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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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So we will get started. Welcome everyone again. I'm Ben Kaplan, Director of Education at yivo. Thank you for joining us for today's program. YIVO is a special place for the contemplation and celebration of Jewish culture. At the core of YIVO are our archive and library, which comprise more than 23 million documents and over 400,000 volumes of books. We share the riches of Jewish history and culture with our global audience and further our mission through classes, exhibitions, and public programs like the one you're about to see today. We'd like to thank Howard Spiegeler, Larry Kay, Elissa Senna, and Harik Feinstein for partnering with us on this morning's program. And now to introduce our two panelists today. Howard Spiegeler is co chair of Herrick Feinstein LLP's Art Law Group, handling all aspects of commercial art matters. Howard advises clients on international trade issues, loans, museum and private exhibitions, organization and structuring of businesses, estate planning, insurance issues, art financing, tax, criminal law concerns, and other matters. He has been integrally involved in some of the most important litigations brought on behalf of foreign governments and heirs of Holocaust victims and others to recover stolen artwork or other cultural property. Jonathan Brent is the executive director and CEO of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009, he was editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co author of Stalin's Last the Plot against the Jewish doctors 1948-1953 and inside the Stalin Archives. He's now working on a biography of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel. And Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College. So the way the event is going to work today, we will have two presentations, first from Howard and then from Jonathan. We will then open it up to Q and A. So again, please put any questions you have for our panelists in the Q and A box below. And without further ado, I will turn it over to Howard. Thank you, Howard, for being here.
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Good morning everybody. It's so thrilling to me that so many people from around the world are joining us today. I also wanted to give out a great thanks to Yivo for asking me to speak today and particularly to Ben, Melissa, Jane, Jonathan and Alyssa of my firm for helping to organize this program. I'm honored to work with yivo, which has done so much to preserve and share knowledge of East European Jewish Culture. That culture, as well as the culture and lives of Jews throughout Europe, were threatened with extinction by the Holocaust. The Nazis not only wanted to take the lives of Jews throughout Europe, didn't just want to take the lives of all the Jewish people, but more generally wanted to eliminate all traces of Jewish life. One major part of that hideous plan was to embark on a program of looting of artworks and other cultural property on an enormous scale. I and my colleagues at our law firm are gratified to have had the opportunity to lead the fight to recover these looted artworks. I will discuss today the history of Nazi looting and one of the major cases we handled, including the fascinating story of that this case revealed about the victims of Nazi looting. As you will see, this case and others like it were historic milestones in the worldwide struggle to return property to families who were victims of the Holocaust. The sheer volume of artwork stolen by the Nazis before and during World War II, from both museums and private, mainly Jewish collections throughout Europe, is staggering. This wholesale plunder was an official Nazi policy. Much of the looted art was destined to fill the Fuhrer Museum that Hitler was planning to build in Linz, Austria. Some have said that Hitler was obsessed with art. Upon his rise to power in Germany, he set out to rid the nation of what he considered to be degenerate cultural influences that had helped to denigrate the pure Aryan culture of Germany. He blamed these influences on Jews, among others. And indeed, his onslaught against so called degenerate art went hand in hand with his violent displacement and murder of millions of Jews throughout Europe. Therefore, many of the Nazi seizures of art involved these so called degenerate works, which were essentially the non representational or modern artworks that comprise some of the most exquisite works in European museums and collections. The great modern impressionists and Expressionists like Picasso and Egon Schiele and Kandinsky and Klimt and scores of other famous artists. Hitler actually arranged a touring exhibition throughout Germany of these artworks before they disappeared from view, calling on German citizens to observe and ridicule these works as not being worthy of being called artworks at all. Although the Nazis destroyed many of these works, they fortunately realized that although they found these works disgusting and degrading, many in the rest of the world considered them extremely beautiful and valuable. The Nazi regime therefore sold huge numbers of these works at auctions and galleries in Europe so they could get hard currency to support the war effort. But other works were favored by the Nazis, like old masters and other representational works by those deemed to be of Germanic related heritage, like Rembrandt or Cranach for these works, Hitler and Reichmark, Marshall, Hermann Goering, the Nazi leaders, second only to Hitler in the German government, actually competed with each other as the Nazi forces confiscated these works en masse from museums and Jewish and other collections. In all, the Nazi art confiscation program is considered the greatest displacement of art in human history. The United States government has estimated that German forces and other Nazi agents before and during World War II seized or coerced the sale of of one fifth of all of the art that then existed throughout Europe. Let me repeat that. The Nazis and their agents coerced the sale of one fifth of all of the art that existed throughout Europe at that time. In total, we're talking about approximately a quarter of a million pieces of art. And when one adds books and manuscripts and other cultural artifacts, the number of items of stolen property runs into the millions. The value of the plundered art alone exceeded the total value of all artwork that was located in the United States in 1945, some $2.5 billion worth of art, or well over $20 billion using today's values. Eventually, as the tide of war drastically changed and the Allies stormed through Europe, they recovered huge numbers of artworks looted by the Nazis. Soldiers with knowledge of art and art history were sought out among the troops and made responsible for finding and recovering these artworks. These men and women were called the Monuments Men. These troops were incredibly courageous as they sought to protect and preserve the culture of Europe. As hostilities still raged, General Eisenhower and other US Officials selflessly decreed that these works would be returned to their original countries, rather than treated as spoils of war to be taken home by US Troops, as so many conquering nations had done in previous wars. Going back centuries after the war, the Allied troops began the enormous task of sorting these millions of pieces of art, cultural artifacts and other items. These works were dispersed across Europe, often far from their countries of origin. While some collections were found intact, the contents of many others were scattered in warehouses or buried in rubble, mines or bombed out churches. In general, it was the policy of the Allies to return the works they found to the governments of the countries from which they had been looted. To France or Holland, for example, so that these governments would have the responsibility of figuring out who were the original owners of these artworks and return them to them. There was little desire on the part of US Troops to set up a system of restitution themselves, since once hostilities were over, they wanted to end their engagement in Europe. But even though the governments who received these works generally set up Post war restitution commissions and agencies to consider claims by the victims of the Nazi onslaught. They often cast a cold and bureaucratic eye on such claims and many works ended up as the property of these governments themselves. Also, before and during the war, several French, Swiss and German dealers and art galleries collaborated with the Nazis to sell many so called degenerate artworks, reaping enormous profits. And other works simply disappeared through theft. So huge numbers of works were never recovered by the Allies at all and remained in the collections of private collectors and museums throughout the world. The families of the victims of these massive thefts, however, often did not pursue their claims, especially once they were rebuffed after the war by their own governments, or they did not or could not take on the enormous task of trying to find the works that were lost and never recovered by the Allies. In many cases, these families, or what was left of them after the mass Nazi murders, had only survival on their minds after the war and were not about to even consider trying to locate property they had lost to the Nazis. And the next generation, as they matured years