May 31, 2001

looking for contact with Any Professional in Old Jerusalem

Any Professional in Old Jerusalem
I will be in Jerusalem from June 12 to the 24, 2001. If anyone on the Museum Security
Network works in the old city, I would be interested in visiting with you when I am there.
Denny Hair, Director
Houston Police Museum

From: Cheryl Maslin cmaslin@uclink.berkeley.edu
Subject:

Re: Irreplaceable books ruined in arson blaze at UW

Anyone can write "ELF" on a wall. Until solid evidence is established, blaming who may seem the most obvious villain is unreasonable, and even unconstitutional given our well- meaning but all-too-often defective legal system. For years, Nazis were blamed for the murders of a number of Jews in a particular Polish town when in fact it was the Poles themselves who committed the atrocities, using the Nazis as a convenient cover.
It is indeed unfortunate that the research efforts of these biologists and scientists have been sabotaged. Perhaps the more this research is made public and collaborations with these environmental groups in a manner that respects both groups' missions is encouraged and developed, the less these incidents will happen and we will know better that the damage committed is by people not interested in preserving the natural world for what it is, but sees it as a commodity for exploitation.
Cheryl Maslin

Smithsonian caught in web of turmoil

One museum head quits to protest policies of new chief

WASHINGTON, May 30 — The Smithsonian Institution, the world-renowned museum and research complex, is in turmoil as its new chief pushes a reorganization that has led to employee protests and the departure of one museum head.
full story:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/580413.asp

Glasgow uses net to sift Nazi looted art

Kirsty Scott
Thursday May 31, 2001
The Guardian
More than 200 works of art owned by the city of Glasgow have been put on a list of treasures that may have been looted by the Nazis.
Works by Picasso, Cezanne, Whistler and Degas are among paintings and drawings found to have unexplained gaps in their history between 1933 and 1945.
They were identified as part of a UK-wide effort to track down art stolen from Jewish families by the Nazis before and during the second world war. Since 1998, officials at Glasgow museums have examined 16,000 paintings and found 232 whose provenance, or background, could not be fully explained. They will be detailed on the internet. Fifty-five have been on display in a collection given to the city in 1944 by Sir William Burrell, and the remainder are housed in the Kelvingrove Museum gallery. They include Picasso's The Flower Seller, Cezanne's La Chaine de l'Etoile avec le Pilon du Roi, and Whistler's Nocturne in Grey and Gold, Westminster Bridge. There are also works by Degas, Renoir, Gauguin and Bellini. Mark O'Neill, head of the city's museums and galleries, said the examination, a painstaking process, would continue for the extensive collection of porcelain, sculpture, tapestry and bronzes. The city had an ethical obligation to draw up the list, he said; while it was confident the works would eventually be found to be legitimate, a repatriation system was in place should any claims be made. "We will go on trying to fill in the gaps in the provenance of the works ourselves, and now the list is public maybe people in the art world may know things and contact us. "The other possibility is that someone makes a claim or raises a question about a particular work, and we have a process for following that up. The Glaswegian belief in fairness means we would want it to go back if it was a fair claim." Glasgow's convener of culture and leisure services, Liz Cameron, said the council considered it unlikely any were stolen. "The reason for the gaps in their provenance could arise from all sorts of things - untidy paperwork, somebody not bothering to keep track. All these paintings have been widely catalogued, most have been in exhibitions. But putting [the list] on the net puts our minds at rest." All UK museums and galleries are making similar lists, coordinated by the national conference of museum directors. So far one painting has been claimed by relatives of a Nazi victim - a work by Jan Griffier the Elder in the Tate.
Glasgow's list will be put on www.nationalmuseums.org.uk .
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/

Cantor's horrific story behind lost art

JIM McLEAN
A survivor of the Auschwitz and Belsen Nazi concentration camps has praised the huge effort being made to identify the provenance of all the art in Scottish collections. His story is part of the bloody reality that makes the search for Nazi-looted art one of national importance.
Cantor Ernst Levy, 76, a leading member of the Jewish community in Scotland, praised the openness of Glasgow's Burrell collection and Kelvingrove Art Gallery in declaring doubts over 232 paintings, including works by Picasso, Degas, and Cezanne. He experienced the horror and greed of the Nazi regime first-hand when his businessman father and their middle-class family lost all their possessions, including some valuable Hungarian art, when the Nazis evicted them from Bratislava in 1938. Now a rabbi and cantor of Giffnock and Newlands synagogue, he said: "What happened was terrible and, of course, we were happy to have escaped with our lives. What the paintings were like has faded into the mists of memory. However, it is right that art which is identified should be returned." His ordeal began at the age of 19, on November 4, 1938, when he and his family were evicted from their home in Czechoslovakia and deposited on the Hungarian border. They tried to build a life for themselves in Budapest, until the Germans invaded Hungary in 1944. Soon he was loaded on a cattle truck for Auschwitz, where he immediately noticed a strange burning smell. Among the SS stood Josef Mengele. Other prisoners warned him death was in the air. He could not guess that two million would die there, that he would never see his father again and, above all, that he would survive. After the selection of Jewish prisoners, Levy was stripped naked, shaved all over and pushed into a scalding shower. He survived unbearable cruelties, including being forced to watch a young boy being hanged in front of his father. While this grotesque theatre was being played out, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was blaring out of the open window of the SS officers' quarters. In Belsen, he survived despite being thrown into a mass grave, piled with corpses. Mr Levy moved to Glasgow in 1962, to become cantor at the Jewish synagogue in Giffnock. There he met Kathy Herman, who turned out to have been in Belsen at the same time. The couple, who have a family of two, still live in Giffnock and enjoy a modest collection of paintings of some favourite Scottish island scenery. These are the horrors which have motivated the conscience of the world, summed up by Mark O'Neill, head of museums and galleries in Glasgow, who said: "There is no way the people of Glasgow, or Scotland, will tolerate any art in the collection that can be shown to have come from such diabolical sources." In a letter in The Herald today, Bashir Mann, a senior Glasgow city councillor and leading member of the city's Muslim community, says justice demands that thousands of works of art and other cultural artefacts looted by Western empires during their occupations of African and Asian countries should be returned. By declaring it has 232 works of art with incomplete provenance between 1934-45, Glasgow's Burrell collection and Kelvingrove Art Gallery now stand on a par with the most famous museum in the world, the free-spending Getty Museum in California. It has found 14 known works linked to Nazi thefts and has declared it has 235 more dubious works in its massive collection, including seven priceless works by Rubens. In the UK, the National Gallery of London's precedent-setting publication of a list of 120 works, acquired for its collection since 1933, placed strongest suspicions on 10 works, including two Monets, a Courbet, a Pissarro, and a Delacroix. The International Council of Museums has urged museums around the world to identify possible Nazi loot in their collections, publicise their findings and return objects "to their rightful owners or their heirs, according to national legislation". The scale of the evil trade is immense. Investigations by the Foreign Economic Administration Enemy Branch for External Economic Security, revealed in a declassified allied document from May 1945, put the value then of stolen art at Ł1.4million. Inflation and market forces mean that figure will now be multiplied several thousand times over.
http://www.theherald.co.uk/