ࡱ> gif5@ 0Ebjbj220pXXT=C& NZ$NE5eee4444444$6R;9V4eeew 44s*s*s*^ 4s*e4s*s**h--~ T"&>-4 50E5-,9')L9-(r9-ees*eeeee44NN  s)NNInka Bertz Collecting for Jewish Museums Today 1. During the preparatory phase of this conference, the question was raised repeatedly, particularly by those concerned with the legal side of Holocaust-era assets, as to whether there was actually a difference between the looted art discussed in the room next door and the Judaica and cultural property, which is our subject here. Since this question is justified, I have decided to include it in my paper, but I know that the answer will leave the lawyers disappointed, for the only answer I can offer lies in the realm of history, not that of law. It has much to do with the history of Jewish museums, and this history differs in many essential ways from that of other museums. After the era of the Holocaust, it was certainly not a given that Jewish museums would be established or re-established in Berlin or other places in Germany or in other countries throughout formerly Axis-occupied Europe. And yet the first post-Holocaust Jewish museum was founded in Europe even before the war had ended: in August 1944 in Vilnius, by survivors of the Jewish resistance.The first thing they did upon returning to their heavily destroyed hometown was to go out and gather the books and artifacts they had saved from the Germans. The story of this short-lived museum project points to a constellation which we see again and again in many other places: The first people to attend to the surviving objects were the survivors themselves and the allied forces. Their plans for these objects tells us a great deal about their outlook on the future. On a more practical level, it seems that the rassemblage the gathering of whatever could be found, was always the first step that people took, whether in the former ghetto library in Vilnius, in similar efforts by the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, or at the collecting points set up in the western zones of Germany. But the subsequent decision on how to proceed with these materials was, as Robert Weltsch has put it, a question of Jewish policy: based on these decisions, they were either left where they had been found, moved to other places, or even sold for the benefit of the survivors. More than sixty years later, Jewish policy and Jewish prospects for the future may have changed, and we may even regret some of the decisions taken at that time, but many objects in todays Jewish museums all over the world still bear witness to and reflect the visions and decisions taken by the survivors back then and the realities they faced. 2. After these initial efforts, there were several decades of silence until Jewish museums were founded again under completely different circumstances and auspices and with different agendas than before the war. And from this moment on, I can only speak about the situation in Germany, which itself is mostly a West German one. The Jewish museums I am talking about are those that have been founded in Germany since the 1980s: in Frankfurt in 1988, in Rendsburg in 1988, in former East Berlin in 1995, in former West Berlin in 2001, and in Munich in 2007. And these are only the larger ones. Most of these museums are situated in historic buildings, and their exhibitions and collections present Jewish History with a strong regional focus. Many go back to private initiatives by local historians. This rediscovery of Jewish history and its institutionalization is in itself an interesting phenomenon of German memory politics and public history. It has taken place against the backdrop of the rediscovery of forgotten sites of persecution (for instance, the Topography of Terrors in 1984) and a growing public awareness of the Holocaust (which began with the screening of the Holocaust TV series in Germany in 1979). Ever since their beginnings in postwar Germany, Jewish museums have been perceived and have defined themselves as counterpoints to the sites dedicated to the memory of persecution. In contrast to these sites, the Jewish museums intended to remember not how Jews died, but how they lived. In this context, Jewish museums in Germany have been places of education, remembrance, and public history, as opposed to being traditional collection-based institutions and repositories of cultural artifacts. There was a certain factual logic to this, since almost none of these museums could draw on prewar Jewish collections. Exceptions to this rule are the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt, which holds artifacts from the Nauheim Collection, and the Centrum Judaicum, which now houses part of the Gesamtarchiv der Deutschen Juden and the few ceremonial objects that survived in the Jewish community in Berlin. -- It should be mentioned briefly here, that the holdings of the important! pre war Jewish museums in Germany were transferred to the United States, Israel and other countries by the JCR and IRSO after the war. Thus, the Jewish museums today are faced with the question of provenance when actively enlarging their collections and when reserching their existing collections. I would like to take a few minutes to explore the methods and problems of provenance research based on examples from the collection of the Jewish Museum Berlin. 