later, were often told by their fathers and mothers that no one wanted to talk about those terrible years, let alone actually research what might have happened to their family's property or where it might be located. But starting about 25 years ago, a confluence of factors led the following generation of these families and many others throughout the world, including governments, to re examine what happened to all of the artworks that had been looted by the Nazis and never found their way back to the families of the original owners. The Clinton Administration, under the leadership of Stuart Eisenstadt, who was then under Secretary of State for Economic, Business and Cultural affairs, was instrumental in urging governments around the world to seek ways to effectuate the policy of identifying art looted by the Nazis and returning it to their rightful owners. In 1998, the US government convened a conference of government officials, art experts, museum officials and many other interested parties from around the world in Washington to consider and debate the many issues raised by the continuing discovery of Nazi looted assets, including artworks. The conference promulgated 11 principles concerning Nazi confiscated art which were adopted by 44 nations. One principle states that pre war owners and their heirs should be encouraged to come forward to make known their claims to art that was confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted. And another states that once they do so, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution. As a result of all this interest and concern, several European governments created brand new restitution commissions to re examine claims by victims families that had been or could have been brought after the war to recover looted artworks. These commissions often provided for the waiver of any statutes of limitations that might otherwise have applied so that these claims could be considered on the merits. And museums all over the world, as well as governments with huge collections of their own, started placing on the Internet images and information about artworks and air collections for which there was a gap in ownership, history, or provenance between the years 1933 to 1945, asking those with further information about these works to contact them and perhaps make a claim for a recovery. There were several other important developments as well as in the late 1990s, a few scholarly books were published examining the remarkable extent of the Nazi looting of artworks. At the same time, since the Cold War had ended and the Iron Curtain had fallen, previously classified archives maintained by the United States government and even information from the former Soviet Union started to become publicly available, providing more and more information to researchers and others who wanted to look into the fate of individual artworks and collections. Also, the advent of the Internet affected a revolutionary change in the ability to do research in this area. And not least important, the current generation of the descendants of Holocaust victims are unburdened by the extreme survival needs of their ancestors. Who were the victims themselves? Or the common feeling among members of the following generation that the Holocaust was not something that anyone wanted to talk about. This latest generation of heirs readily asked questions about their family's property, including artworks in Germany and countries subject to German occupation during the war. They started to locate artworks and began the process of reclaiming them, and we and other attorneys around the world were retained to bring lawsuits to recover these looted artworks. Years after the Washington Conference came other attempts to keep the world's focus on this unfinished business of the Nazi era. The most significant occurred in June 2009 at an international conference in Prague in the Czech Republic, designed to see to it that the promise of the Washington Conference was being fulfilled. The 46 governments at the Prague Conference adopted what is now called the Terezin Declaration, issued during a poignant concluding ceremony which I was privileged to attend, held at the Terezin Memorial, cited the Theresienstadt concentration camp, at which over 100,000 Jews were put to death. Importantly, the Declaration recognized the many ways by which artworks were lost by their owners during the Nazi era, including theft, coercion and confiscation, as well as by forced sales and sales made under duress, and endorsed the principle that everyone should quote, make certain that claims to recover Nazi looted art are Resolved based on the facts and merits of the claims. That is not barred by technical defenses like the statute of limitations. Turning now to a major case that we handled, I would like to transport you to a different place and time. Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In the 1930s, Jacques Haud sticker, a Dutch Jew, was the most famous art dealer in the Netherlands. And his collection of old master artworks was known throughout Europe. And as a result of his excellent eye for valuable art, he was quite wealthy. He owned a villa on the Amstel river called Ostermuir, and a beautiful castelnyin road on the banks of the River Verte. Jacques would regularly have soirees at his homes to which he would invite collectors and members of Dutch society. He would provide entertainment from the arts community. At one of these elegant gatherings, he invited the beautiful Austrian singer Desiree van Halben to entertain his guests. Desi, and as she was known, was from an aristocratic family from Vienna and the daughter of a famous opera singer. From all accounts, when Jacques met Desi, it was love at first sight and they married in 1937. They now shared the beautiful life of Netherlands high society, while Jacques continued to amass a remarkable collection of artworks and became one of the most important art dealers in Europe. But in the late 1930s, their carefree life could not insulate them from developments in nearby Germany and other countries. As the Nazi regime raged on and expanded its reach, Desi started to receive letters from friends trapped in Austria who begged her to help them escape to the Netherlands. Jacques, around 40 years old at the time, took steps to protect himself and his family, which now included a young baby son, Ito. He sent a few paintings to England and deposited some monies in New York. He appointed someone to take charge of his affairs in case he had to leave Holland suddenly. Indeed, Desi and Jacques obtained visas and booked passage on a ship to the United States. But when it came time to leave, Jacques simply could not do it. The visas expired. And then the worst they could have possibly imagined occurred. In May 1940, the German army invaded Holland. Such was the chaos at that time that Desi and Jacques could not get renewed visas stamped into their passports at the US Embassy. They simply could not get to the embassy. The German forces were approaching Amsterdam at remarkable speed. Jacques and Desi volunteered to drive Belgian colleagues who could not reach Brussels by land to a ship leaving from a Dutch port. But after all the planning, Jacques and Desi realized that they themselves had suddenly escaped for their lives. With little time to spare, they grabbed their baby, some cash, some jewelry, and headed out in their car. Jacques's mother refused to leave and would end up being trapped in the Netherlands throughout the war. When Jacques and Desi got to the port, they were surrounded by huge frantic crowds desperate to leave the Netherlands. And they knew that they would have to leave at that very moment. Somehow they found space on a ship headed for Dover, England, which made it through repeated attacks from the German air force. But the Kaufstickers did not have proper papers and were not permitted to leave the ship at Dover. So they headed on to Liverpool. The scene on the ship was horrendous. Hundreds of refugees were stuffed into the hold with little air. The women and children were allowed to stay on the somewhat more comfortable upper parts of the ship. But Desi refused to leave Jacques's side and she joined the crush of humanity below. In the middle of the night, Jacques went up on the deck to get some air. Tragically, he did not see an uncovered hatch in the dark and fell through it to his death. His body was taken off the ship at Falmouth, but but Desdi was not permitted to disembark there. All she could get from the authorities was a promise that Jacques Scrapesite would look out over the sea. The young widow and her one year old son then proceeded to Liverpool alone. Actually, Desi did get something else. In Jacques's pocket she found a little black leather binder that contained a listing of the 1300 artworks that were in his collection. With relevant, albeit very brief, descriptive information, this black book would turn out to be a critical resource for her family. As I shall explain later, Fizzy was briefly interned in Liverpool as an enemy alien because of her Austrian passport. But due to her excellent connections she in England she was soon released. But even US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, whose son of course would later be president and whom Desi knew through friends, could not get her an American visa because of the huge numbers of refugees who were trying to enter the us he was able to get her a Canadian visa, however, and she and Ito went on to Canada. From