HERITAGEThe Magazine of The American Jewish Historical Society | WINTER 2013

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THEFT &RECOVERY ODYSSEY OF A

MASTERPIECE

And much more…

AJHSAT 120

THE MONUMENTS MEN

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www.ajhs.org22

HERITAGEPRESIDENT’S LETTERPaul Warhit...................................................................4

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S LETTERJonathan Karp. ............................................................4

ABOUT THIS ISSUE .............................................5

HEROES OF CIVILIZATION:THE MONUMENTS MENby Robert M. Edsel ......................................................6

MONET’S WATER LILIES, 1904:A LONG JOURNEY HOMEby Charles Dellheim ................................................. 10

HARRY ETTLINGER:FROM REFUGEE TO MONUMENTS MANby Jonathan Karp ..................................................... 14

SEYMOUR POMRENZE & THE SPOILS OF WARby Adele Tauber ......................................................... 16

SAVING THE SACREDby Michael Feldberg ................................................. 24

THE AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY AT 120by Jeffrey S. Gurock .................................................. 28

NEWS FROM THE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVESby Susan Malbin ....................................................... 31

CHAIRMAN EMERITUSKenneth J. Bialkin

CO-CHAIRMENDaniel R. Kaplan

Sidney Lapidus

PRESIDENTPaul B. Warhit

VICE PRESIDENTSGeorge M. Garfunkel

Joshua Landes

Steven D. Oppenheim

SECRETARYLouise P. Rosenfeld

ASSISTANT SECRETARYNancy Polevoy

TREASURERSamuel R. Karetsky

ASSISTANT TREASURERAndrew Lewin

BOARD OFTRUSTEESStanley I. Batkin

Kenneth J. Bialkin

Ronald C. Curhan

Deborah Dash Moore

Ruth B. Fein

George M. Garfunkel

Michael G. Jesselson

Arnold H. Kaplan

Daniel R. Kaplan

Samuel R. Karetsky

Harvey M. Krueger

Joshua H. Landes

Sidney Lapidus

Andrew Lewin

Norman Liss

Bernard J. Michael

Jeffrey S. Oppenheim

Steven D. Oppenheim

Nancy T. Polevoy

Arnold J. Rabinor*

Louise P. Rosenfeld

Bruce Slovin

Jacob Stein

Joseph S. Steinberg

Morton M. Steinberg

Rabbi Lance J. Sussman

Ronald S. Tauber

Paul B. Warhit

Beth Wenger, ex-officio

Carey Robinson Wolchok

Justin L. Wyner

Toni Young

Hedy Zankel

Laurence Zuckerman

HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEESSheldon S. Cohen

Alan M. Edelstein

William M. Ginsburg *

Robert D. Gries

Philip Lax *

Edgar J. Nathan, III

Dr. Arthur S. Obermayer

Sue R. Warburg

Efrem Weinreb *

* of blessed memory

AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

A Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society

15 West 16th StreetNew York, NY 10011www.ajhs.org212-294-6160

Jonathan Karp, Executive DirectorMichael Feldberg, EditorJeff Kornstein, ControllerSusan Malbin, Director of Library & ArchivesDeborah Grossman, Associate Director of DevelopmentTanya Elder, Senior Archivist

Susan Woodland, Senior UJA Project ArchivistAndrey Filimonov, AASJM ArchivistEric Fritzler, Project ArchivistHeather Halliday, Photo and Reference ArchivistStephanie Halperin, Development AssociateChristine McEvilly, Digital Archivist & LibrarianMarvin Rusinek, Assistant ArchivistVital Zajka, Project Archivist

Design by Marshall Haber Creative Group

The Magazine of The American Jewish Historical Society

PHOTO CREDITS

p. 5 National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD)

p. 6-7 National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD)

p. 8 National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD)

p. 9 National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD)

p. 11 The Paul Rosenberg Gallery

p. 14 National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD)

p. 17 AJHS Seymour Pomrenze Collection

p. 19–20 Yad Vashem

p. 21 Top: Yad Vashem Bottom: Yad Vashem

p. 22 Top: Yad Vashem Bottom: AJHS Seymour Pomrenze Collection

p. 23 Yad Vashem

p. 24-5 National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD)

p. 28 Straus Historical Society

p. 29 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Heritage | Winter 2013 3

SAVING THE SACRED

24

HARRY ETTLINGER

14

AJHS 120TH ANNIVERSARY

28

MONET’S WATER LILIES, 1904

10

SEYMOUR POMRENZE & THE SPOILS OF WAR

16

THE MONUMENTS MEN

6

The Reversal of Nazi Plunder, pg. 23

PRESIDENT’S LETTERDear Friends,

Twenty years ago the journalist Richard Ben Cramer published his masterful account of the 1992 presidential election, What it Takes. Cramer’s title came to mind recently when I contemplated the long history of the American Jewish Historical Society. What did it take, I wondered, to keep a non-profit organization like the AJHS relevant and vital for 120 years?

At the very least, it took vision, skill, and commitment.

The AJHS has reflected a uniquely American vision, the idea that every group should preserve its distinct history, both as a matter of pride and as a way to illuminate the broader national narrative.

It has required the skill of a devoted team of professional archivists, laboring year after year, to make the millions of original documents preserved by the Society — the raw materials of American Jewish history — accessible to researchers, students, professors, filmmakers and life-long learners.

Thousands of supporters have demonstrated their commitment to the American Jewish past by paying annual membership dues, contributing to our fundraisers, attending events, and reading and disseminating this magazine and our scholarly journal, American Jewish History. They did so because they understood the power of Jewish history as expressed in the biblical injunction Zakhor – Remember.

There is a well-known Jewish folk expression, “May you live to be a hundred and twenty!” For an organization to survive for 120 years is rare, but we know what it takes to survive that long. It takes you. As we move into our “second lifetime,” we give thanks for your ongoing commitment and support.

Shalom,

In its 120th year, AJHS isn’t resting on its laurels. Although we hold more than 25 million documents covering over three hundred and fifty years of American Jewish History, we continue to acquire new materials almost every month. AJHS recently received an enormous cache of records from the UJA/Jewish Federation of New York, one of the most significant organizations in 20th-century Jewish communal life that has been at the heart of global Jewish philanthropy for the last eight decades. Making the collection’s approximately 4,000 boxes of records available to the public will entail a four-year project, generously funded by UJA/Federation and private donors. Along with

the records of Hadassah (housed at AJHS), those of the American Jewish Congress (vital to the history of civil rights and of Soviet Jewry), those of the Jewish Welfare Board (creator of the Jewish Community Center movement), and the preponderance of materials on the American Soviet Jewry Movement of the 1960s through the 1980s, AJHS has become a major center for the study of American Jewish politics and institutions.

But AJHS isn’t just for academic research. Our mission is also one of education through publications, exhibitions and public programs. In March 2013, we will launch jointly with the Yeshiva University Museum our sesquicentennial exhibition on Jews and the American Civil War, which will tour the country the following year. Meanwhile, our 2012 fall film series highlights the topic of American Jewish response to Nazi art theft and recovery, while our 4-part panel series hones in on the rich topic of Jews as “culture brokers” in such fields as art dealing, publishing, popular music and film.

Finally, the online Portal to American Jewish History has become AJHS’s signature project for the start of the 21st century. This undertaking marks an entirely new approach to archiving, the business we’ve been in all along. The Portal will make it possible through a simple one-click search to locate and identify essential information about historic records relating to the American Jewish experience at libraries and historical societies nationwide.

With the Portal and our other projects, AJHS at 120 truly remains “the future of the American Jewish past.”

Sincerely,

Paul Warhit

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S LETTER

Jonathan Karp

AA

ABOUT THIS ISSUEABOUT THIS ISSUEThis issue of HERITAGE features a section devoted to “The Monuments Men,” the scholar-soldiers who served in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section of the Allied forces during World War II. Articles by Monuments Men Foundation founder and President Robert Edsel and historian Charles Dellheim detail the reasons behind Jews’ involvement in art collecting and dealing, the activities of the Monuments Men to recover these stolen treasures and the fate of art works whose ownership has remained contested to the present day. On a related theme, Michael Feldberg recounts the moving story of the American Jewish Chaplains during World War II who made the recovery of Jewish sacred objects their special mission.

