The painting La Procession hangs nondescriptly in the Tel Aviv apartment of Ruth and Chaim Haller. Completed in 1927 by Lucien Adrion, the piece of art was one of approximately 1,000 works that Dr. Ismar Littmann, a German Jew and Ruth Haller's father, had collected over the years.
Alfred Sisley, 'Banks of the Long - Autumn Efect,' 1881.
Photo: Israel Museum
The entire Littmann collection, some valuable, some just treasures to the family, was auctioned off at a forced sale at the Max Perl auction house in Berlin in 1934; later that year Littmann committed suicide.
Ruth Haller, who escaped from Germany and moved to Palestine just before the war, filed a claim with the New York State Banking Department in the spring of 1998 after discovering that La Procession had been put up for auction in Germany. Through the efforts of the department's Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) the painting was eventually returned to Haller a year later.
At the time, she said, "We are thrilled to have the painting returned to us... it has also helped to ensure that my father's significant collection continues to be recognized and given the attention it deserves."
Today, Haller, 87, incapacitated by a stroke, can only look at La Procession on her wall. A few other paintings from the Littmann collection have also been returned to her over the years, through various sales in Germany, Norway and London, but most is probably lost forever.
The Littmann family story is just one of thousands of cases in which Holocaust survivors or their families are attempting to reclaim part of their heritage that was stripped away during the Nazi purge of Europe.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
Hundreds of thousands of Jewish-owned artworks, by some estimates worth up to $30 billion in current value, were looted and displaced in Europe between 1933 and 1945. But whether a painting is priceless or worthless, for the families of Holocaust victims each item is the mother lode, possibly the only remnant left of the family's prewar life.
Through Allied efforts, some of the looted art was recovered soon after the war and returned to its owners or their families. But most of the artwork has been shrouded in mystery for decades.
According to Marilyn Henry, author of Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference, the process of reclaiming looted art has always been one of the most prickly of all Holocaust restitution issues.
"Countless Nazi victims spent decades trying to find artworks that once belonged to their families. It was a lonely search. The burden was on the victim to find what had been taken, to prove it belonged to him and to convince whoever had it to give it back," she says from her home in New York.
"Imagine looking for a needle in a haystack, finding the needle, and being told by the haystack owner that you had to prove you owned the needle before the war, and then convince him that he should return the needle to you."
Despite efforts by organizations, government commissions and legal specialists, many survivors and families have never made it out of that first stage - they're still looking for the needle. Although, as with the Littmann family, a few paintings have made their way back to the original owner, the fate of most Holocaust-era artwork stolen by the Nazis remains unknown. Some was destroyed, some occasionally crops up in private collections or in art auctions, and other pieces are likely hanging on walls or stored in the basements of museums in Europe, the US - and in Israel.
TWO HIGH-PROFILE cases concerning the Israel Museum exemplify how looted art can unknowingly wind up in museums. And they further exemplify how, even in the Jewish state, the issue of ownership is not so clear cut.
In 2000, the museum announced that it had transferred Boulevard Montmartre: Spring (1897), a painting by Camille Pissarro, to the daughter-in-law of Max Silberberg, a Jewish industrialist and collector from Breslau, Germany.
According to the museum, representatives of the Silberberg estate learned of the circumstances of the disposition of works in Silberberg's collection, including Boulevard Montmartre, on the basis of information obtained from archives in the former East Germany made available for the first time following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
The painting had been sold at auction in Berlin in 1935 and it passed through a number of hands until its sale in 1960 to John and Frances L. Loeb. The couple bequeathed Boulevard Montmartre to the American Friends of the Israel Museum following John Loeb's death in 1996.
"It was the first major claim to come to the museum, and we took the view that we should try to be exemplary in its handling," says Israel Museum director James Snyder, sitting in his stylish Jerusalem office adorned with tasteful art and artifacts.
"It was a sale which, a few years after 1935, would have easily been characterized as a forced sale. But in 1935 it was sold in a single owner sale in Berlin and achieved record prices. However, the owner kept all his assets in Germany and they were soon gone and they died in the Holocaust. So we took the view it was the same 'as if' it had happened later."
However Snyder added that since the painting had made its way to the Israel Museum by legal means, there was some justification in trying to achieve an arrangement whereby the museum would make restitution but be allowed to keep it for an extended period as a loan to the museum.
The end result was that the painting's title was returned to the Silberberg estate, but that it remains on view in the Israel Museum with explanatory text and credit label which recognize its ownership history.
"It encapsulates the whole history of looted art - for us it was fascinating experience," says Snyder. "We see it in the way of a model for the restitution of claims, because we recognized the depth of meaning of the story, made the restitution, and they recognized the appropriateness of extending themselves to us because of the nature of the gift to us and because the work happened to make its way to Jerusalem.