3. In the following, I will present three examples from the collection of the Jewish Museum Berlin and the problems of provenance research associated with them: The collection of the Jewish Museum Berlin originates from the former Jewish department of the city historical museum of Berlin. Collecting started in the mid-1970s and encompasses all genres of objects: ceremonial objects, fine art, architecture, photography, and archival documents. In numers, the collection is not very large. The number of objects produced before 1945 even smaler: It encompasses about 160 paintings and 400 Judaica objects, plus a small number of scultptures and about 5000 sheets of graphic art. Among the paintings we are left with 47 objects that have gaps in their provenance between 1933 and 1945. Up to the present moment we have not received claims. We are currently researching the provanances in our collection and will publish the results on our website by the end of 2010. The art collection had been the focus of provenance research, so the examples I will give are reflecting this emphasis: A The first object I would like to present is a portrait of the rabbi and scholar Abraham Geiger, postumously rendered by Lesser Ury between 1905-1907. It had been suggested that this is the same portrait which was part of the collection of the Hochschule fr die Wissenschaft des Judentums, which was looted and stored in a building which was subsequently bombed. A second loot would not have been all to unlikely. However, closer examination of our pastell showed, that it had a stamp of the artists estate on the reverse. Thus,it prooved to be the pastel version of the painting a practice not uncommon for the artist. It remained with the artist, until after his death, the estate was divided up between the heirs. The pastell left Germany with its owners to the United States. It was sold by the end of the 1970s and acquired by the family, who then sold it to the Museum. B The second object is again a portrait: Theodor Hosemann painted Ferdinand Lassalle in 1865. The small painting was acquired at a Berlin art gallery in 1965. Inqiries there were answered, but negatively: documentation no longer exists. The literature about Hosemann, which is not extensive, does not mention the portrait in fact, he painted hardly any portraits. The literature about Lassalle leads us to the photography, the portrait was painted after, but not to the painting itself. These two examples are quite typical for the problems we face when dealing with second or third tear artists. The exact provenance of the Lesser Ury pastell only could only be identified on the basis of the oeuvre currently being complied. For Hosemann, such a catalogue does not exist yet. Thus, the case has to remain open until futher information will surface. C My next example is a scupture, walking girl, which was handed over to the curator by the widow of the person who had received it from a young woman, whos name she did not remember in the early 1940s, probaly with the intention of safeguarding it before her emigration, deportation or flight. Luck of research has shown, that the scupture was given as a prize at a sports event in 1934 to a young runner named Helene Finkelstein. We do not know if this prize-object## remained with the winner or was handed over to the next winner of the next sports-festival. Neither do we know, if she was the person who had given it. But also the name Helene Finkelstein of that age could not be found in the existing lists. Now, that the archive of the ITS has opened, there is a new possibility of finding a trace of hers. D The next example is one of the core holdings of the Museums collection of ceremonial objects. Its history recalls Aharon Appelfelds novel: Zvi Sofer, a survivor and cantor to the community of Mnster, collected it with his modest means. We do not have any documentation about his purchases, and we can only speculate about his motivation and conceptof collecting. What we are left with are objects, which many curators will know from their collections or from auction catalogues, manufacture production, for example of the silversmith Meyen from Berlin or the Wrttembergische Metallwarenfabrik. And even the pieces of greater artistic importance such as the Berlin rimonim bear no inscription or anything which may give a hint to their previous owners let aside tell us about the circumstances of loot or rescue. 