another legal battle over looted art<\/a> between a California family and a prominent museum, which is still ongoing.<\/p>\nLilly Cassirer Neubauer escaped Germany at the dawn of World War II by relinquishing to a Nazi art broker the exquisite impressionist masterpiece \u201cRue Saint-Honor\u00e9 in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain,\u201d by Camille Pissarro. The painting is now worth millions. Her grandson Claude Cassirer, who moved to California, and great-grandson David Cassirer have been fighting for the painting\u2019s return from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid for the last two decades.<\/p>\n
Amid that battle, California lawmakers rewrote state law to make clear that in situations where it and another jurisdiction\u2019s law on looted artwork are in conflict, California law applies and requires the return of the art to its original owners regardless of the passage of time. In an unusual moment of bipartisanship, Congress followed up by passing its own measure \u2014 the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025 \u2014 to further bolster such family claims.<\/p>\n
The two new lawsuits \u2014 neither of which provide a valuation for the artwork in question \u2014 were filed just ahead of a deadline under the California law for claims to artwork with long-known locations.<\/p>\n
David Cassirer said his father would be \u201cextremely proud\u201d to know a California law passed in part in response to his family\u2019s fight has also given other families another chance \u201cto vindicate their ancestors\u2019 artistic legacies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Auschwitz watercolors<\/p>\n
Michele Babbitt Kane, of Ben Lomond, Calif., and Karin Wendy Babbitt, of Las Vegas, say in their lawsuit that Mengele demanded their mother produce the seven watercolors in question \u2014 each depicting a Roma prisoner later murdered \u2014 to support his \u201cpseudo-scientific\u201d and racist work studying the Roma people. Known as the \u201cAngel of Death,\u201d Mengele conducted gruesome medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners.<\/p>\n
They said their mother obliged \u201cwith deep sympathy for her subjects,\u201d on the condition Mengele \u201cspare her and her mother from the gas chambers.\u201d<\/p>\n
After liberation, the lawsuit says, their mother moved to California and worked for nearly 20 years as an animation assistant for Hollywood studios such as MGM and Warner Bros., where she contributed to familiar cartoon characters such as Wile E. Coyote, Tweety, Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales.<\/p>\n
They say theirs is exactly the sort of case California\u2019s new law was enacted to allow \u2014 involving \u201ca California family seeking the return of watercolors created by their Jewish mother under Nazi coercion at Auschwitz and withheld by a Polish state museum for decades despite the Museum\u2019s own repeated acknowledgments of the family\u2019s rights.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pawe\u0142 Sawicki, a spokesperson for the Auschwitz Memorial, said in a statement to The Times that the Babbitt paintings \u201cmust remain in the Memorial as part of the documentation of the crimes of Mengele,\u201d and that many in the Roma community agree.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe fully understand the emotional approach of Dina Gottliebova\u2019s family to the works she made on the orders of Josef Mengele in circumstances that certainly affected her life, but in carrying out our statutory responsibility, we express the deep conviction that the watercolors should remain at the Memorial,\u201d Sawicki said. \u201cThe portraits of Roma victims are the few remaining fragments of the documentation made by Mengele as part of his criminal experiments. Therefore, they should be treated as unique documents related to the history of Auschwitz.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Adam and Eve\u2019 diptych<\/p>\n
According to the Jewish Federation\u2019s lawsuit, the \u201cAdam and Eve\u201d paintings were part of a vast collection seized from prominent Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker by Hermann G\u00f6ring, Hitler\u2019s second-in-command. The collection was later recovered by Allied forces and given to the Dutch government, with the diptych being sold to the Norton Simon in 1971.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit says Marei von Saher, Goudstikker\u2019s surviving heir, has long sought the return of the Goudstikker collection, and years ago was successful in forcing the Dutch government to return 200 pieces still in its possession. She first demanded the \u201cAdam and Eve\u201d paintings from the Norton Simon in 2000, without success.<\/p>\n
The new lawsuit says Von Saher on Monday signed her claimed rights to the paintings over to Gryczman and the Jewish Federation, which said in a statement that they will use a majority of any proceeds from the return of the paintings to \u201ccare for Los Angeles-area Holocaust survivors living in poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Von Saher\u2019s daughter, Charl\u00e8ne von Saher, said in an interview that her family gave the painting rights to the Jewish Federation because of that shared mission. She said she wishes California and Congress had acted sooner but hopes a win now will help other Jewish families reclaim what is rightfully theirs in the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy grandfather lost his life fleeing the Nazi invasion, and many of his family members were sent to Auschwitz and did not survive,\u201d she said. \u201cVictory would be justice, and a piece of the puzzle to restoring my grandfather\u2019s legacy and his collection.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Norton Simon Art Foundation said in a statement to The Times that it was reviewing the new lawsuit, but that various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have over decades of litigation confirmed that the foundation \u201chas proper title\u201d to the diptych paintings, and the foundation \u201cwill continue to make these important artworks accessible to the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Pissarro<\/p>\n
The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and the Kingdom of Spain, which owns it, have fought the Cassirer family\u2019s claims to the Pissarro painting since Claude Cassirer, now deceased, first sued for its return in 2005. Spain has argued the painting was legally obtained by the collection prior to its 1993 sale to the country by Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, a prolific art collector whose wealthy industrialist family helped finance Adolf Hitler\u2019s rise.<\/p>\n
The matter has repeatedly wound its way through the U.S. courts, including to the Supreme Court, which remanded the case to the lower courts for additional review in light of California\u2019s new law. A hearing is set for next month.<\/p>\n
The museum has contended California\u2019s new law is unconstitutional, which California is contesting<\/a>. David Cassirer has argued the law clearly requires the museum to return the painting \u2014 and has pledged to support other looting victims with any proceeds.<\/p>\nHe said both California and Congress \u201cacted decisively to guarantee that stolen art victims, and victims of political persecution in particular, can have a fair shot to recover family legacies the Nazis ruthlessly tried to destroy,\u201d and that \u201cthe momentum at all levels of government in favor of restitution is very encouraging.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time since California and Congress passed a pair of laws bolstering U.S.-based claims to Nazi-looted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,1431,183324,721,183325,183321,6316,3889,72845,27635,1459,183320,2699,183323,183322],"class_list":["post-465515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-family","tag-jewish-federation","tag-law","tag-marei-von-saher","tag-mengele","tag-mother","tag-new-law","tag-new-lawsuit","tag-painting","tag-part","tag-prominent-museum","tag-return","tag-thyssen-bornemisza-collection","tag-watercolor-babbitt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}