbole perhaps, as David vs. Goliath: Holocaust survivors and their families trying to recover looted artworks from the governments and museums that now possess them.

It appears as though David might be getting some help.

As the Nazis rounded up Jewish families, they also plundered precious artworks that lined the walls of their victims' homes.

Other families who were fortunate enough to escape the Nazis fled quickly, leaving behind valuable and sentimental pieces of art.

Now -- more than 50 years after the end of World War II -- survivors who have memories of paintings hanging in their parents' homes and children born after the war who have only heard about family treasures have launched efforts to reclaim them.

Experts on art looted during the Holocaust era, who spoke at an art restitution conference recently at the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, said there are many difficulties facing people who are trying to track down their families' possessions.

Such obstacles include the lack of international law governing the restitution of art, the prohibitive costs of investigating the origins of the works and problems in proving ownership of art that was stolen and exchanged hands many times.

Lillian Weingast, who is originally from Austria and lives in New Jersey, has had mixed success in reclaiming her family's art.

While she has received some paintings from Austria after going to court, she has been unable to get paintings back from France, where some of her relatives fled to. She was told that she lacked the proper evidence to prove her claim.

Weingast said her family left everything behind, including any sort of documentation related to the art.

"We ran for our lives because we didn't want to be killed," she said.

Willi Korte, a German-born lawyer specializing in the restitution of art lost during World War II, said that unlike the Swiss banking issue, where there can be some kind of financial settlement, there is no way to sit down collectively and cut a deal with the governments, museums and individual collectors that have possession of the contested art.

Each individual will have to pursue his or her own claims, he said.

He added, however, that institutional help is necessary to catalog the works that were stolen from Jews during the war.

"Once that woman who remembers her father's home in 1936 in Berlin is gone, maybe everything else is gone and the grandson can [search for the art] for the next 30 years, and with $70 million dollars he will still not produce anything," Korte said.

The Klutznick Museum has created the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, or HARP, which will create a database and research institute to help historians, legal researchers and individuals who are seeking looted cultural items.

In addition to the museum's new project, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) is planning to introduce legislation later this month that would enable U.S. citizens to file claims in federal court against foreign nationals and allow the court to prevent disputed art from being exported prior to adjudication of the claim.

The bill also would provide some federal funding for HARP.

"The rights of Holocaust victims are paramount," she said at the conference. "It is they who have suffered the most grievous wrong.

"Old injustice should not be compounded by fresh inaction," she added.

Lowey also said the United States should encourage European countries to amend their laws that impose a statute of limitations on art that is found to be stolen if it was purchased in good faith.