Poland returns 91 Jewish objects to Greece, decades after Nazi theft

A trove of sacred Jewish objects from Greece that was stolen by the Nazis and displaced for decades in Poland is finally heading back home. 

Poland returned 91 religious and ceremonial artifacts to the Greek government at a ceremony in Warsaw on Wednesday. Among them were Torah scrolls, a Torah mantle and silver finials that adorned a scroll’s wooden rollers — fragments of a rich Greek Jewish heritage that was nearly wiped out.

This marks the first time Poland has repatriated cultural property held under its care that was illegally taken from another country.

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The Nazis stole the objects from synagogues in Thessaloniki, a port city once known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Jews made up half of Thessaloniki’s residents in 1919. Some 59,000 Greek Jews, over 83% of the country’s Jewish population, were killed in the Holocaust.

These items were seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi agency dedicated to looting Jewish valuables, as it plundered homes, synagogues, cemeteries and cultural institutions across Greece in 1941. The objects were transferred to Nazi depots in southwestern Poland and rediscovered at a castle in Bożków after the war. In 1951, the Polish Ministry of Culture moved them to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where they remained until now.

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This return follows years of advocacy and provenance research. The Greek government formally requested the collection’s restitution in 2024, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization coordinated with Greek and Polish authorities to facilitate it. Now, the objects are headed to the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens.

About 5,000 Jews live in Greece today.

Poland is the only member of the European Union with no comprehensive legislation to address the restitution of property seized by the Nazis and later nationalised by the communist regime. Since the country became a democracy in 1989, several bills have been proposed to return private property to Holocaust survivors and their descendants, but none became law.

In 2021, Poland passed a law that prevented people who sought to claim property from challenging administrative decisions more than 30 years old. This time limit made it virtually impossible for former owners, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants, to recover properties that were appropriated during the communist era.

In a statement, WRJO president Gideon Taylor and COO Mark Weitzman said the return of the Greek Jewish collection represented a milestone in international cooperation for Holocaust-era restitution.

“While Poland has broader restitution issues to address, we hope this historic act marks the beginning of a consistent, systematic approach to historical justice,” they said.