there they were eventually able to go to New York where they remained for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, back in Amsterdam, Jacques and Desi's homes and huge art collection, not to mention Jacques's mother, awaited the Nazi onslaught. Adding to the chaos was the fact that the manager who had been appointed by Jacques to oversee his properties and and the affairs of the Gauzicke Gallery, that manager died the day before Jacques and Desi left. And Jacques did not have time to appoint anyone else in his stead. In Any event, the Nazis had already adopted the policy of seizing all of the properties of any Jews who left before the invasion. But perhaps most significantly, the top Nazi leader whom I mentioned before fancied himself an art connoisseur and the outstanding Haudsticker artworks were well known to him. Remarkably, Goering, commander of the German Air Force who was engineering the Nazi invasion of Holland at the time, came to the steps of the Gauticker Gallery within days of the invasion and promptly arranged the for sale of the gallery and the artworks from the unauthorized employees who were left there. The price was a pittance compared to the true value of the artworks. It was almost as if the Nazi invasion of Holland was designed to ensure that Goring could get his hands on these precious pieces of art. Goering used a local acquaintance named Mittel to be the frontman in all of this. And Miedel actually took over the Hauzticke Gallery and made it a small fortune during the war. While Goering took huge number of works himself, many others were sold by Miedel or others. There were well over 1000 works altogether that were lost, stolen or displaced. Eventually, as the Allied forces advanced into Europe, the they found hundreds of the Gouds Dickel works in Nazi hands or hidden by them and recovered them. As I explained before, however, it was the policy of the Allies to return the artworks they recovered to the government of the country from which they had been looted, so that those governments would then be responsible for returning them to the original owners. Therefore, about 200 hard sticker artworks were transferred by the Allies to the government of the Netherlands. But when Desi came back to Holland after the war to reclaim her properties and artworks, she was greeted with far less than open arms. Yes, the Dutch government had set up a so called recuperation commission to determine the fate of Nazi looted property in its possession. But in its wisdom, the commission rejected Desi's claims and determined that Jacques's artworks had been voluntarily sold by gallery representatives to Goering and therefore should not be returned to Mrs. Haudsticker. Feelings of patriotism ran high in Holland after the war, and there were strong sentiments in favor of holding on to property seized during the war. And this is where things stood when Desi eventually died in 1996. Meanwhile, Ido, Jacques and Desi's baby son, had grown up and married a woman named Marai von Serre, an Olympic class ice skater and teacher. Tragically, Ido died shortly after his mother's death in 1996. So Marai became the sole heir of Jacques and Desi. But Ito and Desi had told Marai very little about the fate of the artworks in the Haudsticke Gallery during the war. Again, as I noted, it was not uncommon for families to want to avoid discussions about the horrors of the wartime years. But with the huge amounts of attention that was being focused on Nazi art looting throughout the world as a backdrop, a Dutch journalist, Peter Denhollander, who had been researching post war Dutch restitution policies, contacted Mirai and revealed the saga to her. So she then resumed the fight that Desi had tried to start. She came to our firm to help her recover the approximately 1,000 works that had not been recovered by the Allies after the war, but had been sold or otherwise disseminated throughout the world. Working with art researchers and investigators, we've been able to find and recover about 40 works thus far. And the critical resource in all of this work, the little black book that Jacques carried with him, containing the names and descriptions of the works that he owned at the time of his untimely death. Marais also began the arduous fight to reclaim the works in the possession of the Dutch government. After years of one disappointing decision by the Dutch courts after another, Holland formed one of those new restitution commissions which I mentioned before, designed to re examine the art holdings of the Dutch government. With our assistance, Mariah made her claim to the Commission for the 200 works in the government's possession that had been taken by Goering and recovered by the Allies, but never returned to Desi after the war. In 2006, the Dutch Commission ruled that all of those works should be returned by the Dutch government to Jacques and Desi's sole heir, Marais van Sayer. A very happy ending indeed for the Gauzdicker family. This slide also shows Mari's daughter Charlene, Jacques's granddaughter, with whom we worked very closely on the case. But of course, this was not an ending. As we continue to find artworks owned by Jacques all over the world and continue our efforts to recover them from Arai and her family, it is the family's goal to find and recover every single work. The next few slides show some works that were among the 200 returned by the Dutch government. And this last one, I should mention, is the earliest known painting of the New World by a European artist. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the essential tenet of the Washington Principles and the Terezin Declaration is that misappropriated artwork should be returned to their rightful owners, several federal courts in the US have not recognized this as an overriding principle in Nazi looted art cases. Most recently, the Supreme Court followed suit and even seemed to ignore the horrific history that victims of the Holocaust experienced. This case concerns several dozen medieval relics and devotional objects known as the Weltswinschatz, or Gulf treasure. During the waning years of the Weimar Republic of Germany, a consortium of three art firms loaned by Jewish residents of Frankfurt purchased the treasure from the Duke of Brunswick. Once the Nazis came to power, Hermann Goering, of course, became interested in the treasure. Using physical threats, he forced the consortium to sell the treasure to Prussia, which was part of Germany in 1935, for approximately one third of its value. During the occupation of Germany during the war, the United States found the treasure and, in line with its policy that I described before, eventually turned it over to the Federal Republic of Germany. The treasure was maintained by the Prussian Cultural Heritage foundation, which is an instrumentality of the government of Germany. Heirs of the consortium members sued Germany to recover the treasure. American law permits claimants to sue foreign governments to recover property taken in violation of international law. A government's violation of international law, however, has generally been interpreted as a government taking property from citizens of other countries, but not from its own citizens, because such a taking would be considered a domestic, not an international, taking. But the claimants in this case argued that the Nazi program of looting and coercing the sale of artworks from German Jews was part of their genocidal intention to eliminate Jews and their culture entirely. So surely such heinous conduct must constitute a violation of international law. However, the Supreme Court rejected that argument unanimously and held that the only relevant issue in the case was that the taking by the Nazis was a domestic one from its own citizens, and therefore the US Courts could not consider the case. The court did, however, leave open the possibility that they could still argue that the treasure was actually not taken by Germany from its own citizens, since German Jews were stripped of all their rights of citizenry during the Nazi era. We will see if the lower courts will agree with that argument as the case proceeds. Putting aside these adverse court decisions, what about the cultural institutions and other possessors of art misappropriated during the Nazi era? I would suggest that anyone or any institution in possession of such artworks should consider returning them to the families of their original owners, so long as the ownership history or provenance is clear. After all, is it appropriate to hide behind legal arguments while disregarding the ethical and moral issues raised by the circumstances surrounding the loss of these artworks? Indeed, a good example of doing the right thing occurred in just the last few days. The French government announced that it would return this painting, a Klimt masterpiece that is the only Klimt painting in France's national collection, to the heirs of the family from whom it was taken by the Nazis under duress. The heirs did not have to face any technical defenses or asserted by France in a legal proceeding. As a French official put it, France simply completed an act of justice. In closing, I refer to the words of, of all people, Hitler's Secret service chief, Heinrich Himmler. It has been said that Himmler once declared that the Nazis had to kill all the Jews because if not, their grandchildren will ask for their property back. We are very proud to say that we have helped to prove Harry Imler quite correct. Thank you very much.