On November 1, 2012, AJHS presented its prestigious Emma Lazarus Statue of Liberty Award to Monuments Man Harry Ettlinger in recognition of the historic contributions of all of the Monuments men and women. In addition, the family of Colonel Seymour Pomrenze accepted the AJHS Legacy Award in memory of Col. Pomrenze (1916-2011), who recovered countless Jewish books confiscated by the Germans. HERITAGE offers intimate portraits of Ettlinger and Pomrenze, uncovering not just their activities during World War II and during the Holocaust, but their subsequent careers in service to Jewish and humanitarian causes.

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the American Jewish Historical Society. As Jeffrey Gurock’s overview of that history shows, the Society’s life has coincided with and supported the growth of American Jewish history as a bona fide academic field, while making it possible for the American Jewish experience to become part of our country’s broader national narrative.

It is fitting that this issue of HERITAGE highlights the brave individuals who did so much to keep our collective cultural and religious heritage alive. We are proud to mark the occasion of our 120th anniversary by telling both their story and ours.

&

Monuments Man Lieutenant Commander,

James Rorimer (center left) supervises art restoration

7

HEROES OF

CIVILIZATION : THE MONUMENTS MEN

BY ROBERT M. EDSEL

ON APRIL 2, 1946, THE TRUSTEES

OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF

ART ELECTED GENERAL EISENHOWER

TO BE AN HONORARY FELLOW FOR

LIFE. THE CITATION, READ ALOUD

TO A CROWD OF 10,000 PEOPLE

JAMMED INTO THE MUSEUM’S STAIRS

AND HALLWAYS HOPING TO CATCH A

GLIMPSE OF THE VICTORIOUS ALLIED

LEADER, LAUDED “DWIGHT DAVID

EISENHOWER, SOLDIER, DIPLOMAT, AND STATESMAN, THROUGH WHOSE

WISDOM AND FORESIGHT IRREPLACEABLE

ART TREASURES WERE SAVED FOR

FUTURE GENERATIONS.”

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WINTER 2013

Francis Henry Taylor, Director of the Met and a contributor to the early concept of cultural preservation officers as war threatened, stated that the award went “to the man who, more responsible than any other, has made it possible for the world of great civilizations in the past to continue for future generations.” Ike, as ever, deflected such praise. “The credit belongs to the officers and men of the combat echelons whose veneration for priceless treasures persisted, even in the heat and fears of battle.” Who were these men and women who had served so nobly in the protection of the arts? How did such a unit come into being?

Five years earlier, following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, key American museum personnel and scholars set in motion plans that by June 1943 resulted in the creation of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, known as the “Roberts Commission.” Realizing the danger to the cultural wealth of western civilization posed by war, the Commission quickly announced the formation of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section. Museum curators, artists, architects, educators and librarians volunteered and entered military service to protect

churches and historic structures in the path of combat, as well as effect temporary repairs when possible. This marked the first time an army fought a war on such a vast scale while mitigating damage to cultural treasures.

The operation began badly. The first Monuments officer didn’t reach Sicily until three weeks after the invasion. Hitchhiking became a common mode of transport, just one of many problems that plagued their efforts. Much of what the earliest arriving Monuments officers accomplished in Italy occurred as a result of personal initiative and ingenuity. The

experience of the dozen or so Monuments Men who arrived in France a month after the D-Day landings proved similarly frustrating. They too persevered. A decisive step taken by General Eisenhower – the issuance of orders stating, “We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows” – finally took hold. While the resources available to them improved only moderately, the Monuments officers benefited from the specific endorsement of their mission by the Supreme Commander.

Only when the Monuments Men shifted their attention from protective work to locating and saving the cultural treasures

of western civilization did the full extent of the Nazis’ elaborate and premeditated looting operation become known. Hidden in salt mines, caves and castles were paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, sculptures by Michelangelo and Donatello, church bells from cathedrals throughout Europe, more than 1,000 Torah scrolls, and millions of library books from the continent’s most revered centers of learning. It became the greatest treasure hunt in history, one that continues to this day.

The end of the war meant millions of America’s fighting forces were going home, but the work of returning these stolen objects had just begun. The Monuments officers quickly established collecting points to house the hundreds of thousands of cultural items, art treasures, and religious artifacts, some in very fragile condition, being removed from Nazi repositories throughout Germany and Austria. Paintings and sculpture belonging to the great museums of Florence reached the Tuscan capital in July 1945. Further north, General Eisenhower ordered the immediate return of the most iconic works of art to their respective countries, rather than individual owners, until a more comprehensive restitution process could be implemented. Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece and Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna soon departed for Belgium. Stained glass windows belonging to the Strasbourg Cathedral, and select paintings – many stolen from Jewish and non-Jewish private collectors in France and the Netherlands – followed.

Over the next six years, the Monuments Men and women continued to oversee the complicated process of restitution while helping to rebuild cultural life in Germany and Italy by organizing temporary art exhibitions. By 1951, with the closing of the last of the collecting points, the Monuments officers had overseen the return of more than five million cultural items. The detailed inventories and photographs they created then continued to make possible much of the restitution of stolen artworks today.

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AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The service of these remarkable men and women didn’t end in Europe. Upon returning home, many played prominent roles in building some of our nation’s most important cultural and educational institutions. They became directors and curators of world-renowned museums, such as the Met, MOMA, National Gallery of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; professors at esteemed universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, and Williams; and founders of pioneering organizations, including the New York City Ballet. Two men who would have made such contributions didn’t return home, both killed in action doing their job of protecting works of art. Their loss made it awkward for the others to trumpet their accomplishments, one of the many reasons the work of the Monuments Men hasn’t been more widely known until now.

The policy of the Western Allies – approved by President Roosevelt, implemented by General Eisenhower, and executed by the Monuments officers – established the gold standard for the protection of cultural treasures during armed conflict. But memory of this noble achievement over time faded. The aftermath of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in 2003 demonstrated how quickly a legacy of honor could be replaced by a moment of ignorance. Sixty-five years ago, in what proved to

be a foretelling observation, Monuments officer Edith Standen, former Curator of Textiles at the Met, wisely observed, “It isn’t enough to be virtuous, we must also appear to be so.”

In his closing remarks at the Met, General Eisenhower told the audience, “It is our privilege to pass on to the coming centuries treasures of past ages and to add to these the artistic creations of our own.” Almost seventy years later, we as a nation cannot regain the cultural high ground established by the titans of the twentieth century – Roosevelt, Churchill and Eisenhower – without respecting the patrimony of others. The challenge of preserving cultural property from threats of all types, in particular armed conflict, will only increase in importance in the coming years. Failure to be prepared will be attended by consequences no nation will find affordable or acceptable.

For these reasons, I founded The Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. Its mission is to preserve and make broadly known the legacy of the unprecedented and heroic work of those men and women, a legacy that belongs not just to Americans, but to people of goodwill in all countries. The Foundation also continues the work of the Monuments Men to locate and return some of the hundreds of thousands of artistic, cultural, and historic treasures and

documents stolen during World War II.

Since its inception in 2007, the Monuments Men Foundation has received numerous honors and awards. Certainly one highlight involved an invitation to the White House, where the President of the United States presented the Foundation with the National Humanities Medal, our nation’s highest honor for work in the humanities. Four Monuments officers stood beside me that day, including the two men honored by the American Jewish Historical Society, Harry Ettlinger and Colonel Seymour Pomrenze.

President John F. Kennedy once said: “A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.” Recognition by the American Jewish Historical Society of these two fine men – Colonel Seymour Pomrenze and Harry Ettlinger – and the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, honors the legacy of the Monuments men and women. It also reminds us of the importance of all they accomplished, and what work remains to be done now, and in the future.

Robert M. Edsel is author of The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (2010) and founder and President of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art.

