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Caught between Continents 
The Holocaust and Israel’s Attempt to Claim the European Jewish 
Diaspora 
 
 
Zachary Kimmel 
Columbia University 
 
 
Abstract  
Israel’s idea of its sovereignty over Jewish cultural production has been essential in 
defining national mythology and self-consciousness ever since its founding as a state in 
1948. But by what right does Israel make such claims? This article examines that question 
through exploring three legal cases: Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, the historical records of 
Jewish Vienna, and the literary estate of Lithuanian-born Chaim Grade. All three cases 
reveal a common jurisprudential and cultural logic, a rescue narrative that is central to the 
State of Israel itself. To this day, Israel maintains an idea of its sovereignty over Jewish 
cultural production, and a study of these cases demonstrates how the Holocaust plays as 
decisive a role in the creation and implementation of Israeli policy and jurisprudential 
practice as it has in its national identity more broadly.  
 
 
Article 
After decades of legal wrangling, a Tel Aviv court ruled in June 2015 that the manuscripts 
of Franz Kafka must be handed over to the National Library of Israel.1 The final batch of 
Kafka’s papers arrived in Jerusalem on August 7, 2019.2 Despite the fact that Kafka died in 
Prague in 1924, Israel’s lawyers argued that his manuscripts ought to be the legal property 
of the Jewish nation-state. Yet by what right does Israel make such claims—even over the 
claims of other nations where the artists in question were citizens, or ignoring the ethno-
religious identifications of the artists themselves? This article examines that question, 
exploring the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts as well as legal battles over two other important 
archives with Jewish lineage: the historical records of Jewish Vienna and the literary estate 
of Lithuanian-born Chaim Grade.  
The decisions in all three cases, adjudicated over many years, reveal a common 
jurisprudential and cultural logic, a rescue narrative that is central to the State of Israel 
itself. To this day, Israel maintains an idea of its sovereignty over Jewish cultural 
production, a defining national mythology since its founding as a state in 1948. And the 

 
1 Ofer Aderet, “Court Rules: Kafka's Papers Belong in Israel's National Library,” Haaretz, June 30, 2015, 
accessed November 6, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/.premium-court-rules-kafkas-
papers-stay-in-israel-1.5374660. 
2 Isabel Kershner, “A Yearslong Battle Over Kafka’s Legacy Ends in Jerusalem,” The New York Times, August 7, 
2019,  accessed August 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/kafka-archive-jerusalem-
israel.html.  

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/.premium-court-rules-kafkas-papers-stay-in-israel-1.5374660
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/.premium-court-rules-kafkas-papers-stay-in-israel-1.5374660
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/kafka-archive-jerusalem-israel.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/kafka-archive-jerusalem-israel.html


   

 

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bedrock of this national story is laid bare in the Kafka case. For in the historical vacuum 
produced by an untimely death and inter-generational conflict over wills and inheritance, 
the new State of Israel laid claim to the Kafka papers as an orphaned, endangered legacy 
otherwise vulnerable to extinction. Although he was a Czech writer who was not an 
observant Jew and who died a quarter-century before its founding, Israel nevertheless 
celebrated the return of Kafka’s work as a homecoming, using the historical memory of the 
Holocaust to assert itself as the rightful guardian of Jewish cultural material created 
anytime, anywhere in the world. 

Prague: The Orphaned Legacy of Franz Kafka 
Franz Kafka never wanted his work to be published—or, for that matter, to be read at all. 
When Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, at age 41, he left all of his unpublished 
manuscripts to Max Brod, a friend and colleague, on the explicit condition that they be 
burned unread in their entirety.3 Brod, of course, ignored the requests of his late friend, 
securing the posthumous publication of three of Kafka’s most recognizable works in the 
first few years following Kafka’s death: The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika 
(1927).4 However, Brod soon recognized the existential threat posed by the rise of Nazism, 
not just to his own life but to the entire material legacy of Franz Kafka. Brod fled Prague in 
March 1939, the same evening the Nazis annexed Czechoslovakia, and made his way to Tel 
Aviv.5 He carried with him a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s drawings, travel diaries, letters, 
and manuscripts.6  
 
It was in Tel Aviv that Brod met Esther Hoffe, a similarly situated, German-speaking Jewish 
refugee from Czechoslovakia, and the two became immensely close. While there is some 
speculation that they were lovers, what is known is that Brod made Hoffe his secretary and 
passed the Kafka manuscripts to her upon his death with explicit instructions that they be 
donated to a public institution, if not in life, then immediately following her death.7 While 
Brod left the final decision of where to donate the works up to his secretary, Israel’s 
National Library was at the top of his list of suggested public institutions.8  

Just as Brod disregarded Kafka’s dying wishes, Hoffe neglected Brod’s preference that the 
manuscripts be housed in a public institution. In 1988, Hoffe sold the manuscript for The 
Trial to a private collector for nearly $2 million, and the text eventually made its way to the 
Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany.9 When Hoffe died in 2007, at the age of 101, she 
bequeathed the Kafka manuscripts left to her by Brod to her two daughters, Eva Hoffe and 
Ruth Wiesler, who intended to sell more work to the Archive. Almost immediately, the 

