Programa de Capacitación sobre la Investigación de Procedencia

PROGRAMA DE CAPACITACIÓN SOBRE LA INVESTIGACIÓN DE PROCEDENCIA
PROVENANCE RESEARCH TRAINING PROGRAM (PRTP)

TALLER EN ZAGREB, CROACIA ENTRE EL 10-15 DE MARZO DE 2013

El Instituto Europeo de Patrimonio de la Shoá (European Shoah Legacy Institute) da la bienvenida anunciar el próximo taller de capacitación sobre la investigación de procedencia que ocurrirá en Zagreb, Croacia, en marzo de 2013 abajo el auspicio del Ministerio de Cultura de la República Croata por su Centro de Documentación (Muzejski dokumentacijski centar) y los Archivos Estatales Croatas (Hrvatski državni arhiv).

El PRTP proviene enseñanza avanzada sobre investigación de procedencia y asuntos relacionados al arte, judaica y otro patrimonio cultural saqueado por los nazis. Los talleres intensivos, con duración de cinco días, se repite varias veces al año en ciudades por Europa y las Américas, dándole a la comunidad internacional análisis avanzada de expertos corrientes y futuros involucrados en la negociación de los asuntos sobre saqueo cultural que pasaron durante el Tercer Reich, el Holocausto y la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El taller intensivo fue inaugurado en Magdeburgo, Alemania, auspiciado por la Oficina Coordinadora de Bienes Culturales Perdidos (Koordinierungsstelle Madgeburg) en junio de 2012. Impartido por especialistas renombrados internacionalmente cuales se han tenido experiencia en la investigación de la procedencia y las cuestiones de restitución desde los finales de 1980. Cada taller se articula en torno a la investigación, la historia y la ética.

El taller se enfocará en:

· herramientas analíticas y metodológicas que puede ayudar aprender la complejidad de los temas de estudio, para visualizar secuencias y comparar estos procesos en contexto global;

· el impacto del saqueo cultural en las prácticas de gestión de colecciones en museos y otras instituciones culturales;

· una comprensión básica del desplazamiento de objetos culturales en Europa antes de, tanto como, durante la guerra y su impacto a la gestión de colecciones y el mercado durante la época nazi, en la política internacional y las prácticas artísticas comerciantes

Hay una ausencia casi total de capacitación en Europa y las Américas que se desarrollan la investigación y capacidades en análisis de esta disciplina emergente -- de la investigación de la procedencia (la documentación de la historia de la propiedad de un objeto de arte desde su inicio hasta la actualidad). Desde la Conferencia de Washington sobre Bienes Culturales durante el Holocausto, en diciembre de 1998, asistido por representantes de 44 países, se han pasado numerosas llamadas para crear un programa de este tipo. La Conferencia sobre Bienes Culturales durante el Holocausto de junio de 2009 en Praga y su resultante Declaración de Terezín, aprobado por 47 países, reafirmaron la necesidad urgente de tal programa que refleja el carácter global de la investigación de procedencia cual apoya una comunidad mundial de especialistas. El Instituto Europeo de Patrimonio de la Shoá (ESLI) pone en práctica la Declaración de Terezín.

Administración del PRTP está apoyada por la Conferencia sobre Reclamaciones Materiales Judías contra Alemania (Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany).

Para más información y hacer solicitud al taller que pasará en Zagreb, Croacia en marzo de 2013 (Fecha límite de inscripción: 4 de enero de 2013), por favor visite:

www.provenanceresearch.org

The Appropriate Place For All That Stuff

by Ori Z. Soltes

It is certainly true of much of the material culture of European Jewry that its pre-Holocaust dwelling places may no longer be appropriate to it. After all, with the profound decimation of that population, hundreds and hundreds of communities that once included small or large Jewish populations have been completely Judenrein for the past eight decades. There is, at first glance, then, little logic to returning, say, Judaica that derived from the Danzig Jewish community to Danzig (aka Gdańsk) when there is no Jewish community to make use of it or to bask in its artistic glow.

Moreover there are those who argue that the point of possessing objects whose former owners—individuals or communities—did not survive is to display them in order to assure that such individuals and communities not be forgotten but be remembered through the survival of their objects; or better still, where Judaica in particular is concerned, to use them, thus symbolizing with actions and not merely written or spoken words the continuity of Jewish life—as a kind of transcendence of the mortality to which such individuals or communities were too quickly subject. Thus every vibrant Jewish American community in whose synagogue there rests a Torah scroll rescued from the Holocaust becomes a link in a chain of continuity.