Monuments officers with da Vinci’s

Lady with an Ermine

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W ater Lilies, 1904 was neither the greatest nor the grandest painting exhibited in the

1998 “Monet in the Twentieth Century” show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, but it surely became the most controversial. The exhibition catalogue provided no hint of any irregularity in its provenance. It stated simply that No. 27 was “recovered after World War II and placed in trust with the Musées Nationaux de France, Caen.” This apparently innocent notation begged several essential questions: “recovered” how and why, from whom and by whom; and “placed in trust” for what purpose?

The answers to these questions reside at the bloody crossroads of 20th-century art and politics. Countless pictures were plundered from or sold under duress by Europe’s Jews during the Nazi era. They were acquired, by hook or by crook, by ignorant or unscrupulous governments, museums, dealers, and collectors. Monet’s Water Lilies, 1904 was among them. Its history under the Nazis and afterwards has opened a window to the rise and fall of Jews in the art world in the 20th century and to the battles over restitution of their looted collections in the past two decades.

W ater Lilies, 1904 was one of a series of celebrated water landscapes (les Nymphéas)

that Monet painted at his home at Giverny, forty miles west of Paris. He produced more than 250 finished canvases depicting the pond at Giverny during sundry times and seasons. Pushing impressionism to its aesthetic limits, he captured the pond’s constantly shifting water landscapes and the blend of French and African water lilies floating on its surface. “The essence

of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance alters at every moment,” Monet noted.

The water lilies series was first exhibited in Paris in spring 1909. The show was a critical and commercial success (among the enthralled visitors was Marcel Proust). Although Water Lilies, 1904 did not initially sell, it caught the eye of the Director of Paris’s Gobelin tapestry works. He borrowed the painting for three years in order to copy it, and then returned it to Monet. The artist eventually sold it to a discerning private collector, Dr. Henry Vasquez. Sometime in the late 1920s, the Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg purchased Water Lilies, 1904 for 85,000 francs.

Rosenberg was representative of a host of Jewish families — including the Wildensteins, Gimpels, Duveens, and Bernheims — who rose to prominence as art dealers and collectors in the late-19th and 20th centuries. Acute financial problems drove landed aristocrats to sell off massive numbers of old master paintings. In addition, the French Academy and the Salon failed to acknowledge new artists and styles, above all Edouard Manet and the Impressionists. These were the essential factors that undermined the old order’s grip on the art world and presented an unexpected opportunity for outsiders, such as Jews.

The economic culture and social ambitions of certain Jews allowed them to take advantage of these changes. Art dealing, like many of the businesses in which Jews clustered, offered competitive advantages to family firms and ethnic networks, growing opportunities for international

trading, low barriers to entry, and relative geographical mobility – characteristics that Jews as outsiders had possessed for centuries. Furthermore, involvement with fine art enabled Jews to associate themselves with both the ideals of the nation and with the broader symbols of European culture.

Alexandre Rosenberg, who founded the family firm that his son Paul eventually ran, was a grain trader (originally from the Czech lands) who became an art dealer only after a shipping accident bankrupted him. He was, like many founders of important galleries, a commercial middleman who applied what he had learned in more ordinary trades to art dealing. He made 19th-century French masters the specialty of his flourishing business.

His son Paul was as canny and commercial as he looked. His old school friend and fellow dealer René Gimpel described him as “no fool, with a face like a short-muzzled fox. His cheekbones were prominent and grained.” Unlike his idealistic but impractical elder brother Léonce, Paul long eschewed Cubist art because he considered it unsalable, if not incomprehensible. He was more comfortable carrying on where his father had left off, trading more mainstream 19th-century French artists from the Barbizon School to the Impressionists.

Nevertheless, in 1917-18, with the end of the First World War in sight, Paul became increasingly interested in contemporary art. He became Picasso’s and then Matisse’s dealer. He saw an opportunity to commercialize the avant-garde by bringing it from the margins to the mainstream. In

MONET’S WATER LILIES,1904:A LONG JOURNEY HOMEBy Charles Dellheim

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AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

his gallery at 21, rue la Boétie (the street for art dealers in the interwar years), Paul fused modernism with classical aristocratic French elegance. He tried to canonize — and sell — the work of his artists by arguing for the continuity of 19th and 20th-century French painting.

During the 1920s and 30s, the incursion of Jews into an art world previously controlled by Christians

provoked or became a pretext for a furious backlash from reactionaries, and then fascists. Most Jewish dealers were secular individuals, more interested in assimilating into French culture than cleaving to Jewish traditions. Even so, their loyalty to France was no defense against anti-Semitic critics who blamed them for all the alleged ills of the art world. “Jews can be reproached for having introduced to the commerce of paintings strategies of dishonesty and corruption,” noted right-wing art critic and Vichy collaborator Camille Mauclair.

In Nazi Germany, Jews became the principal scapegoat for antagonism to modernism. This came to the fore in the notorious 1937 Munich show of confiscated modern “Degenerate Art” works. It culminated in the massive looting of Jewish-owned

works of art. Art looting was nothing new in history, but the Nazi case was unique. The plunder of Jewish-owned collections attempted, in part, to reverse the triumph of modernism and assert the proprietorship of the old masters. It deprived Jews of all cultural rights and any claim to belong to European civilization. What also set apart Nazi art looting was a combination of scale, planning, organization, ideology, and, above all, racial theory. Looting began in Germany and Austria and spread to every country overrun by Hitler’s forces, from the Netherlands to Poland. It provided the Nazis with enormously valuable works of art that they could exchange for old masters with a suitably Northern, “Aryan” provenance, or sell for hard currency that helped fuel the war effort.

The disastrous fall of France in June 1940 was especially threatening to French Jews, including the denizens of the art world. Armed with a list of the fifteen leading Jewish art dealers and their holdings, German officials ordered the French police to provide vans to transport the rich inventory of art they intended to confiscate. During the German Occupation, Nazis and French collaborators looted approximately 100,000 art works owned by Jews. They “aryanized” their galleries, granting control to non-Jewish owners.

Paul Rosenberg, like many of his fellows, tried to safeguard his family collection. Luckily for him, many of his Picassos were on exhibition in the United States when the war broke out. Rosenberg and his family headed south to a villa in Floriac, a village near Bordeaux. He kept about 100 pictures with him while sending others to a warehouse in Tours, where he registered them under a non-Jewish name. He also dispatched 162 paintings to a neighboring town, Libourne, and stored them in the National Bank for Commerce and Industry. This treasure trove included works by Matisse, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Renoir.

Despite the risks he faced as a Jew, the

patriotic Rosenberg wanted to remain in France. After the Germans invaded Paris on June 14, 1940, he and his wife held a family council along with her sisters and their husbands, the Helfts, antique dealers who were Paul’s partners in a London gallery. They reluctantly decided to flee France and traveled by car through the night to Hendaye, on the Spanish border. Three days later, they crossed into Spain, and finally into Portugal, where Rosenberg obtained an American visa with the help of Paul Sachs, the influential director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum and an originator of the Monuments Men idea. By September 1940, Rosenberg was in New York, setting up his new gallery.

His family was safe, but he did not know if the same was true of the art he left in France. The Bordeaux moving company that he had hired to send paintings to New York continued to delay. Then, at 8 am on the morning of September 15th, German police arrived at Rosenberg’s Floriac villa and ransacked his art. Two Parisian art dealers in cahoots with the Bordeaux moving company had tipped off the Germans in return for ten percent of the theft’s proceeds.

It was only in March 1941 that Rosenberg learned what had happened. “Everything is gone, gone, gone,” his assistant informed him by letter. The Nazis had looted not only his villa, but the paintings he had stored in the bank vault at Libourne. The art was sent to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the museum that became one of the Germans’ favorite repositories for plundered art.

