The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 is generally regarded as the turning point that ushered in an international public awareness of the Holocaust in the postwar period. Here, in contrast to the 1946 Nuremberg trials of major war criminals, the discussion of Nazi crimes foregrounded the Jewish experience and changed views of the Second World War. In its aftermath the systematic murder of the European Jews was increasingly considered its negative epicenter. In the 1960s, this boosted the scholarly investigation and documentation of the Holocaust, indirectly promoting the integration of victims’ testimony into the corpus of sources. Through its broad coverage and manifold reverberations in the media, literature, and scholarship, the trial played a crucial part in shaping the Holocaust’s role in the collective memory of Europe, Israel, and the United States. In later debate, this legitimate emphasis on the trial’s significance to the historiography and public consciousness of the Holocaust led to a failure to acknowledge the many earlier efforts to document, publicize, and come to terms with Nazi crimes. A variety of scholars long persisted in claiming that after the war, victims, perpetrating societies, and Allied liberators had lapsed into a state of silence and withdrawal while throwing themselves into reconstruction and focusing on the future.1 In the last few years, this narrative and periodization of Holocaust awareness and historiography has been challenged, while the “silence” of the postwar years has increasingly been revealed as “myth.”2 Researchers have uncovered widespread attempts, on many different levels, to respond to the catastrophe in the early aftermath of World War II. In particular, Jewish activists worldwide engaged in legal and political initiatives intended to deal with Nazi crimes and their consequences. They concurrently dedicated themselves to documentation and commemoration in an attempt to record the events and mourn the dead.
JCR’s efforts to achieve restitution are a powerful and important expression of this will to engage politically with Nazi rule and confront its reality in the comparatively short period between 1945 and 1952. Eventually, the Cold War and the nuclear threat it launched into the foreground of public attention dimmed the urge to discuss the recent past so typical of the early postwar period, prompting a shift of focus to the present and future. In addition, the reluctance of majority societies in Europe and the United States to engage with past crimes and their meaning helped discourage Jewish groups and individuals from taking action. Many different factors contributed to the suppression and eventual forgetting of the many voices calling for, and trying to achieve, greater awareness of the Holocaust from the mid-1940s onward. Both the history and later marginalization of the JCR are an indication of these realities, providing new insights into the political and discursive character of the postwar period and the long-term development of Holocaust memory after 1945.
In an endeavor unique within Jewish diplomacy—one that united many different political and religious factions as well as individuals and organizations from Europe, the United States, and Israel—the JCR initiated far-reaching legal discussions with the goal of restituting and salvaging what was left of European Jewish culture. This was consonant with an overall tendency evident after Germany’s capitulation: it was the prosecution of Nazi crimes—whether through trials or negotiations on restitution, indemnification, and compensation—that prompted sustained efforts by the various Jewish interest groups and attracted general public attention.3 The Allies hoped to achieve the democratic reconsolidation of Germany by enforcing criminal prosecution and material restoration, thus avoiding the political mistakes inherent in the peace treaties signed after the First World War. For all parties involved, the law was both the only means available and the framework of choice for dealing with Nazi crimes. Inherent in this approach was the attempt to create a form of transitional justice that would convert the monstrous suffering and abuse of laws, which were ultimately incomprehensible, immeasurable, and unquantifiable, into nonequivalent forms of compensation, restitution, and judicial prosecution.4 Many Jewish activists realized during the first few years after the war that the legal sphere was the aptest tool for confronting the ultimate genocide. The JCR’s activities were significant in this context but were soon to be overshadowed by subsequent events, particularly the agreement between West Germany, Israel, and the Claims Conference in Luxembourg. The tendency to disregard the JCR’s role prevailed despite the fact that its fight for representation and status for the Jewish collectivity helped bring about this agreement, a fact that is yet to be adequately acknowledged. The JCR’s most significant success was the international recognition of this collectivity as a nonstate legal subject, as expressed in the organization’s entrustment. As the official representatives of the Jewish collectivity, the JCR and its umbrella organization, the JRSO, were able to articulate its demands with respect to restitution and compensation vis-à-vis the initially responsible Allied occupation authorities and later the German states. This endowed the Jews with an equal voice within national and international legal frameworks, transcending the latter’s intergovernmental structure and paving the way for the Claims Conference, which later operated on similar premises.5 The number of eminent individuals involved in the JCR, the degree of its international networking, and the results of its activities into the 1950s are testimony to the range and wide impact of its political work. Its research committee provided a literal archive of Jewish collections and cultural institutions in Europe as they existed before 1939. These documents provide the very first basis for provenance research and remain valuable to this day. The same goes for the JCR’s meticulous research on the agents of Nazi looting and plunder. The organization’s executive organs gave the Jewish victims of Nazism a legal standing, ensuring that, rather than remaining in the possession of the perpetrating state, as provided for by the escheat principle of conventional jurisprudence, heirless Jewish property in Germany was instead returned to Jewish ownership. This entailed a widening of the concept of restitution, overcoming its initial equation with the return of items to their original location. The definition promoted by JCR instead entailed the return of items to the people. Since those entitled were expelled from Europe and had found refuge in and migrated to places all over the world, the material remains had to follow them.