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Thank you so much, Howard, for that presentation. We're going to move now to Jonathan. Jonathan, if you're there, just a reminder to everyone that if you have questions for Howard or Jonathan, please put them in the Q and A function. It's to the right of chat. So not in chat, but in Q and A. And we'll try to get to as many questions as we can. Over to you now, Jonathan.
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Thank you. I'm just going to put up another PowerPoint. First of all, I want to thank the Herrick law Firm for joining us in this program. I want to thank Howard for his wonderful presentation which was so very, very interesting. The Yivo Institute represents, I think, a somewhat peculiar instance of the looting of Jewish property and the restitution of Jewish property for various reasons. Today the Yivo Institute is located on 16th street in Lower New York City. It has been in New York since 1940. However, it was founded in what was then Vilna, Poland, now Vilnius, Lithuania, the capital of Lithuania in 1925. It was founded by scholars fleeing the aftermath of the Russian Revolution who felt that in the wake of World War I, the time had come for the Jewish people of Eastern Europe to establish an academy of higher learning for themselves. Why? Because there was no Brandeis, there was no Hebrew University, there was no,
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there
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were no academies, no institutions whereby the Jews of Eastern Europe, for the most part Yiddish speaking Jews could learn about themselves, learn about their thousand year history in those lands. How did they get there? How did they get from Germany to Poland to Lithuania to Russia? What was the nature of their folklore? How was their cuisine related to the cuisine of other cultures around them? How did their literature develop? How did their language itself that was deemed by most people in the world at that time, including scholars, including Sholem Aleichem himself, as nothing more than A jargon spoken by a fringe culture in a fringe world. And furthermore, what did the culture of East European Jews have to offer the world? What had it invented? How had it organized itself? How did it raise its children, what musicians came out of it, what artists, what writers, etc. And so a decision was made among these scholars who found themselves in Berlin, 1925, to create this YIVO institute. YIVO in Yiddish stands for Yiddish Wissenschaftlacher Institute, the Jewish Scientific Institute. And of course, it was started without any money. It was started without any money. It was started without any wealthy patrons. It was started without a building. It was started in Max Weinreich's apartment in downtown Vilna, which is still standing. And there's a small plaque there to this day. It was started with a dream. And the dream was that the Jewish people of Eastern Europe had created a civilization that was estimable, that was important, that had contributed vitally to the growth of humanity more generally in the 20th century. And this dream was then structured in a variety of ways. First of all, YIVO had an outpost in Berlin, YIVO had an outpost in Warsaw, and YIVO had an outpost which became the headquarters in Vilna. New York was an afterthought. Chicago was an afterthought. Buenos Aires was an afterthought. Paris, London, et cetera, these were things that came later. But what the founders of YIVO discovered not too long after it was created was that YIVO was not just an institution. EVO was not a building. YIVO was not Yale University or Harvard or Brandeis or Hebrew University. YIVO became a mass movement, a mass movement among Jews all over the world to recover their own history and learn about themselves for the first time, aside from what they could glean from their their family over the kitchen table or the dining room table. And so YIVO set about to study this great history. But this great history was difficult to study without books, without documents, without records, without all of the materials that are necessary for the study of history. And therefore, YIVO began in 1925, what was called the Zamler Movement, a movement of collectors and advertisements went out largely through Yiddish newspapers at the time, calling on people, on Jews, Yiddish speaking Jews, but not just Yiddish speaking Jews, all Jews of East European and Russian descent to send materials to the YIVO Institute in Vilna. And therefore, YIVO began acquiring posters from Chicago, books from Buenos Aires, documents from Moscow and Petersburg, and as far away as Japan and China, from Spain, from France. An extraordinary abundance and variety of materials began to come into the Yivo building, which until 1935, fully 10 years after YIVO was started, was Max Weinreich's apartment in Vilna. This abundance of material was of all kinds. Szymon Dubnov, who was one of the great scholars of the Yiddish speaking East European world, collected thousands of rare rabbinical works of the 18th century. Yivo also has a unique collection of Yiddish pornography. It has material on Jewish fighters and wrestlers. It has material on the way children were raised. It has material on school systems, it has material on social organization. It has material on Zionism, on Bundism, on. On Hasidism, on all the variety of political and religious life of East European Jewry. In 1936, Marc Chagall visited because he had heard of the Yivo Institute and he began what was then going to be an art wing. And he in fact contributed various of his own works to YIVO at that time, as did Ell Lissicki and other artists. All of those materials, unfortunately, with one or two small exceptions, were stolen and never returned. And we to this day have no idea where they are in any case, by the time. And this, this is a picture of the building in front of, on the screen of the Yivo Institute on the day that it. It officially opened. And you can see it was a fairly modern building. YIVO was at that time considered in fact an avant garde organization that was going to drive the Jewish people into the future based on knowledge and, and an understanding of their traditions and a critical investigation of their historical memory. And this beautiful building by 1946 looked like this. The Nazis had arrived shortly after they declared war on the Soviet Union in June 1922. Vilna had been in the Soviet part of the partitioned Poland, and so it was protected until 1941. And as Howard had described in, in the Netherlands, Nazi officials had come to YIVO before the war and they did a complete inventory of the contents of the Yivo building, they knew, room by room by room by room, where things were located. And they decided that instead of looting and burning and destroying everything, they were going to loot it, seize it and bring it back to Germany. Because they understood that the Yivo Institute had become the great repository of knowledge about the evolution of East European Jewry, about its activities, about its plans, and that these materials looted from the Yivo archive were going to become the foundation for the Institute for the Study of the Jewish people after the war that was to be built in Frankfurt as well as for the museum of the extinct people that was going to be built in Prague. And so they had great