 
3 Elif Batuman, “Kafka's Last Trial,” The New York Times, September 22, 2010, accessed November 6, 2018, 
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-t.html.  
4 Batuman, “Kafka's Last Trial,” The New York Times. 
5 Adam Kirsch, “Who Gets to Claim Kafka?,” The Atlantic, September 2018, accessed November 6, 2018, 
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/franz-kafka-archives/565763/.  
6 Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” The New York Times. 
7 Daniel K. Eisenbud, “Franz Kafka's Manuscripts Belong in National Library, Tel Aviv Court Says,” Jerusalem 
Post, July 1, 2015, accessed November 6, 2018, https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/Franz-Kafkas-
manuscripts-belong-in-National-Library-Tel-Aviv-court-says-407639.  
8 Eisenbud, “Franz Kafka's Manuscripts Belong in National Library,” Jerusalem Post. 
9 Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” The New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-t.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/franz-kafka-archives/565763/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/franz-kafka-archives/565763/
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/Franz-Kafkas-manuscripts-belong-in-National-Library-Tel-Aviv-court-says-407639
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/Franz-Kafkas-manuscripts-belong-in-National-Library-Tel-Aviv-court-says-407639


   

 

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Israeli National Library challenged the legality of Hoffe’s will and claimed that Kafka’s work 
legally belonged in its possession.10 The Tel Aviv District Court ruled in June 2015 that the 
manuscripts must be handed over to the National Library of Israel.11  

Nearly a century after the writer’s death, the recent Kafka decision is significant—and 
intriguing. It opens questions not only about the literary bequest of a master of western 
modernism who never wanted to be read, but also the conceptual and material legacies of 
the Jewish Diaspora with which he never identified.12 The legal case began with a simple 
enough argument: Eva Hoffe and Ruth Weisler claimed their mother was the lawful 
inheritor of Brod’s entire estate, which, they maintained, included the Kafka papers. Citing 
a 1952 gift-letter written by Brod to Esther Hoffe, the daughters argued that they had the 
legal right to do what they wished with the manuscripts, including selling them.13 
Furthermore, the sisters contended that the Kafka manuscripts were too valuable to be 
housed in an Israeli institution and could be better maintained at the state-of-the-art 
archive in Marbach.14  

Lawyers for the National Library, however, interjected a complex argument that meshed 
legal reasoning with a larger, more conceptual self-understanding of the State of Israel 
relative to the Jewish Diaspora. The National Library first contended that Brod left Kafka’s 
manuscripts to Hoffe as an executor rather than as a beneficiary of the material in her own 
right. Citing Brod’s will from 1961, which clearly articulated that his literary estate be 
placed “with the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Municipal Library in Tel 
Aviv or another public archive in Israel or abroad,” Israel’s lawyers argued that the Kafka 
papers should revert to the wishes articulated in Brod’s will upon Hoffe’s death.15 Then, in 
addition to this strictly legal argument, Israel’s lawyers articulated a sweeping conceptual 
claim. Kafka’s national and ethnic identity as a Jew, they contended, meant that his 
manuscripts ought to be the legal property of Israel, the Jewish nation-state. David 
Blumberg, the chairman of the board of directors of the Israeli National Library, claimed 
Kafka’s literary legacy by explicitly asserting that “the library does not intend to give up on 
cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people.”16 The object of Blumberg’s prepositional 
phrase—“cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people”—bears extraordinary legal and 
cultural weight. It suggests that Kafka’s mere identity as a Jew is sufficient for Israel to 
legally inherit his manuscripts. The logic is grounded in Israel’s belief in its status as the 
cultural epicenter of international Jewry, the rightful legal inheritor of Jewish materials 
produced in the Diaspora.  

 
10 Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” The New York Times. 
11 Aderet, “Court Rules: Kafka's Papers Belong in Israel's National Library,” Haaretz.  
12 Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 
2018), 94. 
13 Eisenbud, “Franz Kafka's Manuscripts Belong in National Library,” Jerusalem Post. 
14 Jack Buehrer, “Battle for Kafka Legacy Drags On,” Prague Post, March 9, 2011, accessed November 6, 2018, 
https://web.archive.org/web/20110615064737/http://www.praguepost.com/news/7768-battle-for-kafka-
legacy-drags-on.html.  
15 Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” The New York Times. 
16 Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?” London Review of Books 33, no. 5 (March 3, 2011): 2, accessed November 
6, 2018, http://www.f.waseda.jp/norm/noconts/Judith%20Butler%20Kafka.pdf  

https://web.archive.org/web/20110615064737/http:/www.praguepost.com/news/7768-battle-for-kafka-legacy-drags-on.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20110615064737/http:/www.praguepost.com/news/7768-battle-for-kafka-legacy-drags-on.html
http://www.f.waseda.jp/norm/noconts/Judith%20Butler%20Kafka.pdf