Monet’s Water Lilies, 1904 was among the looted paintings. It attracted the attention of the acquisitive German Foreign Minister, Joahim von Ribbentrop. This self-styled cultural aristocrat (a commoner who had purchased the “von” in his name) had amassed a collection of tapestries and rugs that impressed Hitler himself, along with Austro-Bavarian genre paintings that suited Nazi taste. Unlike most Nazis, though, Ribbentrop appreciated modern art and was

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powerful enough to ignore its “degenerate” status. And so von Ribbentrop appropriated Water Lilies, 1904 along with other pictures he never paid for. He did not live to enjoy Monet’s water landscape for long, however. In 1946, von Ribbentrop was executed for war crimes.

The fate of stolen art treasures received considerable attention as World War II was ending. The

effort to recoup Nazi art loot, which began after D-Day, was led by “Monuments Men,” art historians and curators who became Allied military officers. Their mission had more to do with rescuing Europe’s aesthetic legacy than with recouping and returning individual property. They knew, of course, that the Nazis’ principal victims were of Jewish origin, but their military brief emphasized recovery over restitution. They were required to repatriate Nazi stolen art to the country from which it was looted, rather than to the actual owner. This left the door open for considerable abuse. The formerly occupied powers had, to varying degrees, aided and abetted German plunder of Jewish property as well as the mass deportation and murder of Jews. Now, they would become owners of the spoils.

In late 1944, soon after the Allied Liberation, the French Commission de Récuperation Artistique (C.R.A), was founded to retrieve, identify and finally return looted works to their owners – an obligation not taken on by the Monuments Men. This was an immensely difficult task, in part because of the sheer quantity of claims. Determining ownership was the nub of the problem; refugees often lacked the necessary documentation to corroborate their claims. It was particularly hard to sort out whether sales were forced or “voluntary” because many Jewish collectors had sold art in hope of saving themselves and their families. Nor was there a simple answer regarding what to do with “ownerless art” that had belonged to the slaughtered dead. Despite these difficulties, the CRA returned

around 45,000 works to their owners, many of whom were major dealers.

But restitution had its limits, as the case of Water Lilies, 1904 shows. The painting survived the war, but was discovered only by chance in Hamburg in 1949. Frau von Ribbentrop claimed that the painting had been purchased legitimately, but it was clear that the Monet had been looted. Water Lilies, 1904, like thousands of other stolen works, therefore reverted to the French government.

Paul Rosenberg managed to recover numerous stolen pictures from his collection before his death in 1959, but Water Lilies, 1904 eluded him. This was not for lack of trying; he registered his claim for this and other pictures with the French authorities. He turned for assistance as well to Rose Valland, the heroic French curator at the Louvre who had helped protect looted paintings that were stored by the Nazis in the Jeu de Paume. When Water Lilies, 1904 finally returned to Paris, however, the Commission was being disbanded. The painting was relegated to the Musée Nationaux de France. It was reportedly on display at various times at the Jeu de Paume from 1950 to 1973. And it was loaned out too for the occasional exhibit abroad before being dispatched to Boston for the “Monet in the Twentieth Century” exhibition.

The flurry of interest in Nazi stolen art faded soon after the Second World War. It was only in the

1990s that restitution surfaced again as an important public issue, largely because of growing public consciousness of the

Holocaust. Nazi art looting, long viewed in terms of national artistic legacies, now became a recognized chapter in a Jewish tragedy. Nazi stolen art became a “site of memory.” The ageing of survivors and their children made them particularly eager to recover the palpable remains of a shattered Jewish legacy. The immense rise in art prices made the prospect of recovery even more appealing for survivors or their heirs and attracted the attention of lawyers and art detectives. Finally, the work of journalists and scholars brought attention to the story of Nazi art looting and the failure of governments and museums to return plundered works after the war.

Jewish communal organizations took up the issue of art restitution in connection with the campaign to recover “Nazi gold” from Swiss banks. In 1997, the World Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Restitution Organization established the Commission on Art Recovery. American federal and local officials pressured European governments to return Nazi stolen art. It was in this atmosphere that the case of Water Lilies, 1904 came to the fore.

The search for Paul Rosenberg’s missing pictures was left to his son Alexandre’s widow Elaine and daughter Elizabeth Rosenberg Clark. A happy accident led Mrs. Rosenberg to seek out the missing Monet. The historian Jonathan Petropoulos paid her a social visit in New York and gave her a copy of his new book on Nazi art policy. Her assistant leafed through its pages and let out a “Eureka scream” when she saw a photograph of the stolen Monet indicating that von Ribbentrop had seized it for his private collection.

In July 1998, the Rosenbergs contacted the recently established Art Loss Register (a commercial company that established a Holocaust-claims detective service) in search of the 58 pictures still missing from their collection. Within a month, its researchers discovered that Water Lilies, 1904 was in Caen, France. When Mrs. Rosenberg

“THEPAINTINGSURVIVED THE WAR”

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contacted officials there, they confirmed that they “owned” the painting and informed her that it was presently en route to the Boston exhibition. It is hard to believe that they were unaware of the Monet’s murky history.

In late November 1998, the “Monet in the Twentieth Century” exhibition attracted extraordinary attention. As visitors paid the $15 admission fee to the “blockbuster” show, Boston Globe journalist Walter V. Robinson revealed that Water Lilies, 1904had been plundered from Rosenberg by the Nazis. Museum of Fine Arts officials, like their French counterparts, were reluctant to believe there was anything amiss with the ownership of Water Lilies, 1904. Despite considerable publicity about France’s failure to return looted art, even major museums could ignore glaring gaps in provenance.

The Rosenbergs did not want to turn the case of the looted Monet into a Holocaust issue, but Jewish communal officials felt differently. Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress and Leonard Zakim of the New England office of the Anti-Defamation

League demanded the return of what the former described as “the last prisoners of war.”

The Museum of Fine Arts responded to the growing scandal by affixing a new plaque to the pillaged Monet. Its new explanation of the water landscape’s history mentioned, but did not confirm, the Rosenberg claim. The MFA repeated the French government’s initial insistence that it had exhibited the painting “in order to facilitate its identification.”

The pressure on the French government to return the stolen Monet mounted during the next few months as they investigated, and finally accepted, the Rosenberg claim. Finally, on April 29, 1999, nearly sixty years after the Germans had looted Paul Rosenberg’s Floriac villa, France returned Water Lilies, 1904 to its heirs. The ceremony took place in Paris at the Jeu de Paume, presided over by Catherine Trautmann, the French Minister of Culture. She considered the site “highly symbolic,” for so many great paintings and so much stolen

art had been housed there. It will always be a mystery, she said, why neither Rosenberg nor French officials were able to identify the work. This did not satisfy Hector Feliciano, the American journalist whose 1998 book The Lost Museum had assailed the French for their failure to return Nazi stolen art to its rightful owners. ‘’The big mystery is why the Government had pictures for 50 years that didn’t belong to them.”

There is good reason to welcome the long-postponed recovery of Nazi stolen art. But the danger is that this quest may distract us from remembering stolen lives. The darkly enthralling story of how Nazis got their hands on Jewish-owned art collections should not obscure what their owners accomplished as collectors, dealers, critics and arbiters of great art. The story of Water Lilies, 1904 reminds us that Jews were actors in European civilization, not simply its victims.

Charles Dellheim is Professor of History and Director of the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University.

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Harry Ettlinger was waiting for me outside his home in Rockaway Township, New Jersey when I pulled into the driveway. He nodded sternly at my apology for arriving late and escorted me to his apartment in the attractive senior living complex.

The apartment was comfortable, even a little large for a single resident (Harry’s children were long grown and his beloved wife Mimi had died a decade earlier). The walls of the den were adorned with awards and testimonials: a distinguished service award from the Jewish War Veterans; an honorary

doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design; a letter of commendation from Rear Admiral John T. Mitchell for Harry’s years of service as a lead engineer for the Astronautics Corporation of America; and a certificate of appreciation from the Committee to Honor Raoul Wallenberg, the foundation for which Ettlinger has long served as co-chair.

A refugee from Nazi Germany, Harry came to the United States in the fall of 1938, leaving just one day after his bar mitzvah (the last such ritual performed in his

hometown of Karlsruhe) in the month prior to Kristallnacht. It marked the end of a long family sojourn in southwest Germany. The Ettlinger-Oppenheimer clan traced its line back to 15th-century Baden and Wurttemberg, their high quality women’s clothing business at one time serving the palace of the local archduke. They were proud of their German-Jewish heritage and its strict behavioral codes. “If you were an Ettlinger, you were on time,” he pointedly told me. “My uncle considered himself late if he was a half hour early,” he added. The sting of his rebuke at my own tardiness

HARRY ETTLINGER:FROM REFUGEE TO MONUMENTS MANBy Jonathan Karp

Self Portrait by Rembrandt, inspected by Monuments Men

Dale V. Ford and Harry Ettlinger (right)

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AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

that day was quickly soothed, however, by Harry’s admission that his late wife’s family, like my own of Eastern European origin, had not been quite so punctual. “If you invited them for lunch, they might show up for dinner.”

The transition to life in Depression-era America proved a difficult one for his parents. Advised by friends to reestablish his retail business in Illinois or Iowa, Ettlinger’s father instead settled the family in Newark, New Jersey. “My father had great difficulties earning a living. He used to go to Philadelphia to sell atlases door to door.” Only with America’s entry into the war did work finally become available. “My father became a night watchman and my mother became a drill press operator for a jewelry outfit, drilling little holes to hold diamonds. It was a complete change in lifestyle. We kids didn’t talk about it.”

The war also afforded Harry an opportunity to fight for his adopted country and avenge those who had inflicted terrible suffering on his family and community. Six months after the invasion of Normandy, Harry found himself on a truck with his squadron of eight men, among 25,000 other G.I.’s being shipped to the frontlines. Two months later, three of his eight squadron buddies were killed and the other five seriously wounded in the Battle of the Bulge.

But fate intervened to pluck Harry from the convoy on the eve of battle. His native command of the German language meant he would be more useful as a translator and interrogator (services he later performed at the Nuremberg trials), and he was sent to Munich. There Harry was offered the opportunity to serve with the Monuments Men, the soldier-scholars tasked with locating and then protecting and restoring art which had been displaced or looted by the Nazis during the war.

Harry became the assistant to arguably the most important and certainly the most dynamic of the Monuments Men, Lieutenant Commander James Rorimer. Later Director

of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the imperious Rorimer assigned Harry (along with Lieutenant Dale V. Ford) the job of recovering the art treasures the Nazis had buried deep underground in the salt mines of Heilbronn-Kochendorf, located about 100 kilometers northeast of Harry’s birthplace. Inside the mines, Harry discovered not just tens of thousands of art works, but also hidden chambers that were booby-trapped with nitroglycerin. “The Germans figured if they weren’t going to keep these treasures neither would we.”

He supervised the removal of the most famous of the works buried there: the stained glass windows of the Strasbourg Cathedral, which General Eisenhower ordered to be returned immediately to France. As Monuments Men historian Robert Edsel remarks, “Harry also accompanied Rorimer to the Castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, which contained more than 20,000 paintings stolen from Jewish collectors and families in France.”

The decision to restore art works to their countries of origin went above even Eisenhower. The Roberts Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, established by Roosevelt in 1943, asserted the novel proposition that to the victors do not go the spoils of war. As Harry emphasized, “That’s not to say that American soldiers didn’t steal things — don’t misunderstand me — but the policy of this government was unique. Number one, we’re not going to take things like the Russians did. And, to boot, we prepared ourselves to govern German

municipalities after the war until we could find replacements. So I was assigned to one of these military governments. The commanding officer, Colonel Montgomery from Westfield, New Jersey, became the Mayor of Heilbronn.”

The salt mines weren’t used only to store art. James Rorimer had learned that the Nazis built underground factories there for the manufacture of jet engines. “If they had been successful, WWII would have lasted one to two more years,” Harry notes. The Germans used Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz as slave laborers in these factories.

Although Harry’s career would later revolve around the design and production of advanced missile systems, what affected him most about Heilbronn was the pathetic saga of these condemned Jews. Years later, when he learned the story of Raoul Wallenberg, the wealthy Swede who tried to rescue Hungary’s Jews, Harry remembered the Jews of Heilbronn and determined to devote his retirement to honoring Wallenberg’s legacy. “I’m co-chair of a foundation that, instead of looking back, recognizes middle and high school students for emulating Wallenberg’s character.”

Looking forward is what continues to drive Harry Ettlinger. When asked about the true significance of the Monuments Men, he doesn’t celebrate past glories. “This concept embodied by the Roberts Commission and the Marshall Plan, that we should treat our fellow human beings with respect not only as individuals but also in terms of their culture, was a very powerful lesson that I’ve learned.”

(On November 1, 2012, Harry Ettlinger accepted the America Jewish Historical Society’s prestigious Emma Lazarus Statue of Liberty Award on behalf of all the Monuments Men.)

Jonathan Karp is Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society and Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Binghamton University, SUNY.

“IF [THE GERMANS] WEREN’T GOING TO KEEP THESE TREASURES,

NEITHER WOULD WE”.

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SEYMOURPOMRENZE

THE

SPOILSOF WAR&

By Adele Tauber

IT WAS THE GREATEST BOOK RESTITUTION IN WORLD

HISTORY OF WHAT WE CALL ‘THE SPOILS OF WAR.’

CAPT. SEYMOUR POMRENZE,DIRECTOR, OFFENBACH ARCHIVAL DEPOT

Capt. Seymour Pomrenze, 1946

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In a secret report of 8 April 1945, a lieutenant in the American Army mentioned that “north of Frankfurt, in

the small village of Hungen, a tremendous collection of Jewish cultural treasures and other objects are stored away that were looted by the Nazis from formerly occupied countries.” The lieutenant had stumbled upon a cache of materials stolen by the ERR, the Einsatzab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. This was the library of the Institut zur Erforshcung der Judenfrage— the Institute for Exploration of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. These materials had been relocated from Frankfurt to the countryside village of Hungen to protect them from destruction by the Allied bombing of Frankfurt in 1943 and 1944.

Headquartered in Berlin, the ERR was formed in July, 1940 by Alfred Rosenberg (and named after himself) to wage ideological warfare against the enemies of the Third Reich –Jews, Freemasons, Socialists and Communists. Rosenberg was authorized by Hitler to establish “research libraries” that would comprise a future Hohe Schule, a post-war Nazi University dedicated to Nazi ideology and research into enemy thinking. The Institute for Exploration of the Jewish Question, one of the Schule’s libraries, provided a “scholarly” front for wholesale ERR looting.

The ERR set up shop across Nazi occupied Europe, both East and West— in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Belgrade, Riga, Kiev, Vilna and Minsk—and sacked the Continent. Rosenberg’s archival commandos entered Jewish homes, archival institutions, Masonic lodges, libraries, museums and institutes, confiscating books and cultural objects and depositing them at ERR collecting points for shipment to Berlin. By the end of the war in March, 1945, the holdings of the Institute for Exploration of the Jewish Question were estimated to be somewhere between 1,500,000 to 2,500,000 volumes confiscated from Jewish and Masonic collections all over Europe.

The Allied defeat of Germany in May, 1945 resulted in the division of Germany into

four separate occupation zones—American, British, French, and Russian. United States policy toward looted Nazi property in its military zone was “rapid restitution to the country of origin.” To achieve this aim, the U.S. Army established the Offenbach Collecting Point in July, 1945 on the site of the I.G. Farben industrial complex in Offenbach Am Main. The first Director of Offenbach, Captain Seymour Pomrenze, a young 29-year-old archivist with only 9 months of work experience, formulated an operating plan for identifying and sorting cases of books that resulted in the “processing—receiving and/or shipping—of more than 1.8 million items contained in 2,251 crates, stacks, packages and piles” during the first month of his two month tenure at Offenbach from March to May, 1946. Captain Pomrenze changed the name of the facility from Offenbach Collecting Point to Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD) in March, 1946 to reflect his use of archival principles in organizing and operating the depot.

