by Gary Vikan
IT WAS AUGUST 1997, AND I had just returned from vacation. In the pile of mail on my desk at the Walters was a large package with a Miami return address. The package contained several Polaroid prints showing a beat-up wooden door about three feet high and perhaps a foot wide bearing Hebrew lettering and decorated with intricate Islamic-style carving. There was also a Xerox from a book, labeled in Hebrew, “Holy Ark. Ben Ezra Synagogue, Old Cairo,” showing the door at an earlier point in its history with its companion left-hand door, when it was still part of a complete Torah ark (cabinet).
The package also included a report from Beta Analytic Services with the results of a carbon-14 analysis: the wood dates around AD 1070. An enclosed timeline told me that the Ben Ezra Synagogue had been founded in the 10th century, destroyed by Caliph al-Hakim in the early 11th century, and rebuilt shortly thereafter, when I assumed this door was created. And finally, there was a cover letter from the sender, Barry Ragone, suggesting that the door was for sale and saying, “I am only a temporary custodian.”
I recalled from my days at Dumbarton Oaks that the Ben Ezra Synagogue was where in the later 1890s Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University had revealed to the world the famous “Cairo Geniza,” a cache of 300,000 Jewish documents dating from the 9th through the 19th century. (A geniza is a dumpster-like repository where a Jewish community throws anything with writing on it against the possibility that it might include the name of God.) Because the Jews of Egypt began communications with the words “with the help of God,” the Ben Ezra Geniza remains unparalleled in the number and variety of its documents that reveal all aspects of Jewish life in the Mediterranean. Ben Ezra, the main synagogue in Egypt, is also noteworthy for its identification with Moses Maimonides, who conducted services there frequently during his extended stay in Old Cairo.
When I reached the sender, Barry Ragone, by phone in Miami, I learned two things: first, that he is a pediatric dentist (I could hear screaming children in the background), and second, that he claimed to have bought the Ben Ezra door at an estate auction in Fort Lauderdale without knowing what it was. As I looked again at the Polaroids I imagined Moses Maimonides, eight centuries ago, unlocking and opening this right-hand door of Ben Ezra’s ark and removing an ancient Torah for reading at services. I very much wanted this extraordinary piece of Judaica for the Walters, since we had nothing remotely like it, nor did any other major museum I knew. But there were troubling questions. How did it get from a famous Cairo synagogue to a Florida auction house? Had it been stolen from Egypt and is that auction story a cover-up?
Seeking some assurance, I called the Director of the Princeton Geniza Project, Mark Cohen, who I learned had heard from Barry Ragone months earlier, and had helped him verify that his door was indeed from of the Ben Ezra Synagogue. But I got no assurance. On the contrary, Mark made it clear that he shared the view of the Curator of Judaica at the Jewish Museum in New York that the Ragone door was recently stolen from Ben Ezra and must be given back to Egypt. The xerox, he said, was taken from a book about the Torah published in the late ’70s by the Israel Museum, and it proves that the ark was then both intact and in place in the synagogue. He told me that Phyllis Lambert, daughter of Samuel Bronfman of the Seagram Company, had overseen the restoration of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in the ’80s. And it was then, in those heady days after the Camp David Accord when large numbers of Israelis and American Jews were visiting Cairo, that the door now in the hands of a Miami dentist was spirited out of Egypt.
This was plausible, I thought, but unlikely. Instead, I chose a very different scenario. I knew that the Ben Ezra Synagogue had fallen into disrepair by the later 19th century and that it was demolished and rebuilt shortly before 1900. I assumed it was then, not in the ’80s, that the Torah ark was removed to another location, and that it was Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter who took the photo of the intact ark, and not some Israeli tourist a century later. I assumed that the ark was then stashed for many years nearby, at least nominally under the care of the local Jewish community. I guessed that the Ragone door, now weather beaten, came out of Egypt many decades ago, long before any export laws would have existed, and that the remainder of the ark was forever lost.
The only missing piece in my scenario was an American collector of Judaica who somehow got hold of that damaged door in the ’50s or ’60s and who eventually retired to Florida, taking the door with him. (Perhaps he never knew what it was.) When this hypothetical Judaica collector died, presumably in the early ’90s, his children were as puzzled by the door as was Barry Ragone when he first saw it. So they consigned it, with their father’s other household goods, to a Fort Lauderdale auction house, where its story intersected that of a Miami dentist. It could have been that simple—and that innocent.
ON SATURDAY JULY 3, 1999, I received a call at home from a fact checker with the Miami Herald. Our conversation was brief. Did I know Barry Ragone? Was it true that Barry Ragone had the right hand door from the Ben Ezra Torah ark and that he bought it at auction? And was it true that the Walters had offered Ragone $250,000 for the door? Yes, yes, and yes. I asked that he send me a copy of the next day’s paper; it had a large photo of Barry holding the door at the bottom center of the front page. That is almost exactly where the same picture was, with pretty much the same story, in The Baltimore Sun two days later.