   

 

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Out from Europe: The Holocaust and the Assertion of Israeli Cultural Ownership 
Debates about the relationship between the State of Israel and the Jewish populations of 
the Diaspora spring from the same source as Israel itself. The claim that the relatively new 
nation is the rightful home of all Jewish culture, no matter when it was created or the 
country of origin of its creator, is firmly rooted in the way the modern State of Israel 
internalized the historical memory of the Holocaust. From the earliest days of the new 
state, Israeli policymakers formulated the “Ingathering of the Exiles” approach to Jewish 
immigration.17 Early Zionist leaders understood the function of the new State to be a 
shelter for persecuted Jews throughout the world, a mandate that seemed particularly 
urgent in the wake of the destruction of Europe’s Jews. The Ingathering framework 
operated on a cultural level as well, for the young state understood itself as the sole safe 
haven for Jewish art and culture in a world that had so recently sought the annihilation of 
the Jews.18 Judah Magnes, an early administrator of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 
emphasized the role that Israeli institutions would play in the preservation of Jewish 
material culture, remarking in 1946 that a Jewish state must be “the trustee of [the] 
spiritual goods which destroyed German Jewry left behind.”19 Under Magnes’ leadership, 
Hebrew University formed the Committee for the Salvaging of Diaspora Treasures, a body 
of university faculty and administrators charged with identifying and gathering the 
property left behind by the Jewish communities murdered by the Nazis into the British 
Mandate.20 Thus, the Holocaust has served—and continues to serve—as the conceptual 
lynchpin for Israel’s early desire “to be recognized as the national and spiritual center of 
the entire Jewish collectivity,” its core justification for why it is the lawful inheritor of the 
cultural record of the Diaspora.21  
 
With that said, historians seem to disagree on when in Israel’s history the Holocaust 
became a prominent feature within its national consciousness. Yehiam Weitz and Idit 
Zertal, for example, posit that the memory of the Holocaust was actually quite marginal to 
the state’s collective identity during its early years. For one thing, Weitz and Zertal argue 
that the destroyed shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe were geographically removed 
from the new Jewish state and felt particularly distant amid Israel’s turbulent early years, 
namely the War of Independence.22 Most crucially, they argue that the devastating memory 
of the Holocaust was not easily reconciled with the desire of the founding generation to 
construct a new Jewish identity of strength, bravery, and self-reliance. Much of the early 
discourse surrounding the Holocaust was wrapped in what Weitz and Zertal call the “guilt 

 
17 “Declaration of Israel's Independence, 1948,” The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School : Documents in 
Law, History and Diplomacy, 1996, accessed August 5, 2019, 
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp.  
18 For a more comprehensive overview of early Jewish efforts in Israel/Palestine to recover European cultural 
artifacts, and the cultural ideology that centered the Jewish State as the sole safe repository for these artifacts 
in the post-Holocaust world, see Elisabeth Gallas, “Building the New State: Israel and the European Jewish 
Cultural Heritage,” in A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust (New York: New 
York University Press, 2019), 163-193. 
19 Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial, 104. 
20 Gallas, A Mortuary of Books, 165. 
21 Gallas, A Mortuary of Books, 165. 
22 Hanna Yablonka and Moshe Tlamim, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The 
Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials,” Israel Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 9. 

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp


   

 

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of the victim”—the deep psychosocial shame associated with the conception that millions 
of European Jews passively walked to the gas chambers without resisting the German 
soldiers who engineered their murder. For many of Israel’s founding leaders, the pervasive 
“sheep to the slaughter” narrative was a profound humiliation, a desecration of the Jewish 
national honor. Thus, the historical narrative of the Holocaust itself—what Zertal calls “the 
shame of their mothers and fathers”—was often marginalized within early Zionist 
discourse and Israeli collective memory.23 

