Wednesday at sundown Yom HaShoah began. This Holocaust Day of Remembrance honors six million dead so that the world may never forget. “Hatred,” a story written by Zuzana and Karel Tausinger in 1971 and published today in Mosaic, movingly illustrates the painful necessity of remembering. And earlier this week, Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe, warned against the tragic inevitability of forgetting.
Early last month, four statesmen urged remembrance with new legislation: Senators John Cornyn (R-TX), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act (HEAR) to help ensure the rightful heirs of Nazi-looted artworks get their day in court.
Per an April 7th statement from Sen. Cornyn’s office, “The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act would ensure that American law encourages the resolution of claims on Nazi-confiscated art on the merits, in a fair and just manner.”
There is more at stake for these families than priceless works of art. In The Orpheus Clock, Simon Goodman chronicles the twenty-year search for his father’s collection, which included sixty Old Masters, conducted decades after its forced sale to Hitler’s agents. Last week on PBS Newshour, Goodman called the collection his “delayed inheritance” and his “family’s heritage.”
Senators behind HEAR say standard legal restrictions, such as statues of limitations, should not apply to when seeking justice for these crimes. Statutes of limitations, after all, make a mockery of the efforts to “never forget.”
In the words of Senator Cruz:
Cruz went on to explain the urgency of this legislation in the context of a stand against terrorism today: “Terrorist groups from the Taliban to ISIS, seeking nothing less than the destruction of Western civilization, long to walk in the footsteps of their genocidal, thieving forebears.”
From Senator Schumer:
