This week marks the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana. For clergy across our country, this has been a particularly difficult year. It has been a year marked with deep reflection about the values we hold most dear. It has been a year of many surprises.
As a rabbi and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, the final days of this year have been particularly surprising and concerning. This December, the Supreme Court will hear Federal Republic of Germany v. Alan Philipp, et al.
In a recently filed brief with the Supreme Court, the Germans have made the argument that the history of the Holocaust is malleable. They have presented our justices an alternative reality on the largest government-organized property theft documented in history. They have attempted to refute the scholarship of the United States Holocaust Museum. They have disregarded the intent of multiple statutes passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and thereby desecrate the memory not only of the Holocaust victims but of the Allied soldiers who sacrificed their lives to beat the Nazis.
Although I am not an attorney, I am a student of history who has traveled extensively in Germany to trace the roots of my family.
The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses began in April 1933. Within weeks, violence and economic pressure emerged nationwide and directly affected my great-grandfather, a Bavarian textile executive. My family and Germany’s Jews lived under a microscope during this period of early Nazi terror.
At issue in the December case is a cultural art collection, the so-called Welfenschatz, which is currently at a state-owned museum in Berlin. Hermann Goering seized this from three Jewish families in Germany and added insult to injury by presenting it to Adolf Hitler for his birthday in 1935.
With the U.S. election fast approaching, it is easy to overlook the importance of this Supreme Court case and what really is at stake. In 2017, Congress passed the Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today Act. This bipartisan legislation was another example of a keen interest by Congress in issues around the Holocaust, human rights, and genocide. Following the JUST Act, the administration published a report cataloging efforts of our European allies this past July. It pointed to the Nazi confiscation and wrongful transfer of Jewish property and the avenues for justice that survivors and their heirs now face. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Europe to highlight the findings.
In recent years, cases involving foreign sovereign immunity have come through our judicial system but have never had defenses as insidious as this Holocaust revisionism.
In too many instances, Holocaust survivors and their heirs steel themselves to relive frightful 1930s nights, only to face the audacious repudiation of German authorities to even sit across the table and have a professional dialogue to begin arbitration. They are faced with reliving this dreadful period while being questioned whether artwork, family heirlooms, and other property were actually “sold” under duress.
The recently submitted German brief to our Supreme Court is legally opportunistic historical revisionism. It is self-serving and shameful.
Virginia is one of 12 states in which our legislature and governor have worked together so students can learn the history of the Holocaust. If we do not learn from our history, then we are doomed to repeat it.
I was a high school student in December 1998. At that point, then-President Bill Clinton brought together all three branches of our government to speak in one voice to the assembled leaders of 43 European governments. This historic gathering formalized the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. Holocaust survivors and their family members, like me, were filled with hope.
In the weeks ahead and this December, I hope our elected leaders and Supreme Court will give us hope again.
Dovid Asher is the rabbi of Keneseth Beth Israel in Richmond, Virginia. He sits on the board of the Virginia Holocaust Museum.