From Europe, JCR staff initiated the transfer of well over five hundred thousand objects. In addition, they managed to ensure that relevant German institutions received official appeals to search through their holdings for stolen goods. They instigated crucial steps forward within the jurisprudence on restitution after the Second World War—despite failing to achieve some of their objectives. Just as relevant were the JCR’s contributions to the construction and development of the community centers, research institutions, libraries, and archives established after 1945 in the new centers of Jewish cultural and scholarly activity, through which it actively helped shape the future of Jewish life after the Holocaust. Objects and books from Europe were transferred to more than thirty countries and placed at the service of community life, research, exhibitions, and commemorative work.
JCR members doubted that there was a viable future for Jewish life in Europe. Virtually none of them could envisage a revival of Jewish culture in the place of its total destruction. With respect to Eastern Europe, few believed there was any prospect of reconstructing a Jewish community life under the political conditions prevailing in the Soviet sphere of influence. This assessment seemed corroborated by the waves of Eastern European Jewish refugees who fled to DP camps in the western German occupation zones after the pogroms that had taken place in Poland against returnees from Nazi internment or temporary places of refuge in the Soviet Union. JCR members in the West also noted with alarm the failure of attempts to establish Jewish institutions, such as the Museum for Jewish Art and Culture planned by Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski in Vilna, which was rigorously supervised and finally closed down by the Soviet authorities. With almost no exceptions, then, the JCR leadership refrained from restituting cultural property to Eastern and Central Europe. Time and again, they highlighted the manifest disproportionality between the stolen and recovered Jewish treasures originating in Poland, the Ukraine, the Baltic Countries, and Russia and the number of Jews still living there. The history of the YIVO in Vilna reinforced their skepticism. The institute, once the focal point of the Eastern European tradition of Jewish scholarship, was never to be rebuilt after the Second World War. Vilna had forever lost its status as Yerushalayim de Lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania), while the many rare and valuable objects of Jewish provenance that had remained in the city did not end up serving the needs of Jewish congregations in Lithuania, Poland, or the Soviet Union; many of them disappeared into state libraries and archives. The work of the Vilna YIVO was continued in New York: to this day, the institute there views its mission as a continuation of its Vilna predecessor’s work and as a reminder of its disastrous history. Books and materials from Vilna constitute a collection of great symbolic significance there.6 All in all, the situation in Central and Eastern Europe left Jews with little hope that it would ever again be home to a flourishing and autonomous Jewish cultural and intellectual life. As most saw it, the region had been transformed into a vast graveyard.
