Interview

Ronald Lauder works to spark the flames of Jewry’s future

The recent winner of the Guardian of Zion Award speaks about art restitution, the evils of anti-Israelism, and the need to make more ‘Jewish worlds’

Deputy Editor Amanda Borschel-Dan is the host of The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing and What Matters Now podcasts and heads up The Times of Israel's Jewish World and Archaeology coverage.

World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder meets The Times of Israel at Jerusalem's King David Hotel on June 15, 2016. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)
World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder meets The Times of Israel at Jerusalem's King David Hotel on June 15, 2016. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)

As the United States ambassador to Austria in 1986, Ronald Lauder underwent what can only be called a life-changing experience. With the fraying of the Iron Curtain, the billionaire businessman-turned-diplomat was witness to a mass emigration of Russian Jewry to the West.

For many Russian emigres, Vienna was meant to be a steppingstone to brighter futures in Israel or the United States. However, very often they didn’t get permission to come to the US or didn’t, in the end, want to make aliyah to Israel, Lauder said. And so in Vienna, some 3,000-5,000 Jewish people formed an insular community of jobless, language-less, stateless adults and children.

It was seeing the children of the so-called “stranded” — poverty-struck, with no options for education — that shifted the course of Lauder’s life.

“I came there as a very assimilated Jew,” Lauder told The Times of Israel in an interview at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. Growing up, he was “a three-day-a-year Jew,” said the man who has been president of the World Jewish Congress since 2007.

Lauder described his European grandparents as “somewhere between very Conservative and Modern Orthodox, trying to adapt to the United States,” and his parents — the founders of the Estée Lauder beauty empire — were “religious, but not so religious that they put it on me, but I became, let’s say, only aware when I came to Austria,” said Lauder.

“And I looked at these children and I started talking to them, understanding what they’re about. And I said, ‘That could have been me, and that could have been my child.’ And that moment I started to feel a certain responsibility and a certain amount of Jewishness.

‘That could have been me, and that could have been my child’

“It moved me very, very much,” said Lauder, in his customary three-piece suit, sitting flanked by his entourage in the historic hotel’s Oak Room a day after receiving the annual Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies​ at Bar-Ilan University’s Guardian of Zion Award on June 14.

That experience, said Lauder, “opened up a certain flame within me, of what Jews are about. There’s an old Hassidic saying that within every Jew there’s a flame burning. Sometimes you don’t see it because it’s covered up, but sometimes it comes out.”

Igniting a flame

In 1987, Lauder founded and funded a system of Jewish kindergartens and schools, particularly in lands ravaged by the Holocaust. As expressed on the Lauder Foundation website, “With every Jewish child learning in our kindergartens and schools, with every Jewish teen exploring her identity in our summer camps and youth centers, with every Jewish young adult studying in our institutions of higher education, and with every one of those young Jews who then starts a Jewish family and has Jewish children, we are helping build new worlds — Jewish worlds.”

Students at the Lauder Jewish day school in Warsaw, Poland (courtesy)
Students at the Lauder Jewish day school in Warsaw, Poland (courtesy)

For the schools, as well as for Lauder, the definition of Jewish is not one based purely on halacha (Jewish law) but rather goes according to the spirit of the Israeli Law of Return, in which a person is eligible for aliyah if one grandparent is Jewish.

“The question of who is a Jew is a very difficult question, especially when you’re dealing with places like Poland, Hungary — all the places behind the so-called Iron Curtain of the time — because you had a lot of mixed marriages; a lot of people who were Jewish and didn’t admit it,” said Lauder. “With our schools, we admitted children who said either they had one parent or one grandparent who was Jewish.

“And to me, I’ve never really and truly made the distinction of who is and who is not a Jew. If anybody comes to you and says they are Jewish in one way or another, or feels Jewish, it’s not for me to say, ‘I’m sorry. Unless you show me the papers, I’m not going to let you be there,'” said Lauder. “In many cases, particularly in Eastern Europe, no papers exist.”

Agata Trzebuchowska as Ida Lebenstein, right, and Agata Kulesza as Wanda Gruz in the Polish fiIm 'Ida.' (Courtesy photo via JTA)
Agata Trzebuchowska as Ida Lebenstein, right, and Agata Kulesza as Wanda Gruz in the Polish fiIm ‘Ida.’ (Courtesy photo via JTA)

The opacity of Jewish identity in post-war Eastern Europe has been discussed in the past several years in popular culture, including the Polish film “Ida,” which took an Oscar for best foreign film at the 87th Academy Awards. The plot of “Ida” focused on a case of what Lauder calls “hidden children.”

‘As far as I’m concerned, anyone who says they’re Jewish, I don’t question’

These cases stem from World War II and are, said Lauder, “children who were raised by Catholics because their parents were killed and some didn’t even know they were Jewish until they were 15, 17, 20 years old and their foster parents came to them and said, ‘Oh, by the way, we have a confession to make, you’re really Jewish.'”

“So the result is, it wasn’t for me to say who is a Jew, and I don’t believe it’s anyone’s responsibility… But as far as I’m concerned, anyone who says they’re Jewish, I don’t question,” said Lauder.

Where the art and Jewish worlds intersect

Just after his stint as ambassador, in 1987 Lauder paid a visit to the Auschwitz death camps in German-occupied Poland. As described in a lengthy 1993 New Yorker magazine article, once there he “was shocked not only by the condition of the place but by the fact that there was no place to pray.”

“You could see the entire place deteriorating before your very eyes — the shoes, the suitcases, the wooden barracks. I realized that in another few years the place would be gone forever. Something had to be done,” he told the New Yorker.

