The oldest extant illuminated manuscript of the Haggadah—the odd title derives from its drawings of humans with the heads of birds—has been in the possession of the Israel Museum for seven decades, and normally goes on display around Passover. But it came to the museum under irregular circumstances, and now Eli Barzilai, whose German-Jewish grandparents possessed the manuscript when the Nazis came to power, is seeking restitution. The Associated Press reports:
Written in southern Germany around 1300 by a scribe identified only as Menaḥem, the Bird’s-Head Haggadah has long been a riddle. . . . Much of the enigma surrounds its strange illustrations of Jewish figures. [The scholar Marc Michael] Epstein believes the heads on the figures are those of griffins, beloved mythical creatures, and the drawings were meant to offer a positive representation of Jews while skirting a biblical prohibition against depicting human likenesses.
Barzilai says the 14th-century Haggadah was a wedding gift from his grandmother’s family to his grandfather, Ludwig Marum, a lawyer from the German town of Karlsruhe who served in Germany’s parliament and opposed Hitler. The Nazis paraded Marum and other opponents across town before taking them away. Marum was later killed at the Kislau concentration camp.
Read more on New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/04/21/world/middleeast/ap-ml-israel-art-claim.html