UPDATE: This story has been updated to include new information from Theater J. The Jewish theater company in the nation’s capital is struggling to find its footing in the face of increasing efforts by donors and funders to steer it away from dealing with controversies related to Israel. Theater J, a nationally acclaimed group under…
A Swiss museum formally agreed to accept the bequest of hundreds of art works from the late German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt, which may include Nazi-looted art. In its announcement on Monday, Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern, which Gurlitt named his sole heir before his death in May, said it would work with German officials to ensure…
A 1914 watercolor by Adolf Hitler fetched 130,000 euros ($161,000) at auction in the German city of Nuremberg on Saturday, the auctioneers said. The buyer was a private person from the Middle East who attended the sale in person, said Kathrin Weidler, head of the auction house. She said there had also been inquiries from…
Calling all Cassandras, those given to gloom and doom about the pliancy of contemporary Jewish life, much less its future. I suggest they make a beeline for Chicago’s Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership’s new exhibition, “Amy Reichert: Reinventing Judaica,” whose display of Jewish ritual objects will go a very long way toward dispelling…
What will it take for Switzerland to emerge, at long last, from the shadows of the Holocaust? The question comes up, yet again, with two recent news items. First, a Holocaust survivor family has filed suit in both Switzerland and the United States, alleging that restitution payments for family art stolen by the Nazis went…
Shortly after his aliyah to Israel six years ago, then 73-year-old Morton Freiman met with Ofek Buchris, commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade, and informed him that he wanted to join the Israeli army. When Buchris asked Freiman, a retired plastic surgeon from Miami, what he could do for the IDF, Freiman said…
A Canadian art museum said it will return a Nazi-looted painting to the heirs of its German Jewish owners. The Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario announced it will return “Portrait of a Lady,” a 17th-century painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Verspronck, CBC Hamilton reported. The Nazis stole the painting in 1940 from Alma…
The head of the World Jewish Congress warned a Swiss art museum that it risks an “avalanche” of lawsuits if it accepts the bequest of a collection of artwork amassed by a man who dealt in art for the Nazis. The Bern Art Museum discovered in May it had been named sole heir of Cornelius…
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