US Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Ellen Germain. Photo: US State Department

The top US officials responsible for achieving restitution for victims of the Holocaust and their descendants told The Algemeiner on Thursday that there was “new momentum” for progress in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel.

Speaking in an interview at the US State Department, Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Ellen Germain and Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues Stuart Eizenstat said that the impact of the events of Oct. 7 was made clear at a 14-nation conference on Holocaust restitution held in Washington on Wednesday.

“There is new momentum behind Holocaust restitution, Holocaust education, Holocaust memory, and it’s reinforced by the facts that we’ve seen on Oct. 7,” Eizenstat said. “And those who say, ‘It’s just a thing of the past,’ were reminded by what has happened in the last few weeks that that’s not the case.”

Mark Weitzman — the chief operating officer of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which co-hosted the conference with the State Department — said that while media attention on Holocaust restitution often focuses on masterpiece artworks looted by the Nazis during World War II, the cultural heritage that they are attempting to restore is much broader in scope.

“When people think of restitution of art, et cetera, they think of big ticket items and kind of rich families and dealing with Metropolitan Museum of Art collections,” Weitzman said. “But we’re actually talking about the cultural objects that define a people, that define a family — the candlesticks, the candelabras, the Kiddush cups, the things that have been handed down through generations. And we’re talking about that as much as anything else.”

Wednesday’s informal conference brought together Holocaust envoys from countries including Austria, Croatia, Czechia, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, and Romania. According to Eizenstat, while thousands of pieces of art stolen from Jews during the Holocaust have been restored to their rightful owners, of the 600,000 artworks estimated to have been taken during the war, 100,000 are unaccounted for and 80 percent have never been returned. He added that while Germany has made enormous efforts in Holocaust compensation and education, including paying $1.4 billion to survivors in 2023, the German government’s disappointing record in restitution cases has led the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz to consider new legislation to address the problem.

Germain said that in the wake of Oct. 7, the continued efforts to achieve justice for victims of the Nazis 80 years after the Holocaust should be a lesson that it’s never too late to do the right thing or to hold the perpetrators of atrocities to account.

“We’re talking about a measure of justice in the past and in the present,” she said. “Justice, rule of law … maintaining the values of our liberal democracies — all of that has been thrown into such stark relief by the events of the last few weeks, and that all connects right up with bringing a measure of justice for Holocaust survivors and their families, even after 80 years.”

German added: “There is no statute of limitations on trying to bring perpetrators of such a great injustice to account for what they’ve done.”

The scale and brutality of Hamas’ invasion of Israel on Oct. 7 — the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — shocked the world and for many Jews evoked memories of the Nazi genocide and other past atrocities against the Jewish people. Hamas terrorists killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, injured thousands more, and took over 200 people back to Gaza as hostages.

Eisenstat said that after Oct. 7, Holocaust restitution sends the signal that the world will not once again be silent.

“We’re going to send a signal to those who think Jewish lives are cheap,” he said. “We’re not going to tolerate it anymore. It’s not going to be tolerated.”