Conversely, prominent Israeli historian Anita Shapira disagrees with Weitz and Zertal, 
articulating that Holocaust memory has been a permeating current throughout the entirety 
of Israel’s conceptual history. For her, the Holocaust served as a foundational justification 
for the very existence of the Israeli state since 1948: the memory of the Holocaust in Israeli 
socio-political life “emphasized the historical continuity of Jewish life in the Diaspora, the 
Jewish tragedy, and the mission of Israel as a state of refugees and a living monument to 
the memory of those who perished.”24 When it comes to the material record, Shapira’s 
argument seems vindicated. Indeed, the connection between the pre-state Jewish tragedy 
and the post-Holocaust Jewish state is prominently and concretely reflected in Israel’s early 
laws. Two years after establishment, Israel’s Knesset passed the Law of Return, which 
allowed for the unconditional acquisition of Israeli citizenship for any Jew in the Diaspora. 
Certainly, the Law of Return was not crafted in an ideological vacuum. Implemented only 
five years removed from Nazi Germany’s surrender in Europe, the Law of Return 
demonstrated Israel’s understanding that the Jews could, at any moment, be “exposed to 
the possibility of another Holocaust with no place to flee.”25 The Law of Return provided 
the legal framework for the vast influx of Central and Eastern European Jewish refugees to 
Israel during its early years. Between establishment and 1960, nearly half a million 
Holocaust survivors emigrated to Israel.26 Later, in 1953, the Knesset passed the Yad 
Vashem Law, which not only established the Yad Vashem Museum as Israel’s official 
memorial to the Holocaust but also formed the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes 
Remembrance Authority, which was tasked with documenting European Jewry in the new 
state.27 In 1960, with those half a million survivors firmly in Israel, the Knesset passed the 
Nazi and Nazi Collaborator Punishment Law; not only did this legislation codify a new a 
criminal category—crimes against the Jews—but it also established the implicit 
understanding that, even as a young state, Israel felt strongly that the prosecution of Nazi 
war criminals was a unique responsibility it had to bear.28 Perhaps most critical for the 
Kafka case is the Israeli Archives Law. Passed in 1955, the Archives Law gave vast 
discretionary oversight to the Israeli Chief Archivist, limited the extent to which historical 
materials could be removed from Israel, and, crucially, affected documents and historical 

 
23 Yablonka and Tlamim, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel,” 10. 
24 Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 261. 
25 Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” in Holocaust: Religious & Philosophical Implications, eds. 
John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1989), 337. 
26 Yablonka and Tlamim, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel,” 9. 
27 Shapira, Israel: A History, 262. 
28 “Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law,” Israeli Knesset, accessed June 23, 2019, 
https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/mfa-archive/1950-1959/pages/nazis%20and%20nazi%20collaborators%20-
punishment-%20law-%20571.aspx  

https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/mfa-archive/1950-1959/pages/nazis%20and%20nazi%20collaborators%20-punishment-%20law-%20571.aspx
https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/mfa-archive/1950-1959/pages/nazis%20and%20nazi%20collaborators%20-punishment-%20law-%20571.aspx


   

 

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artifacts that, regardless of where they are found or currently located, “might be an interest 
to examine [in order] to study the past of the nation, country or society, or [materials] 
connected to the memory or the deeds of the anshei shem [Jewish people].”29  

All of these political developments had significant conceptual impacts for Israeli society, as 
the state came to understand itself as the singular Jewish safe haven in the post-Holocaust 
world. Shapira articulates that the “State of Israel [became] the symbol of the Jewish people 
continuing to live despite catastrophe, a concise expression of the lust for life and vitality of 
a nation that was on the verge of annihilation. The ability to translate the energies born of 
great despair into acts of creation and rebuilding made Israel the Jewish people’s post-
Holocaust rehabilitation project.”30 In other words, Israel in the 1950s understood its role 
in the world as the epicenter of post-Holocaust Jewry and cultural Jewishness. As such, 
several decades later, the Kafka lawyers argued that the Holocaust illustrated the urgent 
need to concentrate the Diaspora’s material legacies, all surviving cultural artifacts of the 
Jewish people, in the Jewish state. 

But Kafka was not killed in the Holocaust. In fact, he died in 1924, nine years before Hitler 
came to power in Germany, fifteen years before the German invasion of Poland, and 
eighteen years before the infamous Wannsee Conference and the conceptualization of the 
“Final Solution.” If Israel’s self-understanding as the cultural inheritor of the Diaspora is 
predicated on the calamity inflicted on European Jewry by the Nazis, Israel’s use of this 
same argument to claim Kafka’s work should have seemed unsubstantiated and relatively 
unconvincing because Kafka’s own death long preceded Auschwitz. And yet, despite the 
temporal gaps between Kafka and the Holocaust, the destruction of European Jews was still 
used to justify the National Library’s legal claim on Brod’s estate and the Kafka 
manuscripts. Indeed, the memory of the Holocaust was manifest both in the formal legal 
language and in the historiographic literature surrounding the Kafka case. In the 
proceedings, significant attention was paid to the fact that Esther Hoffe had sold some of 
Kafka’s manuscripts not just to any archive but an archive in Germany. This was interpreted 
by those directly involved in the case and other commentators as a profound insult, citing 
the fact that several of Kafka’s family members died in the camps and ghettos of Europe 
and that Brod himself had fled Nazi persecution in 1939. Aviad Stollman, a curator for the 
National Library of Israel, wrote during the case that “there is nothing Brod would have 
wanted less than for his writings to go to Germany...not only because of his own experience, 
but Kafka had two siblings murdered in Auschwitz.”31  

While Stollman’s assertion is slightly off—Kafka had three sisters murdered in Auschwitz—
the Holocaust is still a prominent justification for Israel’s acquisition of Kafka’s work 
despite the fact that he himself died beforehand.32 Otto Dov Kulka, an Israeli historian at 

