A feast of art in Israel but on whose walls do these works really belong?

Masterpieces by some of the world's greatest artists went on show in Jerusalem this week. They have one thing in common: they were seized from Jewish owners by the Nazis. By Donald Macintyre

Even if this was an ordinary exhibition, it would be well worth a visit. Loaned by the leading French galleries, including the Louvre, it is a fine collection of paintings – many of them by acknowledged masters – spanning the last four centuries of European art.

But it is so much more than that. When a gallery visitor pauses before a picture he normally has little reason to take more than a passing interest in its provenance, who owned it, how and when. But the show that opened in the Israel Museum here this week is something quite different; it is impossible to see these works without reference to those who owned them – in most cases their names are still unknown – as Europe was engulfed in the darkest period of the 20th century.

Take Church by Maurice Utrillo, the signed original of a much exhibited and reproduced wintry scene in a French suburb, a small group of figures characteristic of the painter in the middle ground clustering outside a parish church, its spire sharply picked out against a watery blue sky. What gives this painting its particular poignancy is the seal on the frame: Feldpolizei 540. That shows it was among hundreds seized by Group 540 of the secret Nazi military police in the early days of the occupation of Paris from Jewish owners and art dealers on the orders of the German Ambassador Otto Abetz, and with the sanction of Adolf Hitler. The experts believe it was then transferred to the foreign ministry in Berlin, and then towards the end of the war transferred to Austria to avoid Allied air raids. It was only rediscovered in 1951 hidden in a castle near Klagenfurt, in the British sector in Austria, joining the works that had already been shipped back to France by the Allied Recovery Commission.

Or Courbet's Baigneuses, known also as Two Nude Women, and bought for Hitler's foreign minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop by the collaborating Paris dealer Raphael Gerard for the suspiciously low price of 16,250 Reichsmarks. Or Claude Monet's Snow In The Setting Sun, with its breathtaking use of shadow in the winter light, which may just have belonged to the Jewish Breslau industrialist Max Silberberg, who was forced by the Nazis to sell more than 140 paintings in Berlin in the 1930s and died while being deported to the extermination camps. Or Henri Matisse's landscape, The Pink Wall, which bore a French customs seal and somehow fell into the hands of Kurt Gertstein, who was assigned the key role of ensuring deliveries of Zyklon B cyanide to the death chambers.

Or La Baveuse, by the 17th-century Dutch master Pieter de Hooch, of a woman drinking with soldiers, seized from the collections of Edouard de Rothschild to become part of the collection of Hermann Goering, whose repeated personal plundering of stolen Jewish-owned works assembled by the Nazi forces in the Jeu de Paume became notorious in war-time occupied Paris.

In that case, the painting was restored to the Rothschilds by the allies after the war and donated in 1974 by the family to the Louvre. But in most other cases "Looking for Owners" could not be a more appropriate title for the exhibition. Or "Orphaned Art" for its simultaneous sister exhibition showing a selection of some 1,200 works shipped to Israel by the Jewish Restitution Successor Organisation from 1949, and held permanently by the Museum. Entry after entry in the catalogue ends by bleakly declaring: "We do not currently have the information required in order to establish the pre-war history of the work."

Some of at least 250,000 works looted across Europe by the Nazis were destined for Hitler himself and the absurdly grandiose museum he planned for Linz, Austria, like the whimsically pastoral Fragonard of "Shepherds In A Landscape" on display here. In many cases, it was systematic – like that of the works discovered during the Mobel Aktion which began in 1942 and was intended to rob all Jews who had fled or were "on the point of fleeing" of furniture for the benefit of Nazi forces settling in the eastern occupied zones.

But in others, says Shlomit Steinberg, the Israel Museum's Curator of European Art, a a Gestapo officer raiding a house "might simply see something he liked". Desperate Jews would be forced – sometimes at gunpoint—or blackmailed into selling their prized posessions well below market value. "He would be told 'you're desperate to leave for England or the US. This is worth 30,000 francs; I'll give you 5000 for it,'" said Ms Steinberg. In other cases the Nazis were able to meet Hitler's double objective of banning "degenerate" art and acquiring "Aryan" works distributed through Europe. Thus the collaborating dealer Gustav Rochlitz exchanged with the Nazis the 17th century Pieter Claesz still life exhibited here for three "degenerate" Matisses which until the war had been in the hands of Picasso's long standing Jewish dealer Paul Rosenberg.

The exhibition is no less welcome to Israel for being a long time coming. Its genesis lies in the 1997 French Matteoli commission which reviewed the history of the 60,000 works sent back to France after the war. After 45,000 of them had been restored to their rightful owners, 2000—among them the 53 on display here—were retained by the state. But another 13,000 were sold—at 100m francs at 1954 prices without much active prior research on who the owners might be and with what the Commission described as "surprising haste" Once the decision in principle was taken to lend some of the works to the Israel Museum, a change in Israeli law provided that if anyone recognized the works as belonging to their family, they could only claim for it in the French courts. The condition was free public access to the databases of the looted works held by the galleries—and they can be seen through the Israel Museum's website www.english.imjnet.org.il. Among the Israel Museum-held works —of mainly lesser artistic, though not less sentimental value, than those brought from France—20 have been claimed over the years, most recently by a British woman Hazel Stein, who was able to identify an Italian print and a 17century Dutch painting in bad condition. Ms Stein donated money to the Museum to restore and keep the painting.

If someone walked in to the museum and identified a picture as their family's, it would be a welcome a "vindication" of the exhibition, says Israel Museum Director James Snyder. But the importance of showing these works in Israel, which "was born from the ashes of World War II" goes way beyond that, he believes. Of course the plunder of art is little beside the much greater horrors of the holocaust. But for the Jewish owners, the quintessentially European paintings, reflecting the choice of their pre-war owners, says Mr Snyder "are a kind of symbol of the assimilation into the secular places where [they] lived." As such they are a "melancholy" memorial to the "loss of a way of life."