Jewish collector’s descendant gets Nazi-looted Renoir back

NEW YORK » The granddaughter of a Jewish art collector whose paintings were stolen by the Nazis had a family reunion with one of the works on Wednesday after almost eight decades, an impressionist piece by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Sylvie Sulitzer saw “Two Women in a Garden” for the first time at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage after unveiling it at a ceremony that included law enforcement officials representing the offices that helped get the painting back to her, her grandparents’ only living descendant.

“I’m very thankful to be able to show my beloved family, wherever they are, that after what they’ve been through, there is justice,” Sulitzer said tearfully.

The reunion, though, will probably be short-lived. She will likely auction off the painting to pay back compensation she previously got for missing artwork.

She was joined by Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, and William Sweeney Jr., the assistant director in charge of the New York office of the FBI.

Sulitzer’s grandfather, Alfred Weinberger, was an art collector in Paris. Sulitzer said he fled the city to avoid being pressed into service by the Nazis for his art expertise.

He put some of his paintings in a bank vault before fleeing the Nazis, who took possession of the works in December 1941. The Nazis made a regular practice of looting artworks and other items of cultural and financial significance, and in the decades since World War II, efforts have been made to find the objects and return them to their owners if possible, with varying levels of success.

Weinberger died when Sulitzer, now 59, was a teenager, without ever getting the Renoir and a handful of other paintings returned to him. She had no idea of the paintings’ existence, Sulitzer said, since they weren’t discussed in her family.

“The war was a taboo subject; we never talked about that,” said Sulitzer, who owns a delicatessen in the