Due to strategic and practical considerations, there was a willingness to leave certain recovered holdings in Western Europe, Germany, and Austria chiefly to facilitate a community life for the Jews remaining there, but by the late 1940s, all those involved in the JCR mission agreed that they must focus on fostering Jewish cultural (re)construction outside continental Europe. Subsequent postwar history was to refute such negative assessments of Jews’ future, particularly in Germany and Austria, often prompting retrospective criticism of the JCR’s strict distribution policy.7 From the perspective of those responsible, however, the situation immediately after the war looked very different. No one could predict how Germany as a state would develop, and the fear of Anti-Semitism persisted. Even more alarming was the fact that several hundred thousand heirless objects were at issue here. Amid the clash of Western Allied, Soviet, German, and Jewish interests, there was a danger that these items would be lost to state and private institutions, as had occurred with millions of other books, paintings, and art objects of Jewish origin that the JCR was unable to acquire. Until 1952, the Jewish congregations in western Germany were in no state to convince anyone of their likely growth. The decision to transfer as many recovered treasures as possible out of Europe to a new environment was also linked with the fact that the majority of JCR representatives had themselves fled from there. Given the situation at the time and their historical experience, they opted not to return from Israel or the United States to their former homeland.
Seen from a broader perspective, the JCR’s activities were much more than a legal practice in response to war. The objects of which its staff took charge played a meaningful part in shaping collective processes of remembrance after the Holocaust. Like monuments, the books, documents, and ritual objects preserved elements of the culture and history of Jewish Europe, so brutally truncated by the Nazis, for the future. Having been amassed in various locations in an arbitrary way or in accordance with the Nazi strategy of plunder and scholarship, these remnants ended up at the Offenbach Depot as an undistinguishable mass. Not only did the JCR reconstitute their initial status as Jewish cultural property; the process of rescue it initiated assigned them the status of memory objects. Through a global pattern of distribution, JCR officials created an invisible net made up of these European material traces, thus building a transnational space of memory. By allocating the holdings to institutions such as the National Library of Israel, Yad Vashem, and the present-day Israel Museum in Jerusalem; the Leo Baeck Institutes in Jerusalem, London, and New York; YIVO, Yeshiva University, and JTS in New York; the Wiener Library in London; and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, the JCR played a significant part in the development of new research and commemorative activities after the war.
Besides their preserving function as containers of the past, the books and objects in the care of the JCR entailed another layer of memory. The history of their home institutions’ destruction and their owners’ murder remained inscribed in them. Often the salvaged objects were the last material traces of the victims, whom they recalled either implicitly or explicitly through ex libris, dedications, and stamps. The process of their restitution often blurred the boundaries between object and former owner, with the books’ rescue functioning as a metonym for the liberation of the murdered from their anonymity. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explained the reality of anonymous deaths in the German extermination camps as one of the most disturbing hallmarks of Nazi rule: “Grief and remembrance are forbidden [ . . . ] The Western world has hitherto, even in its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remembered as a self-evident acknowledgement of the fact that we are all men (and only men).” In the camps, however, “death itself [was made] anonymous” as a means to “take away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one.”8 To a degree, the preservation of books and other material remains helped avoid this outcome, preventing their former owners from vanishing without a trace. As contemporaries saw it, however, the rescue related not merely to individuals but to the entire collectivity of the Jews. This belief was reflected in the commemorative events, services, and ceremonies held when the treasures were received in their new homes. Similar to the processions organized in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to mark the interment of urns containing ashes from the European death camps, official processions accompanied the burial of fragments of Torah scrolls, ritual objects, and liturgical textiles from Europe’s ruined synagogues. Tens of thousands of people took part in funeral services arranged by the Israeli ministry of religious affairs, which were held on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. In August 1949, after the War of Independence, similar numbers turned up at the Jerusalem railroad station to greet the first incoming train from Tel Aviv, which was loaded with several dozen crates of books from Poland.9 Communities and institutions in the United States also honored the collections entrusted to them with ceremonies and memorial exhibitions. The festive handling of the treasures highlighted the meaning attached to them; their rescue was seen as an expression of the survival and continuity of the “People of the Book.”