The challenge posed by the massive materials at Offenbach resonated for Pomrenze on both an historical and personal level. By preserving, saving and restituting millions of books, archives and cultural items looted by the Nazis, Seymour Pomrenze actively participated in world history, reversing the flow of Nazi plunder and establishing Offenbach as the antithesis of the ERR. Pomrenze’s ability to insure the spiritual survival of annihilated Jewish communities by preserving their cultural remnants provided him with a gratifying sense of serving both the Jewish people and Jewish history. And on a more personal level, Seymour Pomrenze’s work of restoration and preservation embodied the Jewish concept of tikkun olam(repairing the world) — an antidote to the murder of his father in a Russian pogrom in 1919.

Seymour Pomrenze served 34 years of active and reserve service with the Army, retiring in 1976 with the rank of Colonel. He considered his two month tenure at Offenbach, performed as a “little captain,” to be the highlight of his Army career. Pomrenze continued working well into his nineties as a consultant in records management for numerous Jewish organizations, such as UJA/Jewish Federation of New York, HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant

Aid Society), and the Jewish Community Centers Association. He received numerous military awards during Army service, including a Bronze Star medal for his service in Vietnam, the Legion of Merit, and the Netherlands Government Silver Medal of Honor for facilitating Dutch restitution at Offenbach. In 2007, President George Bush presented Colonel Pomrenze

with the National Humanities Award in a White House ceremony honoring his restitution work at Offenbach. In a speech marking 2012 Holocaust Remembrance Day, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta paid tribute to Pomrenze, the only Monuments Man mentioned by name at the observance, and described him as a “hero whose actions embodied the professionalism and dedication of the uniform he wore.”

Viewing the images in the photo essay that follows, the reader can better understand the monumentality of the work at Offenbach and Pomrenze’s role in leading it. The hand-written captions under the photos were written in 1946 by a US Army photographer. The typewritten text accompanying the photos are transcriptions of the oral history account I gathered in numerous interviews with Pomrenze between 1999 and 2007.

Adele Tauber is a lawyer and historian. She worked as an attorney for the Federal Government and now writes family histories.

“LOOTED BY THE

NAZIS FROMFORMERLY OCCUPIED

COUNTRIES.”

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THE OFFENBACH ARCHIVAL DEPOT WAREHOUSESeymour Pomrenze: I arrived at

Offenbach at the end of February, 1946

in the midst of a blinding snowstorm.

The Offenbach Depot was housed in

a five-story warehouse that had been

confiscated from the I.G. FARBEN

Conglomerate. IG FARBEN was

notorious for using Jewish slave labor

during the war and for manufacturing

the gas used at Auschwitz. It was ironic

that the organization that had enslaved

Jews was now protecting the cultural

remnants of its victims.

Good working conditions were essential

to the success of the Offenbach

operation, so we fixed up the warehouse

and made it a desirable place to work.

We fixed the windows, cleaned the

floors and I installed an American flag.

Every day the children would raise the

American flag, and of course, when

I went by, they greeted me, “Yavol,

yavol, Herr Hauptmann—Captain.. Yavol

means, “yes, sir, yes, sir.” You see, they

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CONFRONTING THECULTURAL HOLOCAUSTSeymour Pomrenze: I got out of my

jeep and entered the Farben building

that was silent as a morgue. I walked

around very slowly. Almost immediately,

I came face to face with tragedy.

No amount of briefing could have

prepared me for what I encountered.

Here, under one roof, were the pitiful

remains of the Jewish people scattered

miserably over five floors. I felt faint.

As I moved about the building from

top to bottom, I saw hundreds, if not,

thousands of Jewish ritual items ... In

one corner, I saw torah scrolls piled in

huge heaps, one on top of the other,

some on the ground and some on

makeshift shelves. I saw books, some

in crates and some uncrated, some

wrapped in small packages and some

unwrapped; open volumes and closed

volumes haphazardly scattered across

the warehouse floor. In my mind’s

eye, I envisioned the Nazis breaking

into synagogues and Jewish homes,

murdering the families and stealing

the very objects lying before me. I was

stunned... I wanted to cry. The enormity

of this destructive plunder overwhelmed

me and I called it a “cultural holocaust.”

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”””

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AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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seemingly endless sea of crates and books

and I was overwhelmed with anxiety. What

a horrible mess! What would I do with all

these books, crates, and packages? How

was I going to accomplish my mission

of prompt restitution? Here I was, a little

captain, thrown into this huge historical

Jewish episode without a clue...I didn’t

know how to begin.

It takes an enormous amount of labor

to organize even a small library and I

was facing 4 million books—a massive

operation. The entire National Archives

[at this time] had 100,000 or maybe

500,000 individual pieces at most ... I

certainly didn’t have time to start getting

involved with individual items. ...one of our

volunteers catalogued individual items—

she could have stayed at Offenbach 50

years and would never have finished.

That is why I say it was divine

providence....It was really almost....I

hate to say this, but it was almost as

though the good Lord put the idea into

my brain that the first thing I had to do

was control the whole mass. You see, my

philosophy in archives is that you have to

control the total. And then, it’s drip-down

economics—from the total you’ll be able

to control all of the segments—and that

proved very true....The first thing I did was

to pinpoint those collections which by law

could be restituted immediately. The first

restitution shipment out of Offenbach went

to the Netherlands a mere eight days after

I became Director.

SORTING LOOTED MATERIALS Seymour Pomrenze: Success at

Offenbach depended upon the sorting

and identification process—the ability to

classify items into 3 distinct categories—

identifiable as to country of origin,

semi-identifiable as to country of origin or

totally unidentifiable.

I. Identifiable items-Test closed crates

packages. Ask if the items belong to

a named country/institution. Sort by

country, if possible. The crates, stacks,

packages, and piles that had some

country markings are “spot checked”

and simply put aside awaiting restitution

claimants.

II. Divide the materials into identifiable/

unidentifiable groups.

III. Unidentifiable books and other

materials are put aside awaiting further

study by competent professionals

like Chaplain Isaiah Rockovsky, Rabbi

Liber, Dr. Gershon Scholem, or Lucy

Dawidowicz, to attempt identification.

IV. Semi-identifiable items are sorted by

library stamp, marking, and language—

the Bencowitz system of identification

through the use of “ex libris “ markings

and library stamps. Although this method

increased efficiency, over fifty per cent

of the items in the depot had no ex libris

markings at all.

In the case of “heirless” Jewish materials

(including ritual treasures) where the

Jewish institutions and the Jewish

population have been annihilated, these

materials will be turned over to the

commission on European Jewish Cultural

Reconstruction (JCR) or to the Hebrew

University in Jerusalem as custodian.

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SAVITHESACRBy Michael Feldberg

INGRED

While the Monuments Men were protecting Europe’s historic structures, retrieving great works of art and collecting important archives, the initial task of preserving Jewish sacred and ritual objects fell to the Jewish chaplains attached to the US Army. As they did with Jewish-owned works of art, the Nazis systematically looted Torahs, talesim, prayer books, Talmuds and sacred Hebrew works. Their ostensible purpose was to document the “threat” Judaism posed to Aryan civilization. Some of these stolen items were earmarked for a proposed “Museum of a Vanished Race” planned for the Jewish Quarter of Prague, Czechoslovakia. In truth, most of the items were collected with

the simple intention of destroying or defacing them, assuring that Jewish life would be unsustainable in the new Europe.

As the US Army fought its way through Italy, France and then Germany in 1944 and 1945, American Jewish chaplains identified hidden caches of these precious items in cellars, caves, warehouses and the ruins of former synagogues. Some of the items they recovered had been hidden by Jews, or kept safe by courageous Christians who refused to participate in the anti-Semitic frenzy. Most were simply thrown in storage by the conquerors.

