From: LROUSSIN@aol.com
Date sent: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 15:29:36 EDT
Subject: Press release
To: securma@xs4all.nl
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 16, 2001
Contact Lucille A. Roussin, (212) 877-9746 or 917-679-7493
RARE TORAH ORNAMENT RESTITUTED TO AMERICAN FAMILY
In what is believed to be the first recovery of a privately owned object of Judaica, the
Municipality of Fuerth, Germany restituted a rare silver and gilt Torah Breastplate (the
shield placed in front of the mantle on the Torah scroll) to a New York family. Faye
Dottheim-Brooks knew that her father fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and settled in St. Louis,
Missouri, but never dreamt that there was a legacy from her grandmother in the form of a
rare eighteenth century silver and gilt Torah Breastplate. "My father never talked about his
past; we knew only that his parents and three siblings were murdered by the Nazis," said Ms.
Dottheim-Brooks.
A letter from Bernhard Purin, Director of the Jewish Museum of Franconia in Fuerth,
Germany, opened the door not only to restitution of the Torah Breastplate, but also to
research into the family history and a family trip to Fuerth and Gunzenhausen, where the
Dottenheimer family had lived for generations until 1938 when they left Gunzenhausen and
settled in Frankfurt, from where they were deported to concentration camps and perished. Mr.
Purin, who hosted the family during their stay, said that the restitution of the piece to the
family, "enhances the meaning and importance of the object and helps to link the past to the
future."
The Torah Breastplate was made by a Nuremberg silversmith in the early 18th century, as
one of a small group of similar breastplates that are today in the collections of the Jewish
Museum in New York, the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles and in a private collection. In 1913
Frieda Reinhardt married Sigmund Dottenheimer, Faye's grandfather, and brought the valuable
piece of Jewish ritual art to Gunzenhausen as part of her dowry. Mr. Purin was able to trace
the history of the object – rarely possible for objects of silver Judaica – because his
museum, in collaboration with the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People in
Jerusalem, published a new edition of a 1928 inventory of Jewish art and monuments in Bavaria,
in which the Torah Breastplate is recorded as the property of Sigmund Dottenheimer of
Gunzenhausen. Hidden away since Kristallnacht, the Torah ornament was given to the Municipality
of Fuerth by the heirs of the former honorary curator of the Gunzenhausen City Museum in 1990
on the condition it be displayed in the planned Jewish Museum.
The family's lawyer, Lucille A. Roussin of McCallion & Associates, who specializes in the
restitution of Holocaust era assets, says that this case should set a precedent for other
Holocaust art cases. Now that the Torah Breastplate has been restituted to the family by the
Municipality of Fuerth, it will remain on loan to the Jewish Museum of Franconia in Fuerth,
where it will be displayed with a plaque recounting the history of the piece. And in February
of 2003 Mr. Purin will bring the Torah Breastplate to New York to be used in the celebration of
the Bat Mitzvah of Faye's younger daughter, Kara.
This Press release and a photograph of the Torah Breastplate will be available for
downloading at the Website of the Jewish Museum of Franconia:
http://www.juedisches-museum.org/presse
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