Jewish Scrolls, Artifacts Stolen In Holocaust Found In NYC: Feds

NEW YORK CITY, NY — A collection of Jewish funeral scrolls, manuscripts and other community artifacts that were stolen from homes is Eastern Europe during the Holocaust were found in New York City, according to federal officials.

Federal prosecutors said the items — which were originally stored in homes in Romania, Hungary, Ukraine and Slovakia and were believed to be lost — were seized from Kestenbaum and Company auction house at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a consigner's office on Park Avenue.

The artifacts date from the mid-19th Century through World War II were confiscated from communities around Eastern Europe and disappeared during the Holocaust, authorities said.

A few of the items had already been sold: three were located in Israel while a fourth was found at a home in upstate New York, federal prosecutors said.

“The Scrolls and Manuscripts that were illegally confiscated during the Holocaust contain priceless historical information that belongs to the descendants of families that lived and flourished in Jewish communities before the Holocaust,” Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis said in a news release on Thursday. “This Office hopes that today’s seizure will contribute to the restoration of pre-Holocaust history in Eastern Europe.”

Federal prosecutors, working with the Department of Homeland Security, obtained a search warrant in February after learning that the items were being offered up for sale at Kestenbaum and Company.

The New York Times reported in February that upon learning that the items were up for auction, members of the Jewish community in Cluj and the World Jewish Restitution Organization had requested that the auction process be canceled immediately.

Officials said that the items had originally belonged to European residents who had lived in ghettos and who were taken to Nazi concentration camps, where the majority of the people were killed. Survivors returned to their homes after World War II to find that their homes had been ransacked and that items, including records dating back to 1840, had been taken, the news release said.

Items included scrolls and manuscripts that contained prayers for the dead, memorial pages and names of deceased members of the Jewish communities, operating rules of the society, society member payments, obligations, society regulations, the identity of society religious leaders, and, in some cases, the names of the society members who were deported by the Nazis to the Auschwitz concentration camp, according to the release.

“The manuscripts and scrolls were confiscated by individuals who had no right to do so during and after the Holocaust,” federal prosecutors said. “Absent any provenance or documentation of conveyance from any survivors of those communities, there is no legitimate means by which the Manuscripts and Scrolls could have been imported into the United States.”

In an affidavit, Homeland Security special agent Megan Buckley wrote that representatives from the Brooklyn Yard auction house have been cooperative and have not sold any more of the items after being contacted by federal officials. However, Buckley said it is unclear at how long the auction house will continue to be cooperative with the investigation.

However, the Times reported in February that representatives from the auction house had indeed been cooperative when it came to Jewish manuscript which expected to go for between $5,000 and $7,000, the newspaper reported.

“Given the historically delicate nature of the items that are entrusted to us to handle, we take the matter of title to be one of the utmost importance,” Daniel Kestenbaum, the founding chairman of the auction house, wrote in an email to The Times. “Consequently, in respect to recently acquired information, manuscripts were withdrawn from our February Judaica auction.”

The Wall Street consigner who was in possession of 17 of the artifacts has also been cooperative, Buckley wrote in the affidavit, but again, it is unclear how long that will last, Buckley wrote before the items were seized on Thursday. The consigner had told federal officials about his intent to sell the items to international clients – including one in Ireland – which said it planned to make high-quality facsimile items and sell them.