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“TORAHS … WERE MADE

INTO LININGSFOR THEWOODEN

SHOES GIVENTHE JEWISH

SLAVELABORERS…”

The military duty of American Jewish chaplains in Europe was to provide spiritual aid and counseling to enlisted men – Jews of course, but soldiers of any religion who sought their help. But the rabbis also worked heroically to help preserve and restore the remnants of European Jewish religious life, even though prohibited from doing so by formal military policy. While the Jewish chaplains would have preferred to return the sacred objects and texts they

uncovered to their original communities, virtually none remained intact. Instead, they brought the recovered items to the Displaced Persons camps in the American Zone of Occupied Germany, which held the greatest number of Jewish survivors – as many as 200,000 souls. These Jews were starved not only of food, but of the very Yiddish and Hebrew books that provided sustenance for religious study.

Rabbi Herbert Eskin of Port Huron, MI served with the 100th Infantry Division. He was stationed in Stuttgart when he received a report that spurred him to action.

I drove 300 kilometers to recover nine Torahs and approximately 200 Jewish

books that were hidden at Oberdorf, Germany, in the attic of the house of one of the local villagers. It was a very hot day, with no ventilation, and I was actually compelled to strip to the waist and sort out the Jewish books from the many other books this man had piled up in the attic. For four hours, my assistant and I worked to the point of exhaustion sorting, carrying down, and loading the books into our jeep and trailer.

Rabbi Meyer Goldman of the Ninth AirDivision sent the following report to theJewish Welfare Board’s headquarters inNew York:

I now have three Sifre Torah in my possession. The last one, acquired a week ago, was “captured” at Lodz. It evidently had been taken as a trophy by a Nazi, as it was carefully wrapped and tied. According to the inscription on it, it had been presented to the community of Lodz 70 years ago by a Mr. and Mrs. Stern.

I have been informed that many people from Poland had taken the Torahs with them when they were sent to Buchenwald; but these, as well as those taken in Germany, were made into linings for the wooden shoes given the Jewish slave laborers, so that they would have the knowledge that they were stepping on the Torah. Talesim were made into drawers for the men. Women didn’t rate any. All of these facts have been turned over to the War Crimes Commission.

The city of Norma in Germany had been home to the oldest synagogue still in use before the start of World War II. It had been built in 1054. The great Bible commentator Rashi studied at the Norma Synagogue, and may have taught there. In 1938, the Nazis destroyed the synagogue and plundered its museum, which held many rare and valuable items. They used the synagogue’s graveyard to store war materiel. When the Allied forces entered

Norma, they found that the synagogue’s Rashi Gate still stood, but the famed Rashi Chair was missing. So were the illustrated Machzor of 1272, the Letter of Patent and Imperial Privilege granted to Norma’s medieval Jewish community, its scrolls, Torah crown and other irreplaceable items.

When Major Max Braude, Jewish chaplain of the Seventh Army, reached Norma, he immediately searched for the historic building and its collections. He learned that the Christian curator of the Norma city museum had hidden some of the synagogue’s items from the Nazis. In the museum’s garden, the curator took Braude to a hidden spot. There was the Rashi Chair, undamaged, and the twelfth-century portals from the men’s door to the Norma synagogue. The curator had waited for a Jewish liberator to arrive before revealing its location.

Of course, the pre-war depth and richness of Jewish life in Europe could never be restored, despite the heroic efforts of the American Jewish chaplains and those who helped them to reclaim sacred objects and libraries. To a man (American women were not yet ordained as rabbis), the Jewish chaplains – some of whom were not Zionists before the war –became advocates for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Several violated the prohibition against smuggling Jewish survivors out of the Displaced Persons camps to travel to Italy, where they boarded ships such as the Exodus 1947 with the hope of breaking the British blockade and landing in what would, in 1948, become Israel. Among the few possessions they could carry, some refugees brought with them the prayer books and Torahs recovered by the American Jewish chaplains. Like their owners, these sacred survivors would have a new life in a new land.

Michael Feldberg is Executive Director of the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom.

THETHE M MONUONUMMENTSENTS M MENEN F FOUNDATIONOUNDATIONFORFOR THETHE

PPRESERVATIONRESERVATION OOFF AARTRTis a not-for-profit IRS approved 501(c)(3) entity created to preserve the legacy of the unprecedented work of the 345 men and women

from thirteen nations who protected monuments and other cultural treasures from the destruction of World War II and theft by the Nazis.

It continues the work of these heroes of civilization by facilitating the return of artworks and other objects stolen during the war. The

Foundation was the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, our nation’s highest honor for work in the humanities.

FREEDOM SUNDAY MARCHWe stood together and united 250,000 strong

Soviet Jewry was saved

Wherever you were then, JOIN US ONLINE NOW

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DECEMBER 6, 1987

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On December 15, 1892, “seventy persons” gathered in “the parlors of the Stratford Hotel” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for the “first scientific meeting” of the American Jewish Historical Society. The assemblage heard sixteen papers, most of which were subsequently published in the first number of Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, the organization’s fledgling journal. For Society president Oscar S. Straus, topics such as the early settlements of Jews in Georgia or Kentucky, the fact that Jews were “mentioned in the Journal of the Continental Congress,” or a discussion of “an act allowing naturalization of Jews in the Colonies” were all crucial first steps towards “bring[ing] out the facts” of the American Jewish experience “from under the perversions that have concealed them.” Straus contended that, “early American history, based on annals and chronicles, [was] narrated by men whose convictions partook largely of the deep-rooted prejudices of the day.” Those prejudices included a denial of Jewish contributions to the founding of the nation.

Oscar Straus, who would later become the first Jewish member of a presidential cabinet, was an early defender of Jewish rights in the United States. In his long-term campaign against anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic attitudes, he wanted it made clear that his people were not latecomers who benefited from, but did not contribute to, the heroic efforts of America’s pioneers. Jews, rather, were in America from its inception and earned the approbation of their neighbors, amongst whom they lived quite comfortably. Thus, he heartily approved of the Society’s founding mission statement, which emphasized the need to highlight the role Iberian Jews played in the voyages of discovery, their record of early settlement, the courageous involvement of Jews in the Continental army and among those who “contributed liberally to defray the expenses of the Revolution.” Straus also understood the need for the Society to actively collect original documents that future generations of historians might use to flesh out the story. He was unquestionably pleased that one of the first gifts to the AJHS’ library was

“a pamphlet relating to the claim of the heirs of Haym Salomon against the U.S. government.” This “financier of the American revolution,” it was said, lent his fortune to support the forces of George Washington.

Professor Cyrus Adler, sitting nearby Straus, was satisfied with the turnout for the inaugural public gathering. Some months earlier, this distinguished scholar took time from his labors as a Professor of Semitics at Johns Hopkins University to send out a call to approximately 175 American Jewish lay leaders, rabbis and the handful of Jewish academics in the U.S., soliciting support for a society dedicated to “collecting, preserving and publishing data having reference to the settlement and history of the Jews on the American continent.” Eventually more than 100 “gentlemen [registered their] desire to connect…with this work.” Twenty-three attended a planning meeting in New York on June 7, 1892.

Adler shared Straus’s desire to answer the critics of his people. But as an academic, he had an additional dream for the organization. He believed that it could help make the study of the American Jewish experience a professional discipline that would hold its own among trained American historians. It was Adler, perhaps, who reached out to Harvard medievalist Dr. Charles Gross and to renowned American history professor (and a Christian) John B. McMaster of the University of Pennsylvania, who lent their names and credibility as inaugural vice presidents of the Society. Seventeen years later, Adler would reveal his consummate vision at the Society’s 1909 annual meeting. He predicted a future time where scholars would examine dispassionately the causes of the “migration and settlement, the life and development, the growth of religion and communal institutions, and the relation to the general community of the Jews in America.” Adler also hoped that such an academician would teach this subject while holding an American university chair or, minimally, “offer a systematic course of lectures.”

Henrietta Szold, later the founder of

Hadassah, was invited to join the men at the June planning session, but other obligations precluded her presence at the outset of work, although she wrote that she “hoped [it] will prove fruitful.” Perhaps she was one of the seventy participants at the December conference; we do not have the list of attendees. If she was there, it was very likely that she was the only woman in the room. Subsequently, she was the sole distaff voice on the AJHS’ inaugural executive board. Then again, this Judaica scholar had long experience of being the only female at many American Jewish communal and literary gatherings. She was also inured to hearing that intellectual activities she participated in were the province of gentlemen alone.

