Nazi family told to return artifacts

A state appellate court in Brooklyn has ordered the family of a Holocaust survivor to return an ancient gold tablet to a German museum.The decision turns on its head the familiar scenario of Holocaust victims suing to reclaim property stolen or extorted from them by the Nazis. But in this case, according to court papers, the precious 3200yearold Assyrian artifact had been looted not from the survivor but from the vonderstiatches museum in berlin.It is not clear how the survivor iven Flamenbaum came into possession of the tablet after his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945 when he was sent to a displaced persons camp in southeastern Germany.But when Mr. Flamenbaum immigrated to the United States four years later he arrived in New York with a wife he had met at the camp and the inscribed gold tablet which is about the size of a passport photo. Only after Mr. Flamenbaums death in 2003 did his children discover that the thin golden square had been stolen from the museum.