Foreword

In their extraordinary study of a photograph of looting from the Treblinka extermination camp, Golden Harvest, Jan Gross and Irena Grudzinska Gross remind us that "Wartime plundering of Jews became a continent-wide affair.It took place from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to as far east as German armies reached in their campaign against the USSR, and was accompanied by opportunistic behavior of the local population" (Gross and Gross 2012, 78).The economic war against the Jews was an essential part of the Nazi antisemitic program.The corrosive corruption that set in under the combination of traditional Christian and nationalistic antisemitism viewed "the Jews" as an exploiter of native society and, as Gross and Grudzinska wrote, "demanded the elimination of the Jews from the national economyin order to liberate subjugated peoples from alleged Jewish enslavement" (Gross and Gross 2012, 11).Economic elimination was integral to the physical extermination of Jews from the European continent.This themed issue of the Journal of Eastern European Holocaust Studies is a welcome attempt to focus on the question of the spoliation of the Jews of Eastern Europe and the results of post war efforts at restitution.It brings together a number of specialized studies that range over several countries and offers an overview of the latest research on the topic.These articles are an important reminder of the necessity of confronting this issue in the very region where most of the Nazi murders took place and that for too long have been receiving only minimal attention.This is evident for example in the 2007 collection of studies Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe (Dean, Goschler and Ther 2007).Out of nine case studies of restitution discussed there, only three articles refer to countries in Central and Eastern Europe.A few new academic works on the restitution of Jewish property confiscated in Eastern Europe have since appeared, but significant gaps in scholarship persist, particularly regarding the return of Jewish property seized by the Nazis and subsequently nationalized in the former Soviet republics (Ionescu 2024).