By then, nearly eighteen months had passed since my initial visit to Miami, when I was shown the Ben Ezra Synagogue door wrapped in a blue beach towel on a table in the conference room of a small suburban bank. Barry Ragone had seemed enthralled that day with my vision for his door at the Walters, namely, that it would be exhibited at the boundary between galleries of medieval Christian art and Islamic art, mimicking the circumstance of the Jewish community in medieval Egypt. But when I offered him $100,000 he said immediately, “I can’t take that home,” which I took to mean that his wife wanted more money. Of course we both knew that some very influential people in Princeton and New York were saying that the door was stolen. As Barry drove me back to my hotel, I suggested that he go public with his story in order to smoke out any $1 million buyers or anyone with hard evidence that his door was stolen. Two weeks later I upped my offer to $250,000.
I learned from the Miami Herald some things about Barry Ragone that somehow had never come up. I learned that Barry had become a cocaine addict after the death of his father and younger brother in a car accident and that as a result of his addiction he lost his license to practice dentistry in 1993. Apparently, for a time Barry worked in a studio that made documentary films, and in 1995 he pleaded “no contest” to one count of grand theft involving discrepancies in his Medicaid accounts. Perhaps that brush with the law explains why, according to the Herald, Barry had retained one of New York’s most expensive art attorneys, Ralph Lerner, to represent his interests in the sale of the door. Or did it? And as for the auction, Barry could not recall whether it took place in 1993 or in 1994, but he was certain that it happened on a Friday, at the Trader Auction Palace on North Dixie Highway. He was the only bidder and he got the door for just $37.50. As for the auctioneer, it was the “Fastest-Mouth-in-the-South,” Pat Hishon, a personal friend of Barry’s who claimed to have no idea where the door came from. But the final words in the article belonged to Barry’s Rabbi, who was quite certain the Ben Ezra door was worth $1 million.
Six months later I received a call from someone who I think identified himself as Barry’s brother. This person had decided to insinuate himself into our stalled negotiations because the stress of trying to sell the Ben Ezra ark door was affecting the health of Barry’s wife. He wanted us to move to closure, which I jumped at, so I suggested that I come to see him in Miami at my first opportunity, which was on the Friday after Thanksgiving, November 26, 1999.
My host picked me up in his SUV at my South Beach hotel and took me to an Israeli restaurant, which seemed appropriate. He told me with great pride that he had just won an Emmy for a documentary he had produced on American GIs who fough
t in Israel’s War of Independence. I already knew that Barry’s father and younger brother, the ones killed in the car crash, had been involved in creating an indoor soccer team in Phoenix, so I concluded that the Ragone family had many talents and more than one link to Israel. But it also struck me how much more forceful and self-confident Barry’s “brother” was than Barry. He also seemed to not look much like Barry.
At a certain point well into the evening, as my host’s monologue was winding down, I expressed my enormous enthusiasm for the Ben Ezra door and described what I would do with it at the Walters, and how I had recently partnered with Yeshiva University in New York City to make the purchase. And then I upped my offer to $330,000, with the warning that this was my final offer and, after two weeks, if not accepted, it would be withdrawn. I felt confident that evening that the deal was all but done.
But it wasn’t. When I called Barry one day short of my deadline, he seemed puzzled, and when I told him about my visit with his “brother” in South Beach almost two weeks earlier, he seemed totally perplexed. But forget that, I said: do we or do we not have a deal at $330,000? His answer was immediate and crisp: “No, my price is $500,000.” With that I flipped my Motorola flip phone shut—and immediately realized that this impulsive act was not a good idea. But with some help from a friend in the Baltimore Jewish community, I soon got back in touch with Barry, and after another month of dickering and another $60,000 from our side, we came to closure. Barry Ragone agreed to sell the Ben Ezra Torah ark door to the Walters Art Museum and Yeshiva University for $390,000. He said he would take the balance of $610,000 on his initial asking price of $1 million as a charitable contribution (so he got a tax write-off, but no additional cash). Finally, after thirty months, the deal was done and everything was in order. Or so I thought.
The first public showing of the Ben Ezra Torah ark door was at the Yeshiva Art Museum in a small exhibition that opened on September 11, 2000, in their new facilities in Chelsea. I gave the guest lecture on the door and its history. The mood was joyous afterward as we shared cocktails in the gallery, gazing at that precious piece of medieval Judaica and puzzling over whether it had a second story—that is, a true story.
Then in the course of the reception, two older Jewish gentlemen came up to me separately to speak privately. Each had the same message: “I know where the left-hand door is.” And then each slipped back into the crowd. I wondered if they telling me the truth or just having some fun at my expense.
