Lucy S. Dawidowicz and the Restitution of Jewish Cultural Property

[Errata]

In September of 1946, Lucy Schildkret, who later in life would earn renown under her married name, Lucy S. Dawidowicz,² as an “intentionalist” historian of the Holocaust,³ sailed to Europe to work for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the JDC, the Joint, or the AJDC) in its overseas educational department among Jewish refugees in displaced persons (DP) camps.⁴ She later recalled that the journey had filled her with foreboding.⁵ Schildkret was returning to a Europe then murderously emptied of what had been its largest prewar Jewish community, the Jews of Poland. She had lived among this community for a year before the outbreak of the war as a fellow of the Aspirantur, a graduate program at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (now the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research) in Vilna, fleeing only days before the Nazi invasion.⁶ Schildkret’s postwar position stationed her in Munich, the JDC’s headquarters for the American Zone of Occupation. While her official responsibilities for the JDC consisted of procuring supplies, such as textbooks, dictionaries, paper, theater props, writing utensils, and curriculum materials, for the DP camps’ educational institutions, which included more than sixty schools,⁷ she soon found herself on the front lines of the haunting work of postwar Jewish cultural restoration.⁸ By a mixture of chance, intention, and fate, Schildkret’s most enduring role as an educational worker for the JDC would be restituting the remnants of YIVO’s library and archives from the Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD) and ensuring their safe shipment to New York in June of 1947.⁹ Schildkret’s efforts helped to establish YIVO as a distinguished American Jewish research institution, and the New York City YIVO as a critical institutional link to the East European Jewish past.¹⁰ An un-sung “Monuments Woman,” Schildkret became known for her role in salvaging YIVO’s books only in 1989, when she published From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947, which recounted her European experiences.¹¹

This article will establish the context for Schildkret’s work in the OAD and reprint in full one of the many memos she wrote about the issues she — and others — faced in restituting Jewish cultural property after the war, a deeply contested activity whose resonances can still be felt.¹² Much more was at stake than merely ascertaining ownership of valuable books, religious objects, and art. Underlying the salvaging of YIVO’s library — as well as the restitution of all the other plundered property of European Jewry — was the fundamental question of who should be the authoritative voice of “the Jewish people” in the aftermath of the catastrophe.¹³ Schildkret’s work at the OAD placed her among the major figures of the transnational, postwar Jewish intelligentsia, including Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, Hugo Bergmann, Philip Friedman, Judah Magnes, Koppel S. Pinson, Cecil Roth, Gershom G. Scholem, Marie Syrkin, Max Weinreich, and Zosa Szajkowski who were grappling with—and often competing with one another over—the fate of postwar European Jewry and its stolen cultural property.¹⁴ All of them were engaged as well with the pressing issues of postwar Jewish survival and communal reconstruction, issues that directly touched upon the most essential question of modern Jewish existence that the Nazi assault had laid bare: Could Jews be secure in the European diaspora? Depending upon how that question was answered, a second, equally urgent question emerged: If Jews could not be secure in the European diaspora, who should speak for the Jewish future and where should it be located — America or Palestine? There had been no consensus among European, Palestinian, and American Jews before and during the war of where, how, and with what means Jewish security could be ensured.¹⁵ In the war’s aftermath, intellectuals among these groups, some of whom were Holocaust survivors, now debated these questions again, but with renewed urgency.

The memo — now part of Dawidowicz’s papers at the American Jewish Historical Society — was written on May 24, 1947 to Joseph A. Horne, director...