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A German museum curator is personally returning art looted by the Nazis to the descendants of Holocaust victims
(JTA) — For descendants of Jews persecuted by the Nazis, reclaiming art that was allegedly looted from their families can involve years-long court battles or negotiations with European officials.
But one museum curator in Germany, Matthias Weniger, is devoting his energy to restituting stolen art at his institution. Weniger is making it his personal business to return 111 silver objects at the Bavarian National Museum in Munich to the descendants of the Jewish families who owned the pieces before the Holocaust.
The pieces include ritual objects such as kiddush cups and Shabbat candlesticks that wound up in Nazi hands as the result of a 1939 law ordering Jews to surrender their precious metals and stones, often in exchange for just a fraction of their price. The law was one of a series of acts designed to strip Jews of their political and civil rights before the Nazi campaign of mass extermination began.
Most of the confiscated silver went to pawn shops, and much of it was ultimately melted down and used to aid the Nazi war effort. Some of the items that were not melted were returned to Holocaust survivors in the decades after the war, but only if they came forward to retrieve their stolen possessions.
“These silver objects handed in at the pawn shops are often the only material things that remain from an existence wiped out in the Holocaust,” Weniger told the Associated Press on Tuesday. “Therefore it’s really important to try to find the families and give back the objects to them.”
So far, Weniger has managed to return about 50 objects to relatives of their original owners, and he expects that he will be able to return the rest by the end of the year. His campaign comes amid attempts to speed up the process of restitution in Europe and the United States. The Netherlands recently decided to return multiple artworks to Jewish families, and a 2022 law in New York state compels museums to identify art in their possession that was looted during the Nazi era.
Weniger makes an effort to personally deliver the pieces to their owners’ descendants. Last week, he returned 19 silver pieces to families in Israel, including a goblet that was likely used as a kiddush cup, to Hila Gutmann, 53, and her father Benjamin Gutmann, 86, who reside near Tel Aviv.
The original owners of the cup were Bavarian cattle dealer Salomon Gutmann and his wife, Karolina, who were Benjamin Guttman’s grandparents. They were murdered by the Nazis in the Treblinka extermination camp. Their son Max, Benjamin’s father, survived because he fled to British Mandatory Palestine.
“It was a mixed feeling for us to get back the cup,” Hila Gutmann told the AP. “Because you understand it’s the only thing that’s left of them.”
Weniger is able to identify the objects’ provenance due to yellow stickers that the pawn shops affixed to the bottom of each piece in 1939. Those stickers have numbers that correspond to documents naming the original owners. Weniger also looks into the genealogies of the owners’ descendants, using databases, obituaries, phone books, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and email addresses.
Last July, Weniger returned a partially gilded 300-year-old silver baptismal cup that had been stolen from a Jewish woman named Hermine Bernheimer in 1939. Bernheimer died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. After her cup was returned to her descendants, they donated it to the Jewish Museum in Göppingen, the city in Germany where Bernheimer was born.
Weniger provides families with his genealogical research as well as the restituted silver. Along with the cup, relatives of Hermine Bernheimer from around the world learned of each other’s existence for the first time.
“Hermine was my great-aunt,” Naomi Karp, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., told The New York Times. “After I was told that the cup had been found, I learned I had about 30 relatives in the United States, Australia and Germany. I also learned that the cup was a baptismal cup. I have no idea how a Jewish family got a baptismal cup, but maybe it was a gift to them.”
Most of the descendants of the owners, Weniger said, live in the United States and Israel, but the museum is also in the process of returning silver pieces to France, the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico.
“He’s really dedicated to it,” Hila Gutmann said of Weniger’s work to return the silver. “He treats these little objects with so much care — like they are holy.”
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Mistrial Declared in Case of Students Charged After Stanford Anti-Israel Protests
FILE PHOTO: A student attends an event at a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at Stanford University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Stanford, California U.S., April 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in a case of five current and former Stanford University students related to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests when demonstrators barricaded themselves inside the school president’s office.
Twelve protesters were initially charged last year with felony vandalism, according to prosecutors who said at least one suspect entered the building by breaking a window. Police arrested 13 people on June 5, 2024, in relation to the incident and the university said the building underwent “extensive” damage.
