Senate judiciary panel passes bill to help families recover Nazi-looted art

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025, which would remove a “sunset” date of Dec. 31, 2026, from a 2016 bill of the same name, unanimously on Thursday.

“This legislation clarifies and strengthens procedural protections for Holocaust survivors and their heirs by ensuring Nazi looted art claims will be considered on the merits,” stated Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who led the 2016 bill. “With the rising tide of antisemitism around the world, this bill sends a message that Holocaust survivors and their heirs will not be forgotten, and that justice does not have a time limit.”

According to the bill sponsors, some 100,000 artworks that the Nazis stole have yet to be returned to rightful owners. “Unfortunately, many museums, governments and institutions have contradicted Congress’s intent and obstructed justice by stonewalling legitimate claims, obscuring provenance and employing aggressive legal tactics designed to exhaust and outlast survivors and their families,” the senators said.

“Rather than embracing transparency and reconciliation, too many have chosen to entrench and litigate, effectively preserving possession of stolen works rather than returning them to their rightful owners,” they said. “Moreover, some court cases have interpreted the law narrowly, leaving survivors without recourse.”

The new bill would remove the 2016 law’s sunset provision and “amend and reauthorize the original law to ensure victims of the Holocaust are not denied justice by legal loopholes, institutional intransigence or the mere passage of time,” the senators said. “As another insidious wave of antisemitism hits society, this legislation would reaffirm our commitment to the Jewish people and Holocaust survivors by sending a clear message that the United States will not allow looting to be legitimized, justice to be denied or Holocaust profiteering to be tolerated.”

Rabbi A.D. Motzen, national director of government affairs at Agudath Israel of America, told JNS that the bill “will assist Holocaust survivors and their families in their struggle to recover art looted from them by the Nazis.”

“The amended HEAR Act will hopefully stop museums and other entities from using the courts to obstruct justice and prevent stolen art from being returned to its rightful owners,” he said. “We thank the many sponsors for their support of this bill and urge the full Senate to move this legislation forward.”

Vlad Khaykin, North America executive vice president of social impact and partnerships at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS that “no act of law can ever fully recompense crimes as monstrous as the Holocaust.”

Still, the bill “represents an important step toward justice, ensuring that survivors and their families have a fair opportunity to reclaim what was wrongfully taken from them,” Khaykin said. “ We commend this bipartisan effort to uphold memory, moral responsibility and the rule of law in the face of one of history’s darkest chapters.”

The bill makes “very, very clear” that Congress doesn’t want any of the defenses that courts have made in the past decade over procedure and passage of time, according to Joel Greenberg, president of the nonprofit Art Ashes, which helps families recover art that the Nazis stole.

“This basically says that what the court should only focus on was who owned the painting and was it stolen,” Greenberg told JNS. “Especially in this time of rising antisemitism, both in the states and Europe, it’s a very important message that Congress is sending: we’re standing against those who want to deny that the Holocaust happened and remembering the survivors and their families.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who serves on the judiciary panel and is a cosponsor of the bill, said on the Senate floor that the bill “was written to make sure that justice for Holocaust victims is not lost to paperwork, procedure or the passage of time” and that families “can seek restitution on the merits, not be turned away on a technicality.”

“If you are a museum, if you are a corporation, if you are a railroad, if you are a family or an individual and you are displaying the art that was pilfered by Nazis, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, and you have no right to keep that stolen art,” he said. “You are glorifying evil.”

“The law should never be a shield for theft,” Cruz said. “Especially theft born of genocide. The law was never meant to be a refuge for those who profit from theft.”

© JNS