 
29 “Archives Law, 1955,” Israeli Knesset, accessed November 7, 2018, 
https://fs.knesset.gov.il//2/Plenum/2_ptm_250508.pdf.  
30 Shapira, Israel: A History, 471. 
31 Buehrer, “Battle for Kafka Legacy Drags On,” Prague Post. 
32 Phillip Roth, “Kafka Would Have Savored the Irony of Being a German Treasure,” The New York Times, 
November 27, 1988, accessed November 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/27/opinion/l-kafka-
would-have-savored-the-irony-of-being-a-german-treasure-934088.html.  

https://fs.knesset.gov.il/2/Plenum/2_ptm_250508.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/27/opinion/l-kafka-would-have-savored-the-irony-of-being-a-german-treasure-934088.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/27/opinion/l-kafka-would-have-savored-the-irony-of-being-a-german-treasure-934088.html


   

 

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the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, slyly derided the daughters’ argument that they 
should be free to sell Kafka’s works to the archive: “Well, the Germans don’t have a very 
good history of taking care of Kafka’s things. They didn’t take good care of his sisters.”33 
Such arguments have two implications. For one thing, they seek to refute any 
conceptualization of Kafka as an inherently German writer. Rather, the Israeli lawyers 
sought to argue that Kafka’s Jewish identity and the memory of German anti-Semitism 
forbid the possibility that his literary legacy be claimed as an example of German national 
culture, even while Kafka himself spoke fluent German.34 These arguments further assert 
that the materials should remain in Israel as the center of post-Holocaust Jewry. Taken 
together, the Holocaust can be understood as fundamental to the relevant Israeli self-
conceptualization in the Kafka case. The destruction of Europe’s Jews is deployed to justify 
Israel’s claims to legally inherit the materials of the Diaspora, even when the creator 
him/herself was not a victim of the Nazis. 

Vienna: Holocaust Memory and Cultural Ownership in Central Europe 
Interestingly, the role of the Holocaust in defining the Israeli Diaspora archival relationship 
manifests in scenarios far removed from Franz Kafka. The fate of the archives of Vienna’s 
Jewish community, for example, raises equally compelling questions. The Jews of Vienna 
had been collecting archival evidence of their community’s existence since the seventeenth 
century and had accumulated almost three-hundred years’ worth of material by the 
outbreak of World War II.35 In the wake of the destruction of European Jewry, community 
leaders decided in 1952 to send the collection to the Central Archives for the History of the 
Jewish People in the newly created State of Israel for fear its contents would not be treated 
properly in post-Holocaust Austria.36 In 2011, the revived and vibrant Jewish community of 
modern Vienna filed a lawsuit in a District Court in Jerusalem against the Central Archives 
arguing that the materials should be returned to Austria.37 In an unprecedented legal 
maneuver, the Israeli Chief Archivist issued his own opinion on the matter (a document 
which will be discussed at further length later on), articulating that the materials ought to 
remain in Israel rather than be returned to their community of origin. Crucially, both the 
Jerusalem District Court and the Israeli Supreme Court endorsed the Chief Archivist’s 
position, keeping the three-hundred-year-old Viennese archive in the legal possession of 
the Israeli state.38 
 
As in the Kafka decision, it is essential to analyze the legal and conceptual arguments put 
forward by both the Viennese Jewish community and the Israeli Chief Archivist. The 
Viennese lawsuit, led by community leader Dr. Ariel Muzicant, articulated that the transfer 
of historical materials from Vienna to Jerusalem in the 1950s was only undertaken to 
protect the integrity of the materials at a challenging historical juncture for Central 

 
33 Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” The New York Times. 
34 Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial, 13. 
35 Aderet, “Battle Over Viennese Jewish Archive,” Haaretz. 
36 Aderet, “Battle Over Viennese Jewish Archive,” Haaretz. 
37 Benjamin Weinthal, “Vienna's Jewish Archives to Remain in Israel's Hands,” Jerusalem Post, October 16, 
2012, accessed November 9, 2018, https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Viennas-Jewish-
archives-to-remain-in-Israels-hands.  
38 Aderet, “Battle Over Viennese Jewish Archive,” Haaretz. 

https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Viennas-Jewish-archives-to-remain-in-Israels-hands
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European Jews: “They [the archival materials] belong to us, and when times were difficult, 
we sent them to Israel as a loan… Now we are trying to retrieve documents… and build a 
Jewish archive for them in Austria, and the archive in Jerusalem is ignoring us.”39 The 
argument put forward by Israel’s Central Archives is considerably more complex. First, 
from a strictly legal standpoint, the Israelis contended that the transfer was permanent. 
Before the Jerusalem District Court deferred to the decision of Yaacov Lozowick, the Israeli 
Chief Archivist at the time, Lozowick wrote publicly that the transfer from Vienna was 
intended to be permanent because the community was unable to properly preserve Jewish 
documents in the late 1940s and early 1950s: “In the years following World War II, the 
community was left with no assets and no ability to guarantee the preservation of the 
documents in a protected and proper mode. For these reasons, the community chose to 
deposit the collection for safekeeping in the Central Archives.”40  

