Provenance Research

Closely tied to provenance research is the question of restitution, or returning objects to owners and heirs. By signing the Washington Principles, adopted in 1998, the 44 signatory states committed to examining their public collections for items that had been confiscated by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. Where this is the case, efforts should be made to identify the rightful owners and work with them to achieve a just and fair solution. In 1999, Germany followed this commitment by issuing a Joint Declaration. Because these policy documents were focused on confiscated private property, the scope of the commitment was extended with the Terezin Declaration of 2009 to include looted Judaica and Jewish cultural assets that had been communally owned by Jewish Communities .

Challenges of a Unique Collection

The museum’s mission is to preserve evidence of Jewish life in Germany – including the heritage of Jews who were persecuted under the Nazi regime. As a result, the JMB collection includes objects that may have been confiscated in this context, although the original owners or their heirs are not always known.

As a Jewish museum, we feel a special duty to those Jews who were persecuted, robbed, and murdered by the Nazi regime, as well as to their descendants. Hence, tracing the origins of these objects and identifying potential heirs to whom they can be restituted is a central task of our provenance research. Since 2015, the JMB has been pursuing this task systematically. In 2023, the museum established a permanent position for provenance research to allow for a comprehensive review of the entire collection.

How We Handle Research Findings

As we unearth research findings, we gradually publish them on our online collections portal (in German). In the case of books, we will also be publishing the findings via the cooperative database Looted Cultural Assets in the future. Whenever find looted objects in our holdings, we actively search for potential heirs and strive to reach just and fair solutions. If the original owners cannot be identified, we register the objects in the Lost Art Database maintained by the German Lost Art Foundation.

Provenance Research in the Painting and Sculpture Collection, 2015–16

Provenance research at the Jewish Museum begin in April 2015 with an investigation of the painting and sculpture collections. One of the outcomes of this two-year project, which was supported by the German Lost Art Foundation, was identifying the provenance of the oil sketch Das Gastmahl der Familie Mosse (The Mosse Family Banquet) by the artist Anton von Werner. In December 2016, the work was restituted to the heirs.