THE LIFT - The Transfer (Haavara) Agreements: Artistic Research

“Transferumbau: Liebling–Dessau” is the result of a three-year artistic research conducted by artists Ilit Azoulay, Jonathan Touitou, Lou Moria, Nir Shauloff, and Hila Cohen-Schneiderman, which traced the story of the transfer (Haavara) agreements (1933–38). The group of artists embarked on a journey between objects and materials, private and institutional archives, texts and images, places and historical sites, interviews with scholars and meetings with various individuals. In the course of that journey, a collective unconscious was constructed, which gave rise to two exhibitions and one book. The transfer agreements signed between Nazi Germany, the Zionist institutions, and the British Mandatory authorities in the 1930s constituted commercial relations between these parties, and enabled the immigration of tens of thousands of Jews from Germany to Mandatory Palestine. As part of these agreements, a German-Jewish (Yekke) family could sell its assets, and deposit the cash in a bank account in Germany. This money was used to purchase German goods which were shipped to Palestine, where they were sold, and the revenue was reinstated to the family after immigration. The people, ideas, and raw materials which arrived as part of the transfer agreements boosted the construction boom of the Jewish community in the country (the Yishuv), influenced the local variation of the modern style in architecture, design, and art in those years, and particularly—the development of the urban area later to be known as the White City of Tel Aviv. Many of the buildings in that part of the city, which in 2003 was recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, were, in fact, built with materials made in Nazi Germany. The project “Transferumbau: Liebling Dessau”—whose German title denotes transfer and reconstructio 
 was commissioned by Liebing Haus and the Bauhaus 100 Foundation. Some of the fruits of its research are introduced in this book and in the exhibitions featured concurrently in Tel Aviv (September 2019) and in Dessau (October 2019).
 
The book is bilingual (Hebrew and English).