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German Lost Art Foundation
Nazi-looted cultural property

JDCRP publishes initial list with names of some 2,100 Jewish collectors

The Jew­ish Dig­i­tal Cul­tur­al Re­cov­ery Project (JD­CRP) Foun­da­tion has pub­lished an ini­tial list on its web­site https://jd­crp.org con­tain­ing the names of some 2,100 Jew­ish col­lec­tors from eight Eu­ro­pean coun­tries whose works of art and oth­er cul­tur­al prop­er­ty were stolen, con­fis­cat­ed or forcibly sold by the Na­tion­al So­cial­ists.

“For the first time, we now have a com­pi­la­tion of the names of per­se­cut­ed Eu­ro­pean Jew­ish col­lec­tors from dif­fer­ent coun­tries,” ex­plains Dei­dre Berg­er, Chair of the Ex­ec­u­tive Board of the JD­CRP. “By pro­vid­ing this in­ven­to­ry, the JD­CRP is able to of­fer schol­ars a work­ing tool for re­con­struct­ing the di­men­sions and ex­tent of Na­tion­al So­cial­ist art loot­ing, which was the largest of its kind in his­to­ry.”

The ini­tial list col­lates and links in­for­ma­tion from var­i­ous sources such as the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion’s Lost Art Database the database of art ob­jects at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (al­so known as the ERR database) and rel­e­vant lit­er­a­ture. The JD­CRP’s in­ven­to­ry in­cludes Jew­ish in­di­vid­u­als from West­ern and East­ern Eu­rope who owned works of vi­su­al art, books, archival ma­te­ri­als or oth­er arte­facts.

“This is a re­minder that each one of these names stands for a ded­i­cat­ed col­lec­tor per­son­al­i­ty who was forced to un­der­go an ag­o­nis­ing ex­pe­ri­ence of rob­bery and loss, per­se­cu­tion and death, of­ten try­ing in vain to re­cov­er the prop­er­ty that had been loot­ed,” ex­plains Berg­er. “The loot­ing of art­works and oth­er arte­facts owned by Eu­ro­pean Jews was cen­tral to the Nazis’ sys­tem­at­ic at­tempt to erad­i­cate Jew­ish cul­ture and iden­ti­ty.”

The JD­CRP ini­tial list in­cludes col­lec­tors from Aus­tria, Bel­gium, the Czech Re­pub­lic, Es­to­nia, France, Ger­many, the Nether­lands and Poland. The list is con­ceived as a start­ing point for re­search in­to these wide­ly for­got­ten per­son­al­i­ties of cul­tur­al life.

Wes­ley Fish­er, mem­ber of the Ex­ec­u­tive Board of the JD­CRP, com­ment­ed: “Hope­ful­ly this list will reach a wider au­di­ence and gen­er­ate schol­ar­ly in­ter­est. We al­so hope it will tap in­to re­sources for fur­ther re­search in­to the many un­just­ly for­got­ten Jew­ish col­lec­tors who were de­prived and per­se­cut­ed dur­ing the Nazi era.”

Based in Berlin, the Jew­ish Dig­i­tal Cul­tur­al Re­cov­ery Project Foun­da­tion was found­ed in 2019 by the Con­fer­ence on Jew­ish Ma­te­ri­al Claims Against Ger­many (Claims Con­fer­ence) and the Com­mis­sion for Art Re­cov­ery (CAR). The JD­CRP has set it­self the task of build­ing a com­pre­hen­sive, cen­tralised open-source plat­form for archival source ma­te­ri­al, re­search and ed­u­ca­tion on the cul­tur­al loot­ing or­ches­trat­ed by the Nazi regime.

The Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion sup­ports the im­por­tant ac­tiv­i­ties pur­sued by the JD­CRP, and is it­self en­gaged in pro­mot­ing the re­con­struc­tion of scat­tered col­lec­tions as well as in­ves­ti­gat­ing in de­tail the fate of Jew­ish col­lec­tors. A wealth of rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion is of­fered by the re­search database Proveana, which counts among its sources the da­ta gen­er­at­ed by prove­nance re­search projects that re­ceive fund­ing from the Foun­da­tion.