Restitution of Jewish cultural property after the Holocaust.
The case of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and Argentina
Keywords:
Judaica, Jewish Art, Jewish material culture, nazi looted Judaica, provenance researchAbstract
In 1951, Argentina’s Jewish community, represented by the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA), received about 5,000 books and 150 Judaica pieces from the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR). These were distributed among different institutions to keep custody of the items as part of the more extensive restitution program of the JCR. Today, most items are lost or forgotten. This paper presents the partial findings about the lost collections and discusses the significance of provenance research to map heirless nazi looted Judaica. It also raises questions about the implications of this kind of restitution, almost eighty years after the end of World War II.
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