However, it is clear from reading Lozowick’s writing that the primary argument for 
retaining the Viennese materials in Israel rather than returning them to Central Europe is a 
conceptual one. Like the National Library lawyers argued over Kafka, Lozowick contended 
that the archives of Jewish Vienna belong in Israel because they are historical materials of 
the Jewish people and are therefore able to be claimed as the legal property of the Jewish 
state. Israel, according to Lozowick’s conceptual framework, is the cultural axis around 
which the entirety of the Jewish world rotates: “The transfer of the collection [from Vienna] 
to Israel was an ideological expression of the Viennese Jewish community accepting the 
centrality of the new Jewish state—otherwise it could have been transferred to London or 
New York...The founders of the archival world in Israel in the middle of the twentieth 
century regarded the state as the center of world documentation of the Jewish people.”41 
Within this framework, Lozowick understands Israel to be the essential Jewish cultural 
hub, and as such, he is able to assert a legally viable claim of ownership over the historical 
materials produced elsewhere in the Jewish world. Such a sweeping argument has 
incalculable consequences for the status of property ownership and cultural production in 
the Jewish Diaspora, and Lozowick’s claim would be almost indefensible if he had not 
grounded it in the unique calamity of the Holocaust. In his decision, Lozowick asserts the 
following: “When [the Viennese archive] is in Jerusalem, it is part of Jewish heritage. Its 
expulsion from Jerusalem would send it to the periphery of the Jewish world. The leaders 
of the community after the Holocaust understood this well, so they sent their archives to 
the center so that their community would be remembered forever in the center.”42 As in the 
Kafka case, the historical memory of the Holocaust serves to justify Israel’s self-
conceptualization as the center of the Jewish world. As Lozowick states, the role of Israel, 
particularly in an archival sense, is to keep the memory of the murdered Jews of Central 
and Eastern Europe alive in the modern Jewish state. This implicitly asserts that adequate 
Holocaust memorialization can only be achieved in the State of Israel, for the memory of the 

 
39 Weinthal, “Vienna’s Jewish Archive,” Jerusalem Post. 
40 Yaacov Lozowick, “The Decision of the State Archives on the Collections of the Archives of the Jewish 
Community in Vienna,” Israel State Archives, October 15, 2012, 4, accessed November 9, 2018, 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B45gJhLdDCqqdnJPM05taXBrRXc/view.  
41 Lozowick, “The Decision of the State Archives,” 13. 
42 Lozowick, “The Decision of the State Archives,” 13. 

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murdered Jews of Vienna would be memorialized far from the epicenter of Jewish cultural 
life if the archive were returned to Austria.  

Vilnius: A Hebrew Claim on a Decidedly Yiddish Writer 
Still, the examples of the Viennese archive and the Kafka manuscripts each have two 
significant complications. For one thing, both cases concern claims made by Israel over 
materials that were already physically located in Israel: the Viennese archive had been in 
Israel since the 1950s and the Kafka manuscripts had arrived in 1939 in the suitcase of Max 
Brod and were sitting in a Tel Aviv apartment at the time of the lawsuit. The fact that the 
materials were already in Israel, or the territory that would later become the modern state, 
strengthened Israel’s claim considerably since any other nation would need to convincingly 
demonstrate, to an Israeli judge, that the artifacts could be better preserved outside the 
country for any such move to be justified. What’s more, both examples cited thus far have 
had significant legal factors at play relative to their sweeping cultural implications. In the 
case of the Viennese archives, the legal question was whether or not the transfer to 
Jerusalem was permanent; for Kafka, it was whether or not Brod named Hoffe as a 
beneficiary or simply an executor of his estate. These legal factors could obscure the extent 
to which Israel’s post-Holocaust understanding of itself was at play when asserting its 
claim over these historical artifacts.  
 
One final example solidifies that Israel’s logic when claiming ownership over the cultural 
artifacts of the Jewish Diaspora is inherently linked with the memorialization of the 
Holocaust. That example is the fate of the literary estate of Chaim Grade. Grade was a 
writer and poet born in an Orthodox family in Vilnius in 1910.43 During the War, Grade fled 
eastward and sought refuge in the Soviet Union. When he returned to Lithuania after the 
War, he discovered that the Nazis had killed both his wife and his mother; in 1948, the 
same year Israel was established, Grade emigrated to the United States and settled in the 
Bronx.44 Grade’s literary career dealt exclusively with Ashkenazi themes and philosophy. 
His most highly acclaimed novels, The Agunah (1961) and The Yeshiva (1967), are both set 
in prewar Lithuania and the majority of his poetry dealt with the immense trauma of the 
Holocaust.45 After his death, Grade’s second wife, who died in 2010, failed to legally file her 
will. As a result, his entire estate fell into the hands of the public administrator for Bronx 
County.46 Detached from any legal provenance, where, then, should Grade’s orphaned 
legacy—“40 boxes of [his] letters, manuscripts and photographs, and 20,000 books from 
[his] personal library”—be housed?47 In 2013, the Bronx public administrator awarded 

