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What Was Once Lost: The Fight for Holocaust Restitution

As the Nazis attacked and occupied countries across Europe, they looted cultural and religious items and pilfered property from Jewish communities. By the end of the war, the Reich had carried out one of the greatest mass thefts in human history. Much of this stolen property was trapped behind the Iron Curtain, out of reach to those who sought to restore it to Jewish survivors and their heirs. The World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO) was founded in 1992 to pursue restitution of these materials, as many former communist countries have yet to return this property to its original owners or their heirs, or to offer compensation for these losses. Mark Weitzman, chief operating officer of the WJRO, joined us to discuss the ongoing fight for Holocaust restitution in Central and Eastern Europe and his work to make this happen through advocacy and negotiation.

This program took place at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum on April 3, 2024.

About the Speaker
Mark Weitzman is Chief Operating Officer of the World Jewish Restitution Organization. He is the senior member of the official U.S. delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Authority (IHRA), where he chaired the Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial and the Museums and Memorials Working Group. He was the architect of IHRA’s adoption of the Working Definition of Antisemitism, which is the first definition of antisemitism with any formal status, and the lead author of IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. He is the co-editor of the recently published Routledge History of Antisemitism (Routledge, 2023) and won a National Jewish Book Award in 2007 for Antisemitism, The Generic Hatred: Essays in Memory of Simon Wiesenthal.