The case was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court against five defendants charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. The rest previously accepted plea deals or diversion programs.
The jury was deadlocked. It voted nine to three to convict on the felony charge of vandalism and eight to four to convict on the felony charge to trespass. Jurors failed to reach a verdict after deliberations.
The charges were among the most serious against participants in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protest movement on US colleges in which demonstrators demanded an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and Washington’s support for its ally along with a divestment of funds by their universities from companies supporting Israel.
Prosecutors in the case said the defendants engaged in unlawful property destruction.
“This case is about a group of people who destroyed someone else’s property and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. That is against the law,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement, adding he sought a new trial.
Anthony Brass, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told the New York Times his side was not defending lawlessness but “the concept of transparency and ethical investment.”
“This is a win for these young people of conscience and a win for free speech,” Brass said, adding “humanitarian activism has no place in a criminal courtroom.”
Protesters had renamed the building “Dr. Adnan’s Office” after Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian doctor who died in an Israeli prison after months of detention.
Over 3,000 were arrested during the 2024 US pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to media tallies. Some students faced suspension, expulsion and degree revocation.
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Exclusive: FM Gideon Sa’ar to Represent Israel at 1st Board of Peace Meeting in Washington on Thursday
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar speaks next to High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas, and EU commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Suica as they hold a press conference on the day of an EU-Israel Association Council with European Union foreign ministers in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
i24 News – Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar will represent the country at the inaugural meeting of the Gaza Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday, i24NEWS learned on Saturday.
The arrangement was agreed upon following a request from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will not be able to attend.
Netanyahu pushed his Washington visit forward by a week, meeting with US President Donald Trump this week to discuss the Iran situation.
A U.N. Security Council resolution, adopted in mid-November, authorized the Board of Peace and countries working with it to establish an international stabilization force in Gaza and build on the ceasefire agreed in October under a Trump plan.
Under Trump’s Gaza plan, the board was meant to supervise Gaza’s temporary governance. Trump thereafter said the board, with him as chair, would be expanded to tackle global conflicts.
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Two Men Jailed in UK for Islamic State-Inspired Plot to Kill Hundreds of Jews
Weapons seized from the home of Walid Saadaoui, 38, who along with Amar Hussein, 52, has been found guilty at Preston Crown Court of plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired gun rampage against the Jewish community, in Britain, in this handout picture obtained by Reuters on December 23, 2025. They are due to be sentenced on Friday. Photo: Greater Manchester Police/Handout via REUTERS
Two men were jailed on Friday for plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired attack on the Jewish community in England, a plan prosecutors said could have been deadlier than December’s mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, were both convicted after a trial at Preston Crown Court, which began a week after an unrelated deadly attack on a synagogue in the city of Manchester, in northwest England.
Prosecutors said the pair were Islamist extremists who wanted to use automatic firearms to kill as many Jews as they could in an attack in Manchester.
They were found guilty little more than a week after a mass shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in which 15 people were killed.
Prosecutor Harpreet Sandhu said on Friday that, had Saadaoui and Hussein carried out their plan, it “could have been very much more serious” than the attacks in Australia and Manchester.
Judge Mark Wall sentenced Saadaoui to a minimum term of 37 years and Hussein to a minimum term of 26 years, saying: “You were very close to being ready to carry out this plan.”
Hussein refused to attend his sentencing, having refused to attend most of his trial, which Wall said reflected Hussein’s cowardice, describing him as “brave enough to plan to threaten an unarmed group with an AK-47 but not sufficiently courageous to face up to what he did.”
POTENTIALLY ONE OF DEADLIEST ATTACKS ON UK SOIL
Saadaoui had arranged for two assault rifles, an automatic pistol and almost 200 rounds of ammunition to be smuggled into Britain through the port of Dover when he was arrested in May 2024, Sandhu told jurors at the trial.
He added that Saadaoui planned to obtain two more rifles and another pistol, and to collect at least 900 rounds of ammunition.
“This would likely have been one of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever carried out on British soil,” Wall said.
Unbeknown to Saadaoui, however, a man known as “Farouk,” from whom he was trying to get the weapons, was an undercover operative who helped foil the plot.
Walid Saadaoui’s brother Bilel Saadaoui, 37, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism. He was sentenced to six years in jail.