plans for the YBO Institute. And as. And I'll come back to this slide in a moment. But in the. In the process of looting Yivo, they discovered that. That they, the Nazis, unlike with paintings, for instance, they couldn't understand what they were all about. Why? Because all of the books that you see here, the immense number of documents, over well over two and a half million documents of all sorts in every European language were for the most part in Yiddish, in Hebrew, in Polish and in Russian. And the Germans simply couldn't read these languages. And so they employed Jewish slave labor to sort the material. And here in this photograph is the poet Avram Sutskever. And the other poet here is Chmerke Katriginski, who were, with their colleagues, responsible for sorting these materials, deciding which would go to Germany and which would be destroyed. But in the process of sorting these materials, they decided that they didn't want to give everything to Germany. There was a debate would it be safer in Germany or safer hidden in the ghetto? And so a decision was made to continue to give the Germans a certain amount of material, but to hide other materials in the ghetto. And the question arose, how do you get material out of the Yivo building into the ghetto? Because Yivo was not located inside the Vilna ghetto at that time. And so there is a tremendous story that involved what is called the paper brigade of Sutskever, Katriginsky and their colleagues of hiding this material, hiding it in their clothes, hiding it in their boots. There's one story of Smirky Katriginsky walking out of the Ivo Archive with a Torah wrapped around his stomach and getting to the guard, to the ghetto, and he was certain he would be shot. But all of a sudden a commotion broke out somewhere. The guards attention was distracted and he passed through. And so these materials that were saved and were hidden in the Vilna ghetto constitute a very substantial portion of the original Yivo materials, these materials. And here is a slide which shows how they were taken on a cart, brought to the train station for shipment to Frankfurt. These materials were therefore divided. The materials that went to Frankfurt were put in a warehouse outside of the city. The materials that were hidden were buried underground, hidden in attics, given to Polish friends for safekeeping. And it was after the war, immediately after the Nazis had been kicked out of Vilna, in fact, in May of 1940. This is a picture of May 1946. But it was in 1944 that Avram Sutzkever, who had become a partisan during the war, returned to Vilna, and began looking for the. The lost Jewish materials. And this is a picture of the building in Vilnius that had suffered this total destruction, not by the Germans, but by the Soviet bombardment. This is Avram Sutzkever, and around him are millions and millions of fragments of Jewish books and Jewish documents that had been hidden in the attic of the building. They had not been able to transport them into the ghetto by the time the ghetto was liquidated, and they were hidden in the attic. And here is the rubble. Yivo in New York City possesses two boxes of these fragments that were found by Sutzkever and others and sent to us in New York. This is a picture of Vilnius today. And the Yivo building that you saw would have, oops, would have sat right here in this empty street. And I must say that when I first went to Vilnius and I was shown where Yivo stood and I saw the empty street, I realized that this empty street had more than just a physical municipal meaning. This empty street is the empty street of Jewish memory of its life in Eastern Europe that has been all but destroyed, all but totally eliminated. And it is the endeavor of the Yivo Institute in New York City to fill this empty space, to bring the knowledge that Yivo represented and that Yivo possessed through its documents and books back so that we could again understand what once filled this empty space. Part of that act of restoration was performed by the Monuments Men after the war, as Howard described, who discovered the Yivo treasures in the warehouse in outside of Frankfurt. And with the help of the MANISCHEWITZ Brothers, the U.S. army sent all of the looted material to Yivo, which Max Weinreich, who is here, the original founder of Yivo, which Max Weinreich, who had miraculously escaped New York in 1940, had reestablished in New York City. And so these. The materials that were in these boxes represented, though only half of the material that was saved from the Nazis. And from 1947 to 1989, essentially 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was literally unknown what had happened to the other part of Yivo's collection. Here is a photograph from July 1944, which is when Sutzkever and colleagues Israel Seligman and Gershon Abramovich returned. All of them had been partisans during the war, had returned to Vilna for the purpose of digging up and finding all of Yivo's lost materials. And here you see them. This is Sutzkeber going literally from house to house from Bunker to bunker, and collecting Yivo's materials with a pushcart and bringing them to a central location that was going to be made into the new Museum of Jewish Culture in Vilnius. It would have been the successor to the YIVO Institute in Vilnius, using these materials. And as you can see, there were not simply manuscripts and books. There were pictures, there were sculptures, many of them by famous artists. There were a whole variety of different kinds of objects that were going to be part of this museum that was in fact built in 1948. But in 1948, the Soviets arrived. And the Soviets arrived with the intention of obliterating all of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, which was thought to be a threat. Jewish nationalism was thought to be a threat to the Soviet government. With the creation of the State of Israel, it was thought that Jews who recovered their Jewishness would turn to America rather than the Soviet Union. There were many reasons for the obliteration of Jewish culture. It was not simply antisemitism as such. Sutzkeber and Katriginsky fled to Paris and eventually Katraginsky made his way to Buenos Aires and Sutskeber went to Israel. And they left all of those books and documents that they had saved to the elements, so to speak. The Soviets gave the order to pulp literally all of that material. Much of it was brought to a pulping mill. And it was because of a Lithuanian librarian, Antonis Ulfis, and only because of him that this material was saved a second time. He took it with colleagues in the dead of night from the pulping mill. They put it on trucks and they took it to the Church of St. George that had been transformed into the Lithuanian Book Chamber by the Soviets after the war. And there they hid it. They hid this material in various places in the church. And apparently Opus idea was, if the Soviets find some here, they won't look here. If they find it here, they won't look there. But he also put material in other institutions, because he was the head librarian of the Lithuanian National Library, he put it in other institutions as well. And these materials in other institutions were only discovered in 2017, 2014. And I'll talk a little bit about that if time permits. The materials themselves looked a lot like this. Pages crumpled, pressed together,
- [56:32]
A
filled with dirt.