Ronald Lauder looks on as Mordechai Ronen, an inmate at Auschwitz at 11 who lost his parents and sisters there, breaks into tears as he walks through the camp, which is now a museum in Oswiecim, Poland, January 26, 2015. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images/via JTA)
Ronald Lauder looks on as Mordechai Ronen, an inmate at Auschwitz at 11 who lost his parents and sisters there, breaks into tears as he walks through the camp, which is now a museum in Oswiecim, Poland, January 26, 2015. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images/via JTA)

Lauder, a long-time art collector and museum patron, used his web of contacts in the art world to get estimates and operating plans on how to restore the Auschwitz artifacts. He then leveraged his cosmetics-fueled Ronald S. Lauder Foundation as a vehicle to raise the necessary tens of millions of dollars, mainly from nation states.

A decade later, in 1997, Lauder again pulled together his work as a diplomat and his love of art to found the Commission for Art Recovery, which works to bring Nazi-looted art back to its rightful heirs. According to its website, the commission “deals with governments, museums, and other institutions internationally to help, through moral suasion, to bring a small measure of justice into the lives of families whose art was lost.”

The poster child of what is arguably the most internationally famous art restitution case, the “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” by Gustav Klimt, was the basis for the Helen Mirren film “Lady in Gold.” After a long protracted international court battle, it was purchased by Lauder in 2006 from its rightful heir, Maria Altmann and her family, and now hangs in Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York.

Lauder is still a leading activist in the world of art restitution and testified alongside Mirren at the June 7 US Senate hearings on the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, which would change existing statute of limitation laws and create a standardized six years from point of adjudication, said Lauder.

Academy Award winner Helen Mirren and World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder in front of the famous ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,’ nicknamed ‘Woman in Gold’ in June 2015. (Shahar Azran)
Academy Award winner Helen Mirren and World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder in front of the famous ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,’ nicknamed ‘Woman in Gold’ in June 2015. (Shahar Azran)

The bill would set the clock ticking “six years after actual discovery of: (1) the identity and location of the artwork or cultural property, and (2) information or facts sufficient to indicate that the claimant has a claim for a possessory interest in the artwork or cultural property that was unlawfully lost,” according to the Congress website.

At the June hearing, Lauder said, “What makes this particular crime even more despicable is that this art theft, probably the greatest in history, was continued by governments, museums and many knowing collectors in the decades following the war.”

‘There are museums here in the United States that have been waiting out the clock to pass the statute of limitations’

“This was the dirty secret of the post-war art world, and people who should have known better, were part of it… There are museums here in the United States that have been waiting out the clock to pass the statute of limitations. This also forces claimants to spend enormous amounts of money on legal fees – another strategy to make them give up,” Lauder explained. “This is not justice. Stalling claims is an abuse of the system.”

Putting it in layman’s terms for The Times of Israel, Lauder explained, “If you had a painting that you saw in a museum that you thought was stolen from your grandparents and you said to the people, ‘I think that painting belonged to my grandparents,’ the clock would start ticking. Come back a year or two later, you find a lawyer, all of a sudden you find that the statute of limitations had run out, and the museum says, ‘Thank you very much, goodbye,'” said Lauder.

With the HEAR Act, “any organization that is seen to have been trying to run out the clock loses.”

Giving youth their ‘Austria moment’

In his Jerusalem acceptance speech for the Guardian of Zion Award, “Where Are We: The Future of the Jewish People,” Lauder touched on several issues facing Jewish youth today, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which targets Israel over what critics say is its ill-treatment of Palestinians, and an overall apathy and lack of connection to Israel.

Lauder is well aware of the poisonous atmosphere on American college campuses today and the rise of anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Israelism that are potential causes of a disaffection with Jewish affiliation among youth.

Head of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder speaks with Ingeborg Rennert at the Bar-Ilan University's Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies annual Guardian of Zion Award on June 14, 2016 at Jerusalem's King David Hotel. (Yoni Reif)
Head of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder speaks with Ingeborg Rennert at the Bar-Ilan University’s Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies annual Guardian of Zion Award on June 14, 2016 at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. (Yoni Reif)

“Too often people say, ‘I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m anti-Israel.’ And as I answered one head of state, ‘Who do you think lives in Israel? Martians?’ The fact is, let’s say it straight, if you’re anti-Israel, you are basically anti-Semitic,” Lauder told The Times of Israel.

In terms of universities, as a major donor himself to several institutions, Lauder calls on other philanthropists to start asking questions of their alma maters before funding them. Additionally, Lauder is working alongside other Jewish organizations to highlight the illegality of the BDS movement on the basis of being anti-religious and anti-Semitic.

“I would say very much that it is very, very hard for me to see universities which would never accept a racist comment or a homophobic comment by a professor allow the professor to talk negatively about Israel and the Jewish people there,” said Lauder. “Too often the people who are funding many of these places, many of them are Jewish. I feel they should know what their university is saying.”

Lauder highlighted that as opposed to Nazi Europe, today, Jews are the masters of their own destiny.

‘I intend to make our young people proud of their heritage again’

“The world’s attitude towards us may not have changed, but one thing has definitely changed. We have changed. The era of the quiet Jew, the timid Jew, the ghetto Jew is long over. Those tough leaders of the early Zionist movement buried that Jew three generations ago,” said Lauder in his speech.

During the speech, Lauder discussed starting a Jewish Peace Corps to send young Jews out into the field to work in international Diaspora communities. This corps of Jewish activists would be ripe for their own “Austria moment”: the plight of the global Jewish peoplehood as a means to trigger their own Judaism.

“I intend to make our young people proud of their heritage again. I want them to have the same pride that we had when we were younger… when we saw the miracles that this amazing young country accomplished,” said Lauder.

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