Senate Judiciary Committee Advances Legislation Designed to Help Holocaust Families

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently unanimously passed out of committee a bill designed to help Holocaust-survivor families recover artwork stolen by the Nazis.

The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act “ensures federal court cases regarding art looted by the Nazis during the Holocaust are heard on their merits,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal. “With antisemitism on the rise around the world, this bill sends a message to Holocaust survivors and their loved ones that they won’t be forgotten.” 

The bipartisan bill is a piece of follow-up legislation to the original HEAR Act that was passed in 2016. 

The HEAR Act of 2025 would eliminate the sunset date for the original HEAR Act legislation, and attempts to strengthen victims’ abilities to sue in courts.

“It eliminates the foreign sovereign immunity defense. In other words, if Hungary has not too limited art, you can sue them. If you’re a US citizen in your local court,” Raymond Dowd, a lawyer who works on recovery cases, told The Daily Signal.

The legislation also seeks to give victims more time to litigate their cases.

“One of the problems here is that people might know where the Mona Lisa is, but nobody told you that you owned it, right. Like connecting all those dots can take decades to even understand it,” Dowd said. 

M.C. Sungaila, a prominent appellate attorney and expert in Holocaust art recovery, told The Daily Signal that “there have been too many hurdles put in place by various courts contrary to the original 2016 HEAR Act.” 

Joel Greenberg, president of Art Ashes, an organization that works on Nazi art restitutions, also cited jurisprudence following the 2016 law that had limited Holocaust families’ efforts. “Yesterday’s markup in the Senate marks a vital step toward restoring the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act to Congress’s original intent in 2016,” Greenberg told The Daily Signal in a statement. “Courts have interpreted the law so narrowly that families are being denied justice before the facts can even be heard.” 

“The proposed clarifications–eliminating time-based and other procedural barriers–are essential to ensure that claims for Nazi-looted art are resolved on their merits, as Congress always intended,” Greenberg continued. “For too long, certain museums, dealers, private owners and foreign governments have relied on technical defenses to avoid confronting the truth and legacy of the Holocaust. This legislation will help end those tactics and ensure the historical record is fully preserved and remembered – an outcome as meaningful to Survivors and their families as the art itself.”

Sungaila emphasized that the Nazi looting of artwork had an explicit cultural purpose.

“The art wasn’t just pilfered as it is, as a collateral asset to war, but it was really integral to the Nazis’ overall plan. So part of their plan was a cultural plan, right? We want to eliminate a certain group of people, and we really want to eliminate their influence on the culture,” Sungaila added.

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