- [56:33]
C
When I first opened one of the folders in the Lithuanian Central State Archive, the dust of the the ghetto actually came out onto my hands. Here is another example. You see the torn pages, the crumpled, fragmentary nature of so much of this material. You cannot just put this in a frame and put it on your wall. This requires hours and hours and hours of sedulous research and understanding, of context and understanding, of personalities and history to be able to piece back together again. And in 2014, YIVO undertook to do just that. It was clear to me and to others that this material was disintegrating, or much of it was disintegrating. Scholars had no access to it. The people of Lithuania had no access to it. It was just going to disappear from view, and that empty place on that street would never be filled again. And so we began in 2014 to think about what eventually became the Yivo Vilna Collections Project and then the Edward Blank Yivo Vilna Collections Project for the purpose of the digitizing these materials, preserving these materials, and disseminating them to a global public for worldwide research and appreciation. And so this task was begun with a handful of people in Lithuania to look through all of those materials and with the YIVO staff in New York to look through the materials. On our side, what we discovered was that indeed, there were certain documents that we have that had literally been ripped in half, one half being in New York and the other half being in Lithuania. And so this project, and it's appropriate that we're talking about it on the eve of Passover, this project is a little bit like the story of the Afikomo and the reuniting of fragments, because that is what we are doing. We are doing it digitally to reunite these materials so that the world will see as much of a coherent collection as is possible. While the originals remain partly in New York and partly in Lithuania, the project as a whole consists of over 2 million documents and 12,000 volumes. It is nearing completion, I'm glad to say. This is a copy of a letter, one of the letters that was found in the materials in Vilna by Smirke Katridinsky after the war. It's dated March 1945. And so the materials that have flowed into the YIVO collection were written and collected, indeed, after YIVO had already been dissolved, because YIVO was the only organization at that time that represented the communal history of. Of the Jewish people, because Israel had not yet come into being. But this is another example of a work which helps you get an idea of the breadth of the collection. This is an astronomical manuscript written in 1751 in Hebrew in France, that was in Ye both's possession. This is a letter, a notebook of what's called Musar Shmoosen, the table talk of the Telts Yeshiva, which relocated in Cleveland. But this is from 1916, 1918. This is an agreement. This is one of my favorite documents because it's an agreement between the Vilna Union of water chariots carriers in 1857 with one of the most important yeshivas of the time to exchange services. They would have a place to worship on Sabbaths and they would give money for a new set of Talmud. This is a contract in the. In the hand of Yudlamid Peretz, one of the great Yiddish writers. And note that he wrote this in Russian, not in Yiddish. This is one of the most remarkable things that was found in the collection in Lithuania. And that was part of a collection that wasn't found until 2017. So the process of discovery continued over a long period of time. And this was a notebook of poetry written by Avram Switzgeber, whom you saw earlier in the Warsaw ghetto, that was left behind and clearly lost to history. This is another example of the sort of work that was part of this collection. A pincus of the Landischen Shah Society and la Chai from 1836. And you see the beautiful loving Frontis piece of this work. What does this tell us? Why is this important? It shows us that this is not a people that feels endangered. This is not a people that feels that it has no place in the world. This is not a people that is without a history or without a rootedness. This is a people that very much feels at home in its world, feels that it is carrying on a great tradition and is proud of that tradition. This is one of the most wonderful of the things that we discovered. It's an autobiography of a fifth grade student in the Sophia Gorevich school from 1925. And this was written by an 11 year old girl, Beba Epstein. When we found this, we fell in love with her photograph, as you can imagine. And I asked the Lithuanian authorities to send it to me in New York. The New York Times photographed it and put it on the. The. The front cover of a. An article about the YIVO discoveries because they loved it as well. And we thought that she had perished in the Holocaust and was all but forgotten. But the next day I received a telephone call from her son from Los Angeles. And that was quite amazing. It was as amazing for me to hear from her son as it was for her son to see this picture of his mother from when she was 10 years old. And this work, the autobiography of this fifth grade student, has now become the basis of the YIVO online museum, the first exhibition in our online museum. This is another one of the great discoveries that were made in Lithuania of these materials. These are six notebooks by the great writer Chaim Grata, who survived the war in Moscow, went to Israel, but then lived for some 25 years, 20 years in the Bronx. And these notebooks of his poetry were completely forgotten and lost. And he had no idea whatsoever what had become of this material. So I will end my presentation here and we'll be happy to take questions. There's much that I haven't been able to talk about, unfortunately, but I'm very grateful for the opportunity to talk about as much as I have. Thank you so much.
- [65:42]
B
Thank you, Jonathan, and thank you, Howard, for your fascinating and moving presentations. Before we move to Q and A, I just want to take a brief moment to thank all of our donors and members. It's thanks to you and your support that we're able to have programs like the one you're seeing today. So if you'd like to learn more about YIVO, you can visit us on our website, evo.org and you can become a member there and sign up for our mailing list and so forth. We'll include links at the end of the presentation as well. So we're going to open it up now to Q and A and have a conversation with Jonathan and Howard. So if you haven't already, you can write your question in the Q and A box. There are a number of questions here that we will. We'll try to get through as many as we can. So I'll start by asking a question that has come up perhaps to you both, is how do you account for the range of responses from different nations governments for these claims to restitution?
- [66:40]
C
I can only speak about Lithuania. Howard, you have much wider experience.
- [66:47]
A
I'm not exactly sure what the question entails, but I think there, as a result of the work of the US Government forming the Washington, creating the Washington Conference, and then having 44 nations adopt the principles. It was clearly a positive response from most countries. I think part of that was a result of some embarrassment and guilt at the way that many of these countries, having been given artworks and other cultural property from the allies that had been taken from the Nazis, were in so many cases taking the position that for one reason or another, the original owners should not recover these. And I think that was a hurt that was borne for decades and that many of the people who were now in government wanted to write that wrong.