The scholars involved in the JCR and YIVO operated in a field highly charged with symbolic meaning. Through their tireless efforts, Hannah Arendt, Salo Baron, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Gershom Scholem saved countless books and religious objects from Europe. They negotiated with the American military government, the State Department, German authorities, and the directors of museums and libraries over rights to the Jewish cultural heritage; scoured the holdings of German institutions for stolen property; and traveled throughout Europe to unearth Nazi caches. This chapter in the biography of these four scholars is little known. Yet for each of them, this work was what confronted them most directly with Nazi atrocities. And for all of them, this experience molded their conception of history and memory.
In the case of both Scholem and Baron, their work at the JCR became the starting point for their many years of cultural and academic engagement in the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust. They applied themselves with tremendous energy to the promotion of institutions of higher learning and the strengthening of the Jewish cultural infrastructure. In different ways, they sought to establish these institutions in the US and Israel as successors to their European forerunners and were deeply invested in securing and nurturing the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural legacy of the European past. Beyond this, both believed that the historical distance from the events of Nazism was still too short to engage with them on a scholarly, analytical level despite their disciplinary backgrounds. Neither Scholem nor Baron made explicit contributions to the nascent study of the Holocaust. Certainly, they were aware of the findings of this research and commented on it, while Baron also publicly promoted relevant research and aided its practitioners. But due to their experiences—and here their work for the JCR played an important role—they balked at involving themselves actively in the attempt to process these events through the discipline of history. As Scholem’s travel journal and numerous letters attest, his confrontation with postwar Europe and the ubiquitous sense of emptiness he perceived there amounted to such a dramatic caesura in his life that he felt compelled to concentrate on the fate of Israel and delve into the worlds of Jewish mysticism, his life’s work. We see the same kind of development in the case of Baron. His increasing dedication to the Jewish community and Jewish scholarly life in the United States from the 1950s onward seems to have been nurtured by his knowledge of the utter destruction of the former center of Jewish life. He was keen to invest in the future, to “help [the Jews] emerge from that nightmare of ages.”10 Baron had begun his engagement in Jewish politics in the 1930s with great dedication to supporting Jewish life in Europe, while later he sought to resurrect it, but his deepening personal confrontation with what had occurred convinced him that it had pulled the rug from under such visions. Instead, he devoted his energies to supporting those centers where, he believed, Jewish life could continue. This manifestly impacted on his scholarly work: he continued to approach the writing of Jewish history as he had done between the wars, with a focus on those elements connected with survival and development rather than destruction and annihilation.
Hannah Arendt and Lucy Dawidowicz present us with a quite different picture. They were younger than Scholem and Baron and less academically established at the time of their work for the JCR and YIVO, and they responded far more explicitly to the experience of the Holocaust, which was to forge their entire outlook and intellectual stature. It clearly prompted them to rethink the premises of their research. Departing from her prewar educational career, during the war and after, Dawidowicz decided to devote her future research entirely to the history of the Holocaust and use her writing and publications to commemorate the murdered Jews of Europe, particularly its eastern regions. Her career path was directly shaped by her experiences in the YIVO in Vilna, where she herself had carried out research between 1938 and 1939, and her years of collaboration with Max Weinreich at the YIVO in New York, while the impressions she gained during her trip to Germany in 1947 exercised a profound influence on her writing as well. Over time, she developed a specific approach to Jewish history. In one of her late methodological analyses entitled “What Is the Use of Jewish History?,” she elaborated a concept that we might very well apply to her own work. Here she proclaimed the advantages of history writing driven by “ahavat yisrael, that distinctive Jewish concept of love of one’s own people, which entails not only a sense of identity with the Jewish past and an involvement in its present, but also a commitment to a Jewish future.”11 Dawidowicz was convinced that “personal commitments do not distort, but instead they enrich, historical writing.” Her work expresses this form of commitment, be it through her focus on making sources available and keeping traditions and narratives from the Yiddish realm alive or her dedication to the writing and interpretation of the Holocaust in Jewish history. This dual perspective on the preservation of sources, the material basis of thought and tradition, and on history writing from an explicitly Jewish standpoint is anchored in her experiences with YIVO during the 1930s and 1940s.
