Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Nazi Looted Art Experts Hold Conference

Experts on Nazi-era looted art have gathered for a week of workshops aimed at improving their ability to track and restore objects to their rightful heirs.

The first ever Provenance Research Training Program, which concludes June 15, drew 34 international participants – from museum directors to law enforcement agents, from art restitution experts to representatives of major auctioneering firms – to discuss and debate the challenges of tracking down and returning stolen art, 67 years after the end of World War II.

The items can be anything from paintings to silverware to books, said Wesley Fisher, director of research at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. His organization co-sponsored the program together with the European Shoah Legacy Institute and the Magdeburg-based Coordination Office for Lost Cultural Assets.

“Provenance research has never really become an established field,” Fisher lamented. “It is not taught in art history courses and in many countries it does not exist at all.”

The new program – an outgrowth of the 1998 Washington Conference on Nazi looted art and the 2009 Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague – intends to address this deficit, he said.

In a seminar room at the Magdeburg Ministry for Health and Social Affairs, participants discussed the ethical, financial and legal challenges of their work and shared information about the databases they have built for the purpose of provenance research.

“There are still hundreds of thousands of objects that are missing,” Michael Franz, director of the Coordination Office for Lost Cultural Assets, said. But they are more than mere objects, he added: “They are like an historical mirror. These objects are always firmly connected with a human face.”

The workshop program, coordinated and led by Marc Masurovsky, co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, was due to conclude Friday with the distribution of certificates to participants.

Fisher said plans are under way to hold similar workshops in Zagreb, New York and Jerusalem, each with a slightly different focus. “We want to do more than simply train people. We want this to become an international network,” he said.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.