The next day I went back to the book Phyllis Lambert published in 1994 that documented her recent restoration work on the Ben Ezra Synagogue. I found a group of photographs of Ben Ezra from the late ’70s taken by a well-known Israeli documentary photographer named Micha Bar-Am—photographs that in my enthusiasm for my Solomon Schechter scenario I had chosen to ignore. I saw that in the pre-renovation synagogue of 1979 there was a very old wooden cabinet with carved decoration much like that of the Ragone door, a cabinet that according to Lambert had since disappeared. I then did a little investigating with Cambridge University and learned that Solomon Schechter took virtually no photographs on site when he was excavating the Geniza documents in the late 1890s.
Again, it had been my wishful thinking at work, as I reconstructed my “innocent and long ago” scenario for the door’s exit from Egypt. But if it didn’t come then and that way, how did the Ben Ezra Torah ark door get from Cairo to Miami? For a decade, I was content to leave that question alone.
I RETURNED TO THE DISTURBING unfinished business of the Ben Ezra Torah ark door in November 2013 as I began my memoirs. Perhaps, I thought, the missing piece to the puzzle is the identity of that person with whom I had dinner the evening after Thanksgiving in 1999, the man who I think presented himself as Barry’s brother. The Internet is a wonderful research tool now, as it was not fifteen years ago. In short order, I learned that the Emmy-winning producer of the documentary I heard so much about that evening (it is called Israel’s Forgotten Heroes and premiered on the local Miami PBS station in December 1998) was not a Ragone, but rather a Levine, specifically, Jerry Levine, then CEO of Higher Authority Productions. I checked out pictures of Jerry Levine on the Internet from newspaper articles of the late ’90s and I now believe that I recognize that he is the man who picked me up in his SUV at my hotel. This puzzle piece, once in place, has compelling implications, given that Barry told the Baltimore Sun that he had worked for some time in a film production business after his dentistry license was revoked.
Now a very different scenario for the journey of the Ben Ezra Torah ark door from Cairo to Miami came into focus. The hypothetical goes this way: it is 1995 or thereabouts, Barry Ragone is in recovery and working for Jerry Levine, and Jerry is beginning interviews for his Forgotten Heroes documentary. Jerry Levine is an Orthodox Jew and (as I learned on the Internet) is very active in his synagogue, and Higher Authority Productions specializes in documentary films about the South Florida Jewish community and about Israel. These activities and this timeline would not only explain Jerry’s link to Barry, they also connect them both to a group of elderly Jewish war veterans in their own backyard who would likely have both opportunity and motive for mitzvah acquisitions.
My hypothetical continues: perhaps through these connections, Jerry and Barry meet the door’s owner and learn that it was his mitzvah-driven stealth that liberated the door from Cairo ten or fifteen years earlier. They have a general sense that the object is important but are vague on what it actually is. They know that the right thing to do is to place the door in a Jewish museum. At the same time, they are not oblivious to its financial dimension; doing the right thing can also be rewarding. But given that they suspect that the door had been taken without permission from a very important historical site, there is both risk and anxiety. Barry is an amateur collector (as he told the Miami Herald) and he has time on his hands, so the research falls to him, and inevitably he becomes the public face for the door as he reaches out to scholars and museum professionals around the world. The early accusations of theft by the Curator of Judaica at the Jewish Museum and by Mark Cohen at Princeton nearly expose their mitzvah conspiracy, but thanks to Gary Vikan, the Walters Art Museum soon enters to save the day.
By this theory, the Fort Lauderdale auction is a laundry job intended to create “provenance amnesia”; thus the ambiguity about the year it took place and the auctioneer’s inability to account for, or, seemingly, even to care about where he got the door. This mitzvah-conspiracy scenario also explains much about my experience with Barry Ragone: the secrecy and anxiety that flavored our many exchanges; the fancy New York lawyer, Ralph Lerner; and Barry’s consistent refusal to come to New York or Baltimore to see “his” door on public display. It explains as well that strange dinner in South Beach with a co-conspirator who was getting nervous and, most important, it provides a logical and tight connection between Cairo around 1980 and Florida around 1995.
But is it true? I can hardly expect Barry Ragone or Jerry Levine to confirm what I now believe might have happened, and the auctioneer died in 2001. But I should reasonably expect one or both to identify my dinner partner on the evening of November 26, 1999. After all, what’s the harm? So I emailed both Barry and Jerry, coincidently, on the day after Thanksgiving, 2013, asking as naively as I could, with whom I had dinner on that warm evening in South Beach exactly fourteen years earlier. Neither chose to answer me. For Levine, I suppose, silence is understandable. But for Barry Ragone, who in our initial email exchanges that fall was very open and eager that I pay him a visit in Miami, silence may be its own answer.
Was I set up? Was I the “tail-end-Charlie” of the Ben Ezra Synagogue door? Perhaps. But I have no regrets. Quite the opposite, for I have chosen to claim this museum purchase as my own personal mitzvah—one of a sort that I’m absolutely certain would have pleased the greatest “decisor” of them all, Rabbi Moses Maimonides.
Chapter Sixteen
Working for the President
The beginning of th
e