Hannah Arendt too moved away from her initial interest in philosophy toward political theory and history while living through the events of the Nazi period and its aftermath. Though she did not explicitly make the Holocaust her main field of research, it informed and deeply influenced her intellectual work. In their famous exchange of letters after Arendt’s 1963 publication of her report Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem assailed her for the lack of “ahavat yisrael” in her writing. He felt that this very commitment to the people, which Dawidowicz called the engine of her thinking, was missing in Arendt’s interpretation of the Holocaust and especially her tone in the book on the Eichmann trial.12 As is widely known, it was not only Scholem who criticized Arendt’s approach. Her report caused an international stir; Jewish critics mainly took offence at either her controversial perspective on Jews’ behavior under Nazi repression or her universalizing reading of the Holocaust as “crimes against mankind committed on the body of the Jewish people,” which seemed to blur the boundaries of Jewish victimhood.13 Beyond the question of an adequate assessment of Arendt’s report, the broader context of her reception history is interesting here: we can detect a development that resembles the structure and periodization of Holocaust awareness in general, as sketched at the beginning of these remarks, one that is paralleled in the history of the perception of the JCR itself. The copious research on Arendt has paid far too little attention to her farsighted analyses of the significance and consequences of Nazi rule and the Holocaust, which appeared in essays written between 1943 and 1951 and in synthesized form in her pioneering study of totalitarianism. Likewise, few scholars have written more than a few lines on her years of work for the JCR, though this was when she developed most of the ideas that would inform The Origins of Totalitarianism. The majority of researchers failed to acknowledge postwar initiatives of the kind pursued in the context of the JCR. In much the same way, Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial prompted many scholars (including Scholem) to forget what she had previously written and done. Upon publication, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil gained so much critical attention that it was to dominate how others viewed her historical assessment of the Holocaust. As a result, there was a tendency to diminish the validity of essays more explicit in this context, such as “Organized Guilt,” “The Concentration Camps,” “The Rights of Man,” and “Social Science Techniques,” which were written much earlier, and ultimately, her book on totalitarianism as well.14 The reception of her report on Eichmann tended to blot out these elements in Arendt’s thought. We gain a different picture of her commitment to things Jewish and her insights into the devastating events of Jewish history in the twentieth century if we consider her early texts and her tremendous efforts to secure a viable legal framework for Jews and preserve their collective cultural heritage. It is only when we consider these experiential contexts and writings of the 1940s that we can fully grasp Arendt’s contribution to the understanding of the disasters of twentieth-century European history.
Having recapitulated the history of the JCR and its protagonists, two elements relevant to our understanding of postwar Jewish existence stand out. First, this historical review shows the immense commitment to political activity among Jewish survivors, emigrants, refugees, politicians, and scholars resident in and outside Europe in response to war and the Holocaust. No silence prevailed here. On the contrary—particularly when it came to the legal sphere—we find a broad range of initiatives launched by Jewish organizations across the world to stimulate and help shape processes of appraisal and punishment. The activities of the JCR, undertaken as a genuinely transnational endeavor, are a small but important element of these initiatives. Before the Cold War brought these activities to a standstill, within just under five years, Jewish organizations had chalked up significant successes when it came to recognition of the Jews’ voice in international relations and international law. Second, the accomplishments of Otzrot HaGolah, the JCR, and YIVO highlight the close link between restitution and memory, which was due to the specific items in their charge and, in important part, to the efforts of key figures working for these organizations. They recognized that salvaging the material repositories of European Jewish culture paved the way for a rethinking of Jewish historical consciousness and memory after catastrophe, which in turn made them engaged promoters of memorialization, documentation, and Jewish scholarship. The rescue of books and manuscripts provided a material ground for Holocaust commemoration in the new worlds of postwar Jewry, and it facilitated a discussion on the future of Jewish existence in relation to its manifold European roots, a future understood as a countermovement against the cultural genocide inflicted by the Nazis. The herculean efforts to rescue the remnants of a European Jewish past that had faced ultimate destruction brought to the fore crucial aspects of postwar Jewish existence; here rupture and loss become just as visible as the dedicated efforts to ensure continuity and survival.