(JTA) — The government of the Netherlands will restitute a valuable painting to the estate of prewar Jewish art dealer Dr. Max Stern.
An Old Master painting will be turned over to the Stern estate and three university beneficiaries — Concordia and McGill universities, both in Montreal, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem — next week at the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage in The Hague.
The Nazis ordered Stern, who ran the Julius Stern Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany, to liquidate his gallery’s artwork of more than 400 pieces after Jews were banned from selling art. In 1943, after recovering a fraction of the works, Stern moved to Canada and purchased the Dominion Gallery of Fine Arts.
Following his death in 1987, the beneficiary universities in association with the Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York founded the Max Stern Art Restitution Project to locate and recover works from Stern’s collection.
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