Where the state of Israel is concerned, the polity itself was founded and formed as the ultimate exemplum of Jewish continuity: marked by a return to the Land after an enforced absence of nineteen centuries, rebuilding it as that process rebuilt (and continues to re build) countless Jewish lives truncated by events ranging from the destruction effected by the Holocaust to the varied modes of oppression practiced by regimes in places like Libya, or Ethiopia, or the former Soviet Union.

As in so many areas of Israeli exceptionalism within the contemporary Jewish world, there are those who would argue that works of Jewish art and Judaica without an unequivocal tie to a current individual or community—and even in some cases, where the tie is present—should reside in Israel, as part of its role as consummate bearer of the Jewish torch. That argument would regard Israel as the most appropriate place for any Pissarro that comes to light, or for paintings discovered behind a layer of pink wall-paint in a pantry in Ukrainian (formerly Polish) Drogobych by Bruno Schultz, a Holocaust victim best known for his writings.

Several issues intersect each other in this discussion, of course. As a practical matter, a greater complication attends ceremonial objects, as opposed to signed paintings or drawings and sculptures, with respect to restituting them to their original owners or their heirs or the communities from which they exited under such unhappy circumstances. For so many such objects resemble each other and, unsigned and unmarked, would with difficulty be recognizable as coming from particular places, unless someone from those places who survived and was intimate enough with them came forth to make the identification.

Most often those unhappy circumstances were brutal and haphazard. Occasionally, a community like that of Danzig saw the writing on the world and sent its ritual objects forth—a kind of ceremonial objects Kindertransport process—hoping to reclaim them when the horror had ended. But by then there was no community to do the reclamation and the objects were happily ensconced in primarily British and American collections—in museums as much as or more than synagogues. Poorly detailed acquisition records in these collections and limited identification marks would make it problematic for such objects ever to find their way back to the home which is no longer a home.

But—well when I used to direct the B’nai B’rith Klutznick Museum over a decade ago, I became acutely conscious of the conundrum I would face were someone to walk in one day and say—referring to a splendid pair of Shabbat candlesticks from Danzig dating, perhaps, from 1685 and inscribed with the name of the family that commissioned them—“that’s my family; we were from the destroyed Danzig Jewish community. I’d like to have them back within my, family…” How could I verify that s/he was who s/he claimed to be?

How would my responsibility, as someone who believes in restitution of Nazi-plundered art to those from whose families it was taken, play out a against my responsibility as the keeper of a kind of public trust—which public trust, as I interpret it, is to tell the story, again and again, of those candlesticks in terms of their style, the importance of the Hebrew inscription in confirming that they were Shabbat candlesticks and not merely mantel piece candlesticks, the story of the Danzig community and its fate?

What of more obscure ceremonial objects on the one hand, or more clearly identifiable works of art—signed drawings and paintings, say—on the other. Had I a Pissarro in my collections and the provenance path led to a given claimant, there is little doubt in my mind that my primary sense of obligation would be to return it, and allow that claimant to determine its private or public future.

My museum, if it were to effectively fulfill its obligation to teach about Jewish history and culture, Jewish legal and moral thought, could hardly claim to live up to that responsibility if it denied the right of an individual or family to regain a work that had once belonged to him/her or their family—even if that act might remove an important teaching instrument from the public eye.

This is a can of worms, isn’t it? Should the Schultz paintings have come to Israel, rather than remaining in the place where he was murdered? Would they serve a better educative purpose where more people would see them, in Jerusalem than in Ukraine? Would they serve a better educative purpose in Ukraine, where the Jewish vibrancy that once prevailed there died with individuals like Schultz, than in Israel, where Yad VaShem continues to astonish the museum world with innovative ideas and every year is marked by a Yom HaShoah commemoration?

I am not certain of the answers, but I am certain that we must continue to force institutions and even governments to continue to ask these questions and to be willing to consider answers that may not necessarily leave them in possession of works that have somehow arrived at their doors, as if the diaspora of these objects has inherently ended and as if, no questions asked, they have found their appropriate place as part of the process of Jewish preservation and continuity far from their original homes.