 
43 Richard F. Shepard, “Chaim Grade, Yiddish Novelist and Poet on the Holocaust, Dies,” The New York Times, 
July 1, 1982, accessed November 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/01/obituaries/chaim-grade-
yiddish-novelist-and-poet-on-the-holocaust-dies.html.  
44 Shepard, “Chaim Grade, Yiddish Novelist and Poet on the Holocaust, Dies,” The New York Times. 
45 Shepard, “Chaim Grade, Yiddish Novelist and Poet on the Holocaust, Dies,” The New York Times. 
46 Adam Soclof, “YIVO, National Library of Israel Team to Acquire Chaim Grade Collection,” Jewish Telegraph 
Agency, February 13, 2013, accessed November 7, 2018, https://www.jta.org/2013/02/13/arts-
entertainment/yivo-national-library-of-israel-team-to-acquire-chaim-grade-collection.  
47 Soclof, “YIVO, National Library of Israel Team to Acquire Chaim Grade Collection,” Jewish Telegraph Agency. 

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/01/obituaries/chaim-grade-yiddish-novelist-and-poet-on-the-holocaust-dies.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/01/obituaries/chaim-grade-yiddish-novelist-and-poet-on-the-holocaust-dies.html
https://www.jta.org/2013/02/13/arts-entertainment/yivo-national-library-of-israel-team-to-acquire-chaim-grade-collection
https://www.jta.org/2013/02/13/arts-entertainment/yivo-national-library-of-israel-team-to-acquire-chaim-grade-collection


   

 

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joint ownership of Grade’s literary estate to the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in New 
York and the National Library of Israel.48 

At least half of this decision is bewildering. Grade, after all, was a Yiddish writer, not a 
Hebrew one. In fact, he was quite resistant to his works being translated from Yiddish to 
any other language during his early career.49 Furthermore, he was decidedly not an Israeli, 
as he left Europe in the wake of the Holocaust and settled in New York, the quintessential 
metropole of the Jewish Diaspora. Grade neither traveled to Israel during his lifetime nor 
chose to write about “Israeli” themes typical of modern Hebrew literature, such as the 
kibbutz movement, the ethos of the new, muscular, and self-sufficient Jew, or the cultivation 
of the land in Israel. Instead, his work depicted a distinctly Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking, 
Old-World Jewish experience. Given these factors alone, it is rather remarkable that YIVO’s 
claim to the entirety of Grade’s work was deemed insufficient. But what is more, YIVO was 
established in Grade’s own hometown, Vilnius, in 1925 to serve as a cultural archive for 
Jewish life in Eastern Europe. With the outbreak of World War II, YIVO recognized the need 
to move Jewish historical materials out of Europe and felt that the United States 
represented the essence of the Jewish Diaspora.50 Once relocated to New York, YIVO’s 
collections sought to be “the primary source of the documentary history of East European 
Jewry and the surviving record of millions of lives of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.”51 
YIVO’s historical trajectory is almost identical to Grade’s: both were born in Vilnius but 
established themselves in New York with an exclusive focus on documenting Jewish life in 
Eastern Europe, particularly relative to the Nazi horror from which they both survived.  

Yet even though YIVO appeared able to put forward the stronger claim, the National 
Library of Israel was successful in securing shared successor rights.52 Importantly, the 
Grade decision does not possess any of the legal quagmires seen in the Kafka or Vienna 
cases, nor were Grade’s manuscripts physically located in Israel at the time of the decision. 
Rather, Israel was able to successfully claim Grade’s literary legacy as its own simply by 
virtue of Grade being a Jew and by his proximity to the Holocaust. In the National Library’s 
statement after the decision, Grade is described as having “lost his family in the 

 
48 Soclof, “YIVO, National Library of Israel Team to Acquire Chaim Grade Collection,” Jewish Telegraph Agency. 
49 Curt Leviant, “Translating and Remembering Chaim Grade,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2011, accessed 
November 7, 2018, https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/272/translating-and-remembering-chaim-
grade/.  
50 Silvia Schenkolewski-Kroll, “Jewish Archives and Archival Documents: Israel and the Diaspora,” Archival 
Science 16 (2016): 309-326, accessed November 7, 2018, 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282545878_Jewish_archives_and_archival_documents_Israel_and
_the_Diaspora. 
51 Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation 
(New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 12. 
52 For a discussion of the competing cultural ideologies that drive the “latent rivalry” between YIVO and 
Israeli cultural institutions, such as the National Library of Israel, see Bilha Shilo, “When YIVO Was Defined by 
Territory: Two Perspectives on the Restitution of YIVO’s Collections,” in Contested Heritage: Jewish Cultural 
Property After 1945, eds. Elisabeth Gallas, Anna Holzer-kawalko, Caroline Jessen, and Yfaat Weiss (Göttingen: 
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Gmbh & Co., 2019), 79-90. 