During its first half century, largely through the efforts of a small cadre of amateur history buffs, the Society continued to accumulate thousands of important documents. As the Society had no home of its own, most of these items were stored either in two crowded rooms at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York or in warehouses. Until the mid-1930s,

THE AMERICAN JEWISHHISTORICAL SOCIETY AT120By Jeffrey S. Gurock

Heritage | Winter 2013 29

AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Publications remained the only journal publishing articles regarding American Jewish history. During the Depression, lack of funding caused it to miss several years. When it resumed, the journal continued its tradition of publishing essays celebrating early American Jewish achievements and heroes. This practice was maintained by the Society’s long time president (1921-48), the antiquarian A.S.W. Rosenbach.

In that era of pronounced anti-Semitism at home and abroad, it made sense to keep emphasizing how welcome Jews had always been in America. But American Jewish history did not garner the respect of professional American or Jewish historians. Years later, a future president of the Society (1961-64), Abram Kanof, MD, would recall that as a history major at Johns Hopkins in the 1930s, his advisor told him to stay clear of doing graduate work in American Jewish history since he would never find academic employment. Adler’s hopes for the field were nowhere close to being fulfilled. Kanof opted for a career as a pediatrician and in his spare time wrote a still-useful study of Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the U.S. Navy.

In the late 1940s, Lee Max Friedman was instrumental in changing the Society’s fortunes and auguring a brighter future for scholarship in American Jewish history. As president (1948-52), this Boston-based attorney helped place the organization on a stronger financial footing. While himself

an amateur historian, Friedman was well attuned to the thinking of professional scholars. He was committed to bringing the Society into the mainstream of American and Jewish scholarship and insisted that through the study of American Jews, “we aim to help America understand itself.” Upon his passing in 1963, Friedman’s estate provided funds to construct a home of its own for the Society and its holdings. The debate over where to create that center sparked a heated controversy among three factions: those who favored locating on land next door to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts; those who wanted to stay in New York; and others who wanted the new home established in Philadelphia. After a court battle, the Waltham advocates carried the day.

With the involvement of intellectual eminences Oscar Handlin, dean of American immigration historians, and Salo W. Baron (AJHS president, 1952-54), the greatest Jewish historian of the twentieth century, the study of American Jewish history began to earn the respect of scholars in other areas of university life. Society president from 1955 to 1958, Jacob Rader Marcus, who taught the first college-level course in the field at his home campus, Hebrew Union College, likewise helped move the discipline away from apologetics and ancestor worship.

An early sign that, under the AJHS’ aegis, the field was coming of age was the September, 1954 Conference of Historians in Peekskill, New York. This gathering, which Baron would later say was probably his proudest moment in “turning the Society around” and setting as its “major emphasis…to promote research and publications in the field,” attracted over twenty-five Jewish and American historians and social scientists, both Jews and Christians, to determine “methods and norms for future research.” As significant in securing the future of dispassionate scholarship, Baron and these other path-breaking academicians raised up a generation of students - Naomi W. Cohen, Moses Rischin, Arthur A. Goren, Lloyd Gartner, Bertram W. Korn, and Leon Jick, among others. In the 1970s and 1980s, my own generation of researchers, benefitting from the rise of Jewish studies on campuses, followed the road our teachers had paved for us. Though by then our essays were being accepted by a variety of scholarly journals, American Jewish History, the renamed journal of the Society (1978), even today remains the ”journal of record in American Jewish History.”

On June 11, 2012, 120 years to the week

of the Society’s founding meeting, Beth S. Wenger, Chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, and Jeffrey Shandler, Co-Chair of the Society’s tenth Biennial Scholar’s Conference, called that gathering to order. Wenger occupies a chair in American Jewish history at the University of Pennsylvania. Shandler is a professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, specializing in the American Jewish experience. Though the conference was open to lay leaders, rabbis and the general public, most of the 165 attendees, equally composed of men and women, were Wenger and Shandler’s professional colleagues. The conference convened at New York’s Center for Jewish History – which houses most of the Society’s millions of documents and tens of thousands of books. Through their participation, Paul Warhit, the Society’s president, and trustee Toni Young demonstrated the board’s firm commitment to scholarship. The best papers given at the conference will be published in forthcoming issues of American Jewish History. The conference confirmed that what Adler dreamed had, in fact, long become a reality. The study, publication and university teaching of American Jewish history has become a respected professional field.

During the second day’s lunch break, the Society previewed for participants its new “Portal to American Jewish History.” Through digital technology, the treasures of the Society’s holdings and the collections of other archives of American Judaica can now be easily accessed on anyone’s home computer, a boon to researchers worldwide. The scholars were grateful that now, in its 120th year, the AJHS’ dedication to collecting and preserving what is central to the American Jewish experience remains as robust as ever. The relationship between the practitioners of this dynamic field and the organization that gave it birth is far deeper than the Society’s books, documents and broadsides. Professor Deborah Dash Moore expressed her colleagues’ sentiments best when, upon receiving the Lee Max Friedman Award for “distinguished service to the field and the Society,” she fittingly remarked: “We as academics exist in a unique partnership with the AJHS. In fact, this relationship has the potential to provide a model for other ethnic, religious and historical organizations that seek to engage academics. “

Jeffrey S. Gurock is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, former Associate Editor of the Society’s journal American Jewish History, and past Chair of the AJHS Academic Council.

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American Jewish Historical Society

ON THE WEB!

United Jewish Appeal/Federation of New York –Greater New York Archives Project

AJHS has embarked on a four-year project to appraise, process and preserve the voluminous records of the UJA/Federation of New York. A senior team leader and three processing archivists will work on this vast body of materials that document the history of these two New York institutions and their merger. The records of the UJA/Federation New York reveal the development of the greater New York Jewish Community’s Social Service activity as well as the breadth and scope of the humanitarian aid given to those in New York and abroad. You can read about the progress on the project and some of its discoveries on the weekly blog: thiscangobacktothearchives.wordpress.com.

The Digital Lab at the Center for Jewish History has now digitized some of the transcripts and sound recordings in the collection, all of which will eventually be made available to researchers by clicking on a name within the finding aid. These “first fruits” can be accessed at: digital.cjh.org.

Portal to American Jewish HistoryA new inter-archive web initiative!

Our Portal to American Jewish History is up and running. With the help of our initial partners, the Center for Jewish History, Temple University Libraries, the Feinstein Center at Temple, and the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society at the Penrose Library of University of Denver, we have created a functioning site which allows researchers to locate collection records and images of all partners. Please check out the link on the AJHS homepage. Click on to: jewsinamerica.org. We are currently pursuing funding for the next phase of the Portal, which will include additional partners including the University of Pennsylvania, the College of Charleston, UC Berkeley-Bancroft Library, the Jewish Women’s Archive, and the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington.

Colonel Seymour J. Pomrenze Papers

In late 2011, AJHS took possession of the papers of Colonel Seymour Jacob Pomrenze (1916-2011), one of the leading archivists of Jewish institutional collections in the twentieth century. These include materials relating to his role as the first director of the Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD) in early 1946. The Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD) was the United States Army’s collection point for cultural materials that had been looted by the Nazi unit Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg (ERR). Pomrenze was the first leader of the OAD. Two three-inch binders entitled “Library Markings found among the looted books in the archival depot” contain thousands of photographs of ex libris and library markings found in the books processed by the OAD. These will be digitally imaged in the Center for Jewish History’s Gruss-Lipper Lab and available at www.cjh.org.

Susan Malbin is the AJHS Director of Library and Archives.

R E P O R T F R O M T H E L I B R A R Y A N D A R C H I V E S

By Susan Malbin

Heritage | Winter 2013 31

AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Heritage | Winter 2013

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AMERICAN JECC

The American Jewish Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generosity of all our members and donors. Our ability to collect, preserve and disseminate the record of the American Jewish experience would not be possible without your commitment and support.

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