Description
Book SynopsisQuestions arose after 1945, and have persisted, about the ownership of properties which had belonged to Jewish communities before the Second World War, to Holocaust victims and survivors, and to Jewish expellees from the Middle East and North Africa. Studies of these properties have often focused on their symbolic values, their places in cultures of memory and identity construction, and measures of justice achieved or denied.
This collection explores contesting conceptions of ownership and property claims advanced in the post-war years. The authors focus considerably upon how conflicts over these properties both shaped and reflected shifting and competing ideas about Jewish belonging. They show their outcomes to have had considerable consequences for the lived experiences of both Jews and non-Jews around the world. This is because the properties in questions always maintained their worth as material assets, just as they could also impart financial liabilities and other
Table of Contents
Introduction – Jewish property after 1945: cultures and economies of ownership, loss, recovery, and transfer 1. The amnesia of the Wirtschaftswunder: Essen’s ‘House of Industrial Design’ 2. Toward a material culture of Jewish loss 3. Unsettled possession: the question of ownership of Jewish sites in Poland after the Holocaust from a local perspective 4. Synagogues for sale: Jewish-State mutuality in the communist Czech lands, 1945–1970 5. Property Claims of Jews from Arab Countries: political, monetary, or cultural? 6. Grave connections: Algeria’s Jewish cemeteries as sites of diaspora-homeland contact 7. Reconnecting with a fugitive collection: a case study of the records of JDC’s Warsaw Office, 1945–1949
