Repairing Past Wrongs?
The Impact of the Luxembourg Agreement on
Compensation of Historical Injustices
— International Symposium —
The Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights
Thursday, November 17, 2022
Mt. Scopus Campus
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
On September 10, 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany, the State of Israel and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany signed a far-reaching compensation agreement in Luxembourg. Under the so-called Luxembourg Agreement and its two protocols, West Germany paid for the integration of half a million Holocaust survivors into the Jewish state and for the indemnification of individual Nazi victims. Back then, the agreement was groundbreaking. Ever since 1952, and more so since the end of the Cold War, the negotiations that preceded the agreement, the agreement itself, and not the least the German-Jewish-Israeli relations that grew out of it, serve many other former perpetrators and victims of grave human rights violation – and their representatives respectively – as a model for dealing with past wrongs.
Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement, the aim of this symposium is to discuss and reflect together on the agreement and its impact on other cases of historical injustices. Guiding questions of the event are thus: In what ways did the agreement affect subsequent campaigns for compensation and restitution of property related to genocide and severe persecution? In what ways are the agreement, the negotiations leading up to it and the agreement’s aftermath similar and different to other case studies? To what extent did other historical cases rely on the Luxembourg Agreement? Does the agreement provide a model for dealing with problems of the future?
By answering these questions, we intend both to foster comparative, critical and transnational aspects of reparations studies and to promote interdisciplinary cooperation between historians, political scientists, legal scholars, philosophers, and scholars from other disciplines.
The symposium program consists of a keynote lecture, paper presentations and discussions. In order to enable fruitful discussions, the presentations should not exceed 25 minutes. We invite emerging and established scholars of all disciplinary backgrounds to send us a proposal for a paper addressing the theme of the symposium. Applications should include: title and abstract of the proposed paper (1 page), a short CV, and contact information. Please submit your proposal to iris.nachum@mail.huji.ac.il by December 31, 2021.
Travel (economy) and accommodation costs in Jerusalem will be covered by the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights.
The symposium will take place following the international conference on “70 Years of Holocaust Compensation and Restitution” to be held at Tel Aviv
University on November 14-16, 2022.
For more details, please visit: https://en-humanities.tau.ac.il/diaspora/70_Years_of_Holocaust_Compensation_and_Restitution