Decision no. 1159/2016

The Jewish Central Archive was founded in 1930/31 at the instigation of the Eisenstadt wine dearler and art collector Sándor W. with the aim of collecting and archiving archive material from the Burgenland Jewish Communities and from Jewish private ownership that was worthy of safeguarding. By the time of the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich, the Jewish Communities of Deutschkreutz, Unterberg-Eisenstadt, Frauenkirchen, Gattendorf, Güssing, Kittsee, Kobersdorf, Lackenbach, Mattersburg, Rechnitz and Oberwart (Stadt Schlaining) and several private individuals had provided a wide range of archive material to the Central Archive on loan.

On 26 March 1938 the Central Archive’s holdings, which were stored in a Jewish school run by the Jewish Community of Unterberg-Eisenstadt, were secured by the authorities for conservational reasons. In October 1938 the newly-established Archive Eisenstadt Branch (Filialarchiv), which was under the authority of the Reich Regional Archive Niederdonau following the dissolution of the Province of Burgenland, took on the Central Archive’s holdings. Until 1945, additional holdings from Jewish Communities of Burgenland that had been dissolved under the Nazi regime, including documents from Jewish schools and associations, were incorporated into the Central Archive.

In 1960 the re-established IK V. filed for the handover of the Central Archive. This request was rejected by the Office of the Burgenland Provincial Government. In the years that followed, until at least 1981, negotiations between the IK V., the Jerusalem Central Archives, the competent Israeli Ambassador to Austria and the Israeli Ministry of Internal Affairs on one side and the Office of the Burgenland Provincial Government, the Burgenland Provincial Governor, the Burgenland Provincial Councillor for Culture, the Archive Office and the Austrian Federal Chancellor on the other, repeatedly broke down. From 1989 to 1996 the holdings of the Central Archive were microfilmed at the request of the Jerusalem Central Archives and the microfilms were transferred to the archive in Jerusalem.

In its juridical appraisal, the Arbitration Panel reached the conclusion that neither the Province of Burgenland nor the Republic of Austria had been the owners of the Jewish Central Archive on the cut off day pursuant to the GSF Law, 17 January 2001. Moreover, the contents of the Jewish Central Archive had not been seized as defined by the GSF Law, nor had there been a disposition relating to the archive resulting in a change of ownership benefitting the Republic, a province or a municipality. As such, fundamental requirements for a restitution pursuant to the GSF Law are not met. Therefore, the applications for in rem restitution of the Jewish Central Archive of Burgenland had to be rejected. In addition, the Arbitration Panel held that this rejection does not allow the conclusion to be drawn that the archive material of the Jewish Central Archive cannot be attributed to the IK V. or the Jewish Religious Association.