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/272/translating-and-remembering-chaim-grade/
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/272/translating-and-remembering-chaim-grade/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282545878_Jewish_archives_and_archival_documents_Israel_and_the_Diaspora
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282545878_Jewish_archives_and_archival_documents_Israel_and_the_Diaspora


   

 

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Holocaust.”53 Although a brief biographical detail, this inclusion seems to suggest that the 
Holocaust was an important explanation for Israel’s pursuit of Grade’s work in the first 
place, and a crucial justification for awarding shared ownership to Israel. Thus, the Grade 
decision, perhaps even more clearly than the Kafka and Vienna cases, underscores Israel’s 
deep—and very effective—assertion that the memory of the Holocaust centers Israel as the 
cultural locus of all Jewish materials and artistic contributions, even those produced by 
Jews in the Diaspora who neither traveled nor expressed any connection to Israel. 

Caught Between Continents: Sovereignty, Identity, and the Claim to Inherit Jewish 
History 
From these three cases, it is clear that the Holocaust plays as decisive a role in the creation 
and implementation of Israeli policy and jurisprudential practice as it has in its national 
identity more broadly. As Israeli institutions have launched legal cases to inherit the works 
of Jewish artists, even those who may have died before the wholesale destruction of 
European Jewry, they have used the memory and trauma of the Holocaust to legitimize and 
empower their claims. At first, the close association between the Holocaust and the Israeli 
state may not seem so contentious, considering the state was founded three years removed 
from Germany’s surrender with the explicit intention of ingathering Jewish refugees. 
However, such articulations posit several sweeping implications that could potentially 
redefine the form of Holocaust commemoration and assert Israeli primacy over all other 
Jewish communities across the globe.  
 
To begin with, these articulations imply that Israel alone bears the trauma of the Holocaust. 
While it should be noted that Israel has the highest population of Holocaust survivors in the 
world today (189,500), Israel is not the only country to which survivors of the death camps 
fled following liberation.54 The United States, for example, is home to roughly 100,000 
survivors, half of whom live in the metropolitan area surrounding New York City.55 
Australia has the largest per-capita Holocaust survivor population outside Israel with 
particularly high concentrations in Sydney and Melbourne.56 As such, it seems rather odd 
that Israel has been successful in using the Holocaust—a European tragedy occurring in the 
years preceding the establishment of the Jewish state—as a justification in court.  

Even more important, these articulations, while specifically related to Holocaust memory 
and commemoration, posit dangers to the Israeli-Diaspora relationship. Indeed, the ability 
of Israel to legally inherit the art and historical materials of Jews born abroad poses an 

 
53 “BeShutafus: Forming Partnerships to Preserve Yiddish Literature,” National Library of Israel, accessed 
November 7, 2018, http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/collections/jewish-
collection/Pages/beshutafus.aspx.  
54 Marcy Oster, “Worldwide Population of 14.7 Million Jews Falls Short of Pre-War Numbers,” Jerusalem Post, 
April 21, 2020, accessed July 25, 2020, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/worldwide-population-of-147-
million-jews-falls-short-of-pre-war-numbers-625299. 
55 Shachar Peled, “On Holocaust Remembrance Day: A Third of Survivors in the US Are Poor,” CNN, January 
27, 2017, accessed November 26, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/27/us/holocaust-survivor-
poverty/index.html.  
56 Charmaine Joffe, Henry Brodaty, Georgina Luscombe, and Frederick Ehrlich, “The Sydney Holocaust Study: 
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Other Psychosocial Morbidity in an Aged Community Sample,” Journal of 
Traumatic Stress 16, no. 1 (February 2003): 39-47. 

http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/collections/jewish-collection/Pages/beshutafus.aspx
http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/collections/jewish-collection/Pages/beshutafus.aspx
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/worldwide-population-of-147-million-jews-falls-short-of-pre-war-numbers-625299
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/worldwide-population-of-147-million-jews-falls-short-of-pre-war-numbers-625299
https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/27/us/holocaust-survivor-poverty/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/27/us/holocaust-survivor-poverty/index.html


   

 

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existential threat to the very vitality of Jewish identity in the Diaspora. If the Holocaust can 
be employed as an argumentative trump card to claim the cultural legacy of the Diaspora— 
even when the artist was only tangentially or posthumously impacted—then Israel has 
secured the right to hold and possess anything Jewish. As such, Israel’s broad claim to own 
the Diaspora essentially destroys the Diaspora, for it rejects the idea that Jewish materials 
can retain their essential Jewishness outside of the State of Israel. In the largest sense, these 
decisions threaten to shift the most basic foundations not only of cultural ownership but of 
Jewish identity altogether. With a few favorable decisions, Israel has effectively obtained a 
monopoly on the material and historical legacy of the entire Jewish people and has asserted 
itself as the central gatekeeper for what it means to be a Jew in the world. And with the 
Holocaust holding almost invincible argumentative sway, it remains to be seen how far 
Israel’s self-proclaimed cultural powers will extend. 


