In 1938, Paul and Alice Leffmann, a Jewish couple from Germany, made a determined resolution. Fleeing Nazi persecution, they entrusted a treasured Pablo Picasso portray to a non-Jewish German acquaintance, hoping it will survive the Second World Battle even when they may not. To finance their escape to Brazil, the Leffmanns in the end negotiated the sale of the work—beneath duress, like so many compelled gross sales of that period.
That portray, The Actor (1904), has been hanging within the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York since 1952. In 2016, Laurel Zuckerman, the Leffmanns’ inheritor, introduced a case in search of its return. However courts within the US rejected the declare.
80 years of opacity
In September, the World Jewish Restitution Group (WJRO) launched a brand new report revealing the sobering actuality that 80 years after the Holocaust, most museums within the US—each giant and small—have performed little to supply the form of transparency that justice requires.
Our report discovered that US museums possible maintain effectively over 100,000 coated objects that had been in Europe through the Nazi period. But barely 10% of that quantity at present have publicly accessible provenance analysis. The closure of the Nazi Period Provenance Web Portal (NEPIP) in 2024 has made this drawback even worse, leaving survivors and heirs and not using a centralised software to find probably looted works.
This isn’t nearly well-known work. Households misplaced books, Judaica, silver kiddush cups, musical devices and abnormal family objects that carried extraordinary that means. These possessions had been the guts of households and communities, and their absence remains to be felt throughout the generations.
New HEAR Act
That’s why the brand new laws to increase and strengthen the 2016 Holocaust Expropriated Artwork Restoration (HEAR) Act is so important. Congress is predicted to vote quickly on a 2025 HEAR Act invoice that removes the sundown provision of the 2016 legislation (which is ready to run out on 1 January 2027), eliminates procedural defences corresponding to laches, and ensures survivors and heirs can convey claims as soon as they be taught the place their household’s property is positioned. Momentum is constructing.
However laws alone shouldn’t be sufficient. Particular panels to adjudicate claims at present exist in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK. Authorities in Belgium are contemplating creating one as effectively. The US must also contemplate establishing a federal or state-level fee to resolve claims. Such a fee may present an alternative choice to expensive litigation, prioritise ethical and historic justice over inflexible authorized doctrines, and at last give households a good listening to.
In March 2024, the US Division of State and WJRO collectively led the event of the “Greatest Practices for the Washington Ideas on Nazi-Confiscated Artwork”, which has since been endorsed by 34 nations. These finest practices name on museums to publish provenance analysis on-line, encourage governments to create unbiased skilled our bodies to adjudicate claims, and name on nations to make exceptions to authorized boundaries—corresponding to defences based mostly on the passage of time—that may in any other case restrict restitution.
Time to maneuver
We all know the authorized system within the US shouldn’t be working for a lot of claimants. Litigation is dear, sluggish and emotionally draining. Museums typically elevate procedural defences reasonably than addressing the ethical weight of a household’s historical past.
Now’s the time for Congress to cross the brand new HEAR Act, for museums to significantly improve provenance analysis efforts and to make the outcomes accessible, and for US officers and the US museum group to determine a fee. We owe it to ageing Holocaust survivors and their households. Justice delayed is justice denied—however it isn’t but too late.
• Gideon Taylor is the president of the World Jewish Restitution Group
