The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with a family seeking to reclaim a Claude Pissarro painting stolen by the Nazis in 1939. Overturning prior rulings that favored a Spanish museum's ownership, the court ruled that California's new law, established to address Holocaust art restitution, should govern the case. The case began when Claude Cassirer discovered the painting in a Madrid museum, leading his family to fight for its return following his death. Governor Newsom noted the ongoing trauma this fight brings to Holocaust survivors.
In 2000, Claude Cassirer, a San Diego resident, was astonished to learn that the painting that he remembered from the Berlin apartment was hanging in a museum in Madrid. After trying successfully to have it returned by the museum, he filed a lawsuit in 2005 in federal court in Los Angeles that has been carried on by his family.
Repeatedly, a federal judge in Los Angeles and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had ruled the Spanish museum that had lawfully obtained the painting...had a rightful claim to own it.
The Supreme Court on Monday revived a family's claim to recover a painting that had been hung in a Berlin apartment in 1939 and was stolen by the Nazis.
For survivors of the Holocaust and their families, the fight to take back ownership of art and other personal items stolen by the Nazis continues to traumatize those who have already gone through the unimaginable.
Collection
[
|
...
]