MINEOLA, New York (AP) A 3,000-year-old gold Assyrian tablet stolen from a German museum during World War II and later possessed by a Holocaust survivor who may have gotten it in a trade with Russian soldiers for some cigarettes is being returned to Berlin, a New York judge said Wednesday.
Smaller than a credit card and weighing about one-third of an ounce, the relic known as the Ishtar Temple Tablet had been the subject of a New York legal battle over its ownership.
Last month, the state's highest court ruled that the estate of Riven Flamenbaum is not entitled to the relic. On Wednesday, Nassau County Surrogate's Court Judge Edward McCarty signed an order transferring ownership of the relic back to the Vorderasiatisches Museum, part of the renowned Pergamon Museum in Berlin.
"The museum must display it and make it available to both scholars and the mere curious," McCarty said.
Flamenbaum, an Auschwitz survivor, brought the tablet to the United States when he settled in New York after the war. Family lore says he got it by trading cigarettes to a Russian soldier while in a camp for Holocaust survivors after the war. His relatives did not know of its existence until after he died in 2003, attorneys said.