Jewish heirs of Holocaust victims sue California museum over Nazi-looted art

Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum holds 16th-century paintings stolen by the Nazis during the second world war

Jewish heirs of Holocaust victims and their representatives have filed two lawsuits in California staking their claims to Nazi -looted paintings that still hang on the walls of prominent museums in Los Angeles and Auschwitz.

This pair of lawsuits are the first to be filed after the recent passage of laws by California and the US Congress, which strengthen US-based claims to artwork that were forcibly taken from Jewish families during the second world war.

One lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles superior court on Monday by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and its board chair, Daniel Gryczman, against the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena for the return of painting Adam and Eve. These are two lifesize oil-on-panel masterpieces created by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1530.

The other lawsuit was filed in federal court in Los Angeles the same day by the daughters of the late Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, a Holocaust survivor and California-based animator who was held in Auschwitz. It demanded the return of watercolors of fellow prisoners that the artist was forced to paint for Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who had earned the nickname the “Angel of Death”, from the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Poland.

Spokespersons for both museums say the museums legally hold titles to the works, and intend to continue displaying them to the public. The lawsuits don’t specify the monetary value of the paintings.

The issue of Nazi-looted art is an emotionally, legally and ethically charged topic that pits Jewish families that have suffered intergenerational trauma against museums that say they are trying to preserve a painful, yet important, chapter of history.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime orchestrated the largest art theft in world history, seizing more than 600,000 works of art across Europe from Jewish families, collectors and museums. Decades later, many of these masterpieces reside in prominent museums around the world, making the push for their recovery more complex than a simple property dispute.

Rabbi Noah Farkas is president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, the organization to which Marei von Saher, sole heir of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, has signed over her rights.