Restitution of five silver objects to Jewish heirs at the Bavarian National Museum in Munich

The pieces were ac­quired by the mu­se­um as a re­sult of the so-called NS-Sil­ber­ab­gabe: in Febru­ary 1939, Ger­man cit­i­zens per­se­cut­ed as Jews were forced by state de­cree to hand over their jew­ellery and all ob­jects made of pre­cious met­als in ex­change for a small com­pen­sa­tion. From these hold­ings, the Bavar­i­an Na­tion­al Mu­se­um ac­quired a to­tal of 322 sil­ver ob­jects from the Städtis­ches Lei­hamt (Mu­nic­i­pal Lend­ing Of­fice) in Mu­nich in the years 1939 and 1940. Two thirds of them were re­turned to the orig­i­nal own­ers or their heirs by 1969.

In 2019, the Bavar­i­an Na­tion­al Mu­se­um be­gan to con­duct sys­tem­at­ic re­search in­to the right­ful own­ers of the 112 pieces that re­mained in its col­lec­tions. The search for the de­scen­dants of 65 Jew­ish fam­i­lies and in­di­vid­u­als has been fund­ed by the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion and the Bavar­i­an State Min­istry of Sci­ence and the Arts since 2021. Al­most half of the items have been resti­tut­ed or ap­proved for resti­tu­tion to date, and five were hand­ed over to the de­scen­dants of four ag­grieved par­ties. The re­cip­i­ents in­clude Dr. Jorge Feucht­wanger, whose great-grand­fa­ther Max She­ma­ja Feucht­wanger was the First Chair­man of the Mu­nich Or­tho­dox Com­mu­ni­ty Ohel Jakob from 1925, the ti­tle of which has been trans­ferred to to­day’s syn­a­gogue on Jakob­splatz. Dr. Feucht­wanger’s great-grandun­cle Hein­rich Lipp­mann was the first Jew­ish front-line sol­dier from Bavaria to die in the First World War. A more dis­tant re­la­tion of his is the writ­er Li­on Feucht­wanger, who spent his child­hood in the im­me­di­ate vicin­i­ty of the Na­tion­al Mu­se­um.

The fate of the ag­grieved par­ties ex­em­pli­fy the grad­u­al dis­en­fran­chise­ment of Jew­ish cit­i­zens res­i­dent in Mu­nich. The de­scen­dants of Ol­ga Maier, now scat­tered in Is­rael, South Africa, the UK and the USA, have de­cid­ed to do­nate two can­dle­sticks to the Jew­ish Mu­se­um Mu­nich in mem­o­ry of their per­se­cut­ed rel­a­tives.