- [67:53]
C
The situation, for if I could add one thing, the situation for the looted and saved materials of the YIVO Institute is a little bit different. Clearly, the Nazi materials had been looted and saved and needed to be restituted. But to where? To whom? That book from the 18th century was no law. You could not return that to its owner any longer. Most of the owners had been murdered in the Holocaust. YIVO was the only cultural institution of its sort to survive in the Holocaust. Holocaust. And so the US army made the idea, made the decision in 1946 to send it to New York. But the material that was in Lithuania, which made a great deal of sense in as much as Israel, didn't yet exist. But the material in Lithuania is different. There. The material wasn't looted by the Lithuanian government. In fact, the Lithuanian government protected the material and saved the material from 1948 until 1991. And so the situation is extremely complicated there also, because the Jewish community, because Yivo as a communal institution was not just the, the, Not just owned by one family or one person. It wasn't named as a single corporate entity. It was a communal institution. And therefore the materials of the Yivo institution belonged to all the people. And today the Jewish community, as small as it is in Lithuania, says these are our materials and they have to stay in Lithuania. And so sorting through all of that very difficult history and, and, and, and the legal claims involved will take a generation, at least, during which our materials would have completely continued to deteriorate and during which nobody would read them. And so we undertook this project hoping that in the future these problems will get sorted out.
- [70:33]
B
So along those lines, of the various complexities we deal with with cases like this, there's sort of a philosophical question of how should we weigh the need for the public display of these documents and art works of art with the rights of heirs to keep them in private collections or just to, you know, keep them as they, as they see fit? How do you balance those two challenges?
- [71:03]
A
During the course of our work, especially in the early years, many museums argued that wouldn't it be right for the descendants of the former owners of the artworks to donate all of these artworks to museums so that they could be seen by the general public? Our response generally to that was, well, do you ask all collectors and owners of art to contribute their artworks to museums? The answer is, in our view, that this was property owned by people. And although it may have taken decades and decades, the descendants of those people, the heirs of those owners, should get back to their property. And if they want to donate them to museums and all that, that's fine. But we never felt that there should be an obligation along those lines.
- [72:04]
B
Have there been instances, this is for you, Howard, of a resistance to restoration from the world's major museums that you have dealt with recently or in the past?
- [72:17]
A
Absolutely, absolutely. We've had many cases where, in fact, in almost every case that we've been involved in the work to recover these artworks, involved years and years of litigation, during which time museums often, you know, great museums in the world, and this is true of other cases that we haven't handled as well, have resisted giving these, this property back, have used so called technical defenses like the statute of limitations saying too much time has passed, that these, the heirs that are seeking the recovery were not the original survivors of the Holocaust.
- [73:06]
B
And
- [73:10]
A
shouldn't these objects better be seen by most of the public in our museums? So many museums have been very resistant, some have been wonderful. And you saw the example of the French just recently in just doing the right thing. And we always ask any collector or museum who's in possession of this looted work, shouldn't these go back? No matter how much time has passed, think of the history that we're trying to correct. But again, it has certainly not been the case for many, many museums around the world.
- [73:51]
B
Can either of you, if you can talk about, in addition to art, maybe say a bit more about efforts to recover valuable books, rare books, Judaica, that are currently underway or that you've encountered in recent times?
- [74:09]
C
If I could. Among the most important materials looted by the Nazis from the YIVO collection were five or six, I think, what are called incunabula, handwritten books from the 15th and 16th centuries. These are extraordinarily precious. We know they are unique because they're handwritten and they have never been recovered. We have on more than one occasion put out advertisements in various, you know, publications that circulate among bibliophiles and libraries and so on and so forth, and have never had any luck whatsoever in recovering it. So we, we don't, to be honest, we don't know what to do any, any longer in terms of attempting to do so. I assume it's in a safe. These materials are in a safe somewhere in Switzerland or elsewhere. It's really too bad. There are other important works from the Strashun Library of Vilna that became part of the YIVO collection that we in fact, have had success in collecting and getting back through dealers around the world. Sometimes in Israel, they will find a manuscript or a book that clearly belongs to yivo, it has the YIVO stamp, or is known to have been part of our collection, and we're able to Reassemble the collection.
- [76:02]
B
Howard, have you also dealt with Judaica Rare before?
- [76:06]
A
We have indirectly. But there's a well known case brought by the Chabad, which is the crew who sought to recover a remarkable collection of archives and books during and after the war. And they brought suit in the United States against Russia and Russia moved to dismiss the case on technical grounds. The court denied that motion and said the court will proceed. Russia, in its inimitable fashion, sent their lawyer to court the next day day who announced to the court that they do not recognize that the United States has any jurisdiction over the Soviet Union over Russia, and therefore will no longer participate in the lawsuit. The judge was rather miffed by this and ordered that there be a default judgment entered against Russia, including with the ability of the plaintiffs to go after any assets of Russia in the banks in the United States, of which there were a few. Quite, quite a lot. But the US Government was not that happy about that. So this case has been going on and on without a resolution right now. But those did involve books, valuable books.
- [77:20]
B
So, Howard, this question's for you. There are a number of questions about if one thinks one has a claim, how to begin that process, or how to find out if you do have that claim. And then perhaps you could talk a little bit about how you begin your process, what is the minimum amount of proof that you typically need in order to begin the claim, and how you go about it at the outset.
- [77:43]
A
The key to any of these cases is proving that the claimant, the plaintiff, his or her predecessors owned the works. It then becomes more complicated when the works have changed hands, especially in Europe, when the law regarding what happens to stolen property are different. In the US without getting into a very technical discussion. In many European countries, a good faith purchaser who did not know these were stolen can get good titles to certain artworks. That's not the case in the United States, but as I've mentioned, in the US There are certainly doctrines of too much time has passed which might prevent somebody from recovering these works. But the initial inquiry is always to prove without any question that the people you represent, their predecessors, owned this work. And usually that involves not so much work by us as lawyers, but researchers, art historians, and others of which there are many now who go through the archives, US archives as well as elsewhere to try to trace works, to find out who are the original owners, and then to find out who their descendants are. That usually occurs before we get actively involved, although we've used researchers to help establish those cases. Once that's established, we can then bring a claim.
- [79:16]
B
Sounds like a fascinating process to.
- [79:20]
A
Fascinating, frustrating, and very difficult.
- [79:25]
B
Jonathan, we have a question from Sam Norich. Could you speak more about the role of Emmanuel Zingeras, a leader of the Lithuanian Jewish community, about the restitution of Yivo's materials after 1990?
- [79:37]
C
Well, Zingeris was among those who argued that the Evo material should stay in Lithuania. And he did so on the basis, as far as I know, that the Lithuanian Jewish community had a claim to these materials because they were essentially communal materials and belonged to them. That all happened at a time before I became director of yivo. So my information about it is completely secondhand at this point, but I know that it was a very complicated role, particularly because he is one of the most outspoken and active members of that Jewish community and a member of parliament as well.
- [80:33]
B
Howard, I believe you touched upon this earlier, but there are a couple questions about how many cases are currently active, and perhaps this is harder to answer for you both. Jonathan, you touched upon this a bit. How many cases we think could be out there that might be a bit too abstract to answer, but if you both have any thoughts about that, why don't I start?
- [81:01]
A
There are always, I would say, a handful of cases that append seeking to recover Nazi looted art. And there are a handful now that have gone through the courts, the appellate courts. Some have just been brought. We're about to bring a claim that I can't talk about to recover artworks. Experts say that there are still about 100,000 artworks that were looted by the Nazis that have not been recovered for the original owners. So our expectation is that even though family members may pass on the interest in their children and their children's children in recovering, this work will continue, and this work will continue until, we hope, every artwork that has ever been looted will be discovered and returned.
- [81:58]
C
If I could add something about my own experience at yivo, I think we have absolutely no idea how much may still be out there. There may yet be materials that have remained hidden that we don't know anything about. The Nazis did, in fact, unfortunately, destroy a great deal of material. We don't know what it is. We have their inventory of what existed before the war, but unfortunately, they did an inventory room by room, which I have seen that was found. And they only say Yiddish theater, literary manuscripts, and so on and so forth. They don't itemize it. Obviously, they couldn't do that because they couldn't read Yiddish and they couldn't read Polish for the most part, or Russian. So we really don't know how much is out there, but I can tell you a story. I'll try to do it quickly. In 2014, I was giving a talk in Vilnius about this project and about these materials, and someone suggested that I go and visit the Wroblevsky Library. And she said, there may be something there you will find of interest. And I did. I went and sure enough, there was a long table of boxes, and at the end of it was the director of the library. And she said, please have a look at these materials. And I saw the Yivo stamp on them. And I said, well, what have you been doing with these materials? You've had them from 1948? She said, Yes. I said, what have you been doing with them? She said, we've been waiting. I said, what have you been waiting for? She said, well, we've been waiting for you. And you see, not me personally, obviously, but we don't know how much else might be waiting, might be waiting.
- [84:06]
B
It does feel like a good place to end. But I will ask one more quick question first to Howard and then to both of you. There's a question about what rules currently exist for museums. Do they have to mandate if there is no provenance for a particular work of art during the war years? Do they have to state that somewhere? Is there a policy in place? And a broader question I will add of my own to both of you is when you look to the near future, what would you like to see happen in terms of are there further policies, legislation, collaborations you would like to see happen that you think could bring more justice to the heirs of these documents and to the history itself? So first to you, Howard, if there are any mandates from museums, they have to list or acknowledge lack of provenance.
- [85:03]
A
The major museum corp, Major museum associations, of which many but not all museums are members, have adopted ethical rules that require that before acquiring work as to which there may be a question in terms of provenance relating to the Nazi seizures, that they carefully review this and not take into their collection works that were clearly stolen and by the Nazis. It's still. Well, I should say. In addition, most of the major museums have agreed to subscribe their holdings to see which artworks do they have that do not have clear provenance information between 1933 and 1945. That's raising the specter, although not proving that they might have been looted by the Nazis. These museums then place those on the Internet. I think I mentioned this so that those who might have claims would be able to come forward or at least provide information to the museum about this so they can shore up the provenance of these works. So those are two examples where museums are trying to find out more about what's in their holdings and try to avoid acquiring works that might be problematical.
- [86:44]
B
Jonathan, or to both of you in the near future. Are there initiatives you'd like to see or policies put in place or collaborations between institutions that could be fruitful for bringing more justice?
- [87:00]
C
Well, nothing, from my point of view, nothing will bring justice. There is only moving forward and trying to preserve what remains. And yivo's approach is to try to preserve the remnant of our heritage, the remnant of. Of our traditions, the remnant of our communal knowledge, into the future. And we don't do so just for institutional purposes. We do so because we believe this is the foundation of Jewish identity, that is to say, knowledge of its past. And so if there were anything that I would like to propose, I would like to propose that people come forward and help institutions such as Yivo. And Yivo is not the only one that has these materials in boxes that nobody reads and help these institutions, because by virtue of nobody reading them, they're lost again. They may have been found, but they're still lost. They're lost until people read them and understand them. And that is the function of a cultural institution, institution like Yivo. And whatever assistance can be given by governments or by individuals to foster the process of making these materials public free of charge and preserving them would be a tremendous burden to our enterprise.
- [88:33]
A
I would like to see the extension of. Of the ability of people to make claims in this area. The typical case right now depends on very valuable artworks being at issue, so that attorneys like ours, like our firm, can take on these cases with the prospect that, at the end of the
- [89:00]
C
day,
- [89:02]
A
these valuable works will be recovered and the clients who are otherwise not able to afford our services will be able to essentially pay us back. You know, contingency work. That's very commonly how these cases are financed, along with financing entities that help finance these cases. But this almost always involves extremely valuable artworks. And what I would like to see is perhaps a government agency that would allow claimants who are looking to recover works that aren't that valuable and can afford a lawyer to bring the case to have the government research the work and at their own expense, help these clients, help these individuals recover some of the less valuable works. Because there's a real hole, I think, in that because of the difference between the valuable works and the many, many, many others. Most others that. That are not that valuable. There are agencies, government agencies like the Holocaust Claims Processing Office, which is part of the New York State Banking Department, actually, which has spent many, many years working for those who do not have to hire lawyers, but have asked them to try to recover works for them. And although they can't go to court, this agency has affected settlements with governments and other entities to get some of these works back. And I think that's a really helpful development, but I think it should be done on a federal level.
- [90:46]
B
Wonderful. So I think that's a good place to end. I want to thank Jonathan and Howard again for these wonderful presentations. Thank you to Alyssa, Larry Kay and Harik Feinstein for partnering with us on the event and thank you to all of you for attending this panel. We hope you found it informative and enriching. You can Visit us@yivo.org for a list of upcoming courses and programs featuring scholars and world class guest lecturers and faculty. You can also become a YIVO member and join our global community and helping us to ensure we can continue to bring these programs to audiences around the world. So thank you again, Howard, for everything you've done for us today to share this important information and to Jonathan and we hope to see you all again soon.
- [91:38]
A
Thank you very much. Thanks.
- [91:45]
C
Sa.