Loved ones of a Holocaust survivor surrendered an ancient gold plate to German museum curators Wednesday, ending a nasty Long Island court battle over the 3,000-year-old artifact.
The two-inch, 9.5-gram tablet — worth up to $10 million — had been with the Great Neck family of former Auschwitz prisoner Riven Flamenbaum since the end of World War II.
The Holocaust survivor died in 2003 before son Israel Flamenbaum tipped off Vorderasiatisches Museum officials about the artifact and ignited the emotional, trans-Atlantic court fight. New York’s high court ruled last month that the plate belongs to the museum.
Family lawyer Steven Schlesinger handed the gold to a museum curator wearing white gloves in Nassau County Surrogate’s Court on Wednesday. He measured, weighed and examined it, before authenticating it for Judge Edward McCarty.
“We’d like to thank the court for the opportunity to express the museum’s gratitude for the safe and orderly return of this valuable tablet and for a happy end this long journey,” said the museum’s US lawyer Raymond Dowd.
“We hope that this ceremony will help to heal wounds of the Holocaust, wounds that run deep, wounds that continue to hurt families.”
Flamenbaum’s family did not attend the hearing. They had wanted to donate the plate to a Holocaust museum in the United States.
“They very much wanted it to go anywhere but Germany — where their family was killed,” Schlesinger said outside court.
The tablet dates back to Assyrian King Tukulti-Ninurta I and was found by German archeologists in 1913 in what’s now northern Iraq.
The credit-card-sized relic was housed at Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum, which was looted by Soviet troops at the end of World War II, curators said.
Flamenbaum claimed he traded cigarettes with Soviet troops to score the relic days after his liberation.
The New York Court of Appeals rejected the estate’s “spoils of war” argument that the relic was acquired through legal means, because Soviet authorities allowed their troops to grab German valuables.
Flamenbaum’s two daughters said they had no idea the gold plate was worth so much money, until their brother tipped off the museum. The sisters and Israel Flamenbaum are estranged, according to Schlesinger.