Jewish family makes claims to prized Passover manuscript

JERUSALEM (AP) -- The grandchildren of one of the earlier Jewish victims of the Nazis are assumption to a gem of Israel's top museum: the earth's oldest illustrated Passover holograph. The posterity of a German Jewish lawgiver say the famous Birds' Psyche Haggadah, a gothic imitate of the schoolbook take about Jewish dinner tables on Passover, was stolen from their kinfolk during the Nazi era and sold without the folk's accept 70 geezerhood ago to the forerunner of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem — an act the category calls a "long-standing illegal and lesson shabbiness." The knightly holograph, which tells the scriptural narration of the Israelite hejira from Egypt, has yearn harried scholars with its queer drawings of Jewish figures with bird-like heads. Now, a new pageboy in the ms's chronicle is organism scripted, as a high-profile American lawyer who restored pillaged masterpieces by artist Gustav Klimt to their Jewish heritor — a court play made renowned in the late Hollywood flick "Charwoman in Aureate" — is fetching on the lawsuit. The holograph is presently displayed arse glass a darkened board at the Israel Museum in a extra demo before of the seven-day Passover vacation, which begins Friday.

The kinsfolk wants the holograph to stay at the museum, but it demands the museum pay recompense and rename the holograph astern the kinsfolk, or aspect a case. "We deficiency a compromise," aforementioned Eli Barzilai, 75, who lives in Jerusalem. He is preeminent the regaining postulate in Jerusalem on behalf of his cousins in the Joined States and Berlin. He aforementioned the holograph is so rarefied, its assess is invaluable.

The Art Newsprint, which low reported the possession exact, aforementioned the sept is quest "less than" $10 jillion, but neither Barzilai nor the kinsfolk's attorney would mention a build to The Associated Wardrobe. "If we attend courtyard," he aforesaid, "thither's no turn backrest." Barzilai, who is expenditure Passover on a go of Chinaware with his wife, aforementioned his attorney and the Israel Museum had exchanged corroboration regarding the Haggadah, and that Barzilai would fill museum stave first in May. The museum aforesaid in a affirmation that it "looks ahead to merging with Mr.

One day, he understand in the newsprint approximately a especial Haggadah purchased by the Bezalel Internal Museum, the herald to the Israel Museum. Jeselsohn accepted it as the Birds' Header Haggadah. Marum had unbroken it in his law situation, Jeselsohn aforementioned in his memoirs. Queer as to how the ms complete up in Jerusalem, Jeselsohn began devising inquiries.

The museum conductor told him a Jewish immigrant from Karlsruhe brought it afterwards the war. Barzilai, followers its respective suggestions that he do so, and to acquisition most whatsoever new data and corroboration he has and to communion what the Museum knows with him." In an netmail central provided by Barzilai's attorney, the museum's attorney acknowledged the Marum kinfolk's possession of the Haggadah "for a period up until 1933." Scripted in southerly Germany about 1300 by a scribbler identified lone as Menahem, the Boo's Brain Haggadah has farsighted been a conundrum. Marc Michael Epstein, Vassar College prof and source of the playscript The Knightly Haggadah, called it "as mystic as the Pyramids of Giza, the monoliths of Easterly Island, or Mona Lisa's grinning." Often of the secret surrounds its unusual illustrations of Jewish figures.

Epstein believes the heads on the figures are those of griffins, a darling fabulous wight, and the drawings were meant to propose a incontrovertible histrionics of Jews patch encircling a scriptural proscription against portrayal hum likenesses. Barzilai says the 14th-century Haggadah was a marriage present from his grandma's kinfolk to his granddad, Ludwig Marum, a attorney from the German townspeople of Karlsruhe who served in Germany's sevens and opposed Hitler.

The Nazis paraded Marum and over-the-counter opponents crossways townsfolk ahead pickings them by. Marum was after killed at the Kislau stockade. A Jewish attorney named Shimon Jeselsohn who worked with Marum managed to fly and finally touched to Israel aft Earth War II.

When Jeselsohn asked the immigrant where he got it, he aforesaid a Jewish fix had minded it to him. But when the bushel denied it, the immigrant offered no foster account, and Jeselsohn grew funny. Study More