4. What we see from this is that, no matter how different and how difficult provenance research proves to be in Jewish museums it is not fundamentally different from that in other museums. In this respect the lawyers have been right in asking what distinguishes Judaica from looted art. It takes just as long and is just as difficult. In addition, a great deal of luck is often required to bring together the missing pieces of the puzzle. So we see that Jewish museums share the concerns raised in the section devoted to looted art: they reject statutes of limitation and support demands for open access to all archival sources. But even if all these demands are met, and even if we do our homework as diligently as possible, we will have to accept the fact that we will be left with some objects in our collections or maybe even only our storerooms  which we most likely will never be able to restitute: either because the identity of the object cannot be clearly established, the circumstances under which they were looted cannot be clarified, or the former rightful owners or their living heirs cannot be identified. It is this corpus of objects that raises ethical and philosophical questions as to the role of museums as owners or as custodians of cultural property. And it is at this point that Jewish museums assume a role that may be different from that of art museums, since the culture to which they are dedicated was directly affected by the Holocaust: To illustrate the predicaments facing Jewish museums and anyone collecting Judaica after the Holocaust, we might recall two works of art and the statements they make: One is Daniel Libeskinds architectural design for the Jewish Museum Berlin, which incorporates empty spaces called voids, echoes iconoclastic philosophical reflections on the limits of representation, and has led to statements such as: Ceci nest pas un muse. Even so, Daniel Libeskind has shown that a Jewish museum is NOT something that can be taken for granted after the Holocaust. The second is the novel Iron Tracks by Aharon Appelfeld. Ever since his release from a concentration camp forty years earlier, the protagonist has been obsessively riding the trains of postwar Austria since. What keeps him sane is his mission to collect the menorahs, kiddush cups, and holy books that have survived their vanished owners. And the hope that one day he will find the Nazi officer who murdered his parents and have the strength to kill him. The novel is remarkable because it combines both these tasks which are actually two aspects of the same mission and presents the act of collecting Judaica and the theme of revenge with the same degree of emotional intensity in a world of broken characters. The objects he collects are just as much sherit hapleita as the survivors he meets during his journey. 5. Again: what makes Jewish museums different from other museums? First, one could view the matter from a legal perspective and discuss the notion of heirless property and the question of the legal owner, the successor to these orphaned objects.. The fact that Jewish successor organizations were set up immediately after the war to avoid common succession by the state, especially the German state, is another sign of the special character of Judaica and Jewish cultural property among the Holocaust-era assets. And at this point historical specifics result in legal specifics of ownership. And second, there is the more general, historical aspect: The Jewish museums of Europe to different degrees and in different ways are built on the ruins of the culture they are dedicated to. They assume the character of a memorial. Thus, the imperative which we share with all other museums, namely, to preserve, has taken on a different character. It entails using the means available to museums not only to remember, but also to restore the destroyed cultural context and the lost knowledge that once were associated with these objects. Today, special efforts are required to show the meaning of these objects, especially in a largely non-Jewish cultural context. Jewish museums take on this role of re-contextualization. Through the exchange of information, through the preservation and circulation of objects, they contribute to memorializing and even re-building at least a small part of Jewish cultural life in Europe. Since the Terezin Declaration mentions the possibility of restoring objects for synagogue use, it is important to make the point here that this is not the only way to re-attribute cultural meaning to an object. Since every object incorporates cultural values which lie beyond its religious function in the aesthetic and historical realms, and since Jewish culture has never been limited to religious practice, these secular aspects of an object are equally legitimate and important aspects of Jewish Culture. To reduce objects to their religious function or even to give unquestioned preference to this function would also place limitations on the idea of Jewish culture, which has always had a secular side and integrated influences from the non-Jewish world. Moreover, the preservation and study of Judaica and Jewish cultural property, even the founding of Jewish Museums, has been a vital part of modern Jewish culture, which in prewar Europe successfully built modern, partly secularized, and vividly Jewish identities. Jewish museums can also assume a role in rebuilding Jewish life in present-day Europe: by preserving and studying objects, making them available to scholars, providing information about them, and circulating the dispersed heritage through loans. In doing so, Jewish museums have become part of the activities of remembrance, education, and research. As counterpoints to the original sites of the Holocaust, they preserve the objects that bear witness to Jewish life and allow the past to live on in the memory of generations to come. This is not clear. 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