After more than 75 years: The Jewish Museum of Westphalia restitutes book to the Jewish Community of Frankfurt am Main

It is the pop­u­lar sci­en­tif­ic “Monats­blät­ter zur Belehrung über das Ju­den­tum für Gebildete aller Kon­fes­sio­nen”, a cul­tur­al-his­tor­i­cal jour­nal orig­i­nat­ing from the “Mendelssohn-Vere­in” as­so­ci­a­tion based in Frank­furt am Main, and pub­lished by the Jew­ish the­olo­gian Adolf Brüll at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. The ten month­ly book­lets from 1891 con­tain es­says re­flect­ing as­pects of the Jew­ish re­li­gion. The Jew­ish Mu­se­um of West­phalia ac­quired the copy through an an­ti­quar­i­an book­shop in Mün­ster while build­ing its col­lec­tion in 1988.

Two in­for­ma­tive own­er’s stamps were iden­ti­fied in the book’s cov­er. A stamp in­di­cates the “Bib­lio­thek der Is­raeli­tis­chen Gemeinde Frank­furt am Main” as the orig­i­nal own­er. The copy is one of the few sur­viv­ing his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments from the Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ty of Frank­furt am Main, which was dis­solved by the Na­tion­al So­cial­ists on Novem­ber 6, 1942. In 1937, the li­brary of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of Frank­furt at that time com­prised a stock of near­ly 15,384 items.

A pho­to com­par­i­son of the mu­nic­i­pal stamp with a his­tor­i­cal pho­to­graph in the fold3 database con­firmed the sus­pi­cion that the book al­so falls un­der the cat­e­go­ry of Nazi-loot­ed art. At the Of­fen­bach Archival De­pot, the cen­tral col­lec­tion point for Jew­ish cul­tur­al prop­er­ty af­ter 1945, the di­rec­tor Joseph A. Horne doc­u­ment­ed the stamp in the cat­e­go­ry “loot­ed books.”

On the in­side of the book cov­er, there is al­so a pur­ple stamp with the He­brew word הוצא (= tak­en out). It stands to rea­son that, af­ter be­ing doc­u­ment­ed in the Of­fen­bach Archival De­pot, the book was trans­ferred to Is­rael around 1949 as an “out­ship­ment” or “ex­port” by the Jew­ish trust or­ga­ni­za­tion “Jew­ish Cul­tur­al Re­con­struc­tion”, where it be­came part of a li­brary col­lec­tion and lat­er en­tered in­to cir­cu­la­tion. Many books from Is­raeli stocks bear this stamp.

The Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ty of Frank­furt am Main, the ide­al­is­tic le­gal suc­ces­sor of all Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties liv­ing in Frank­furt be­fore Na­tion­al So­cial­ism, and the Jew­ish Mu­se­um of West­phalia would like to use the resti­tu­tion to raise aware­ness re­gard­ing the trans­par­ent han­dling of ob­jects of bur­dened prove­nance, and to do jus­tice to the pre­vail­ing moral re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for Jew­ish cul­tur­al as­sets.
Link to the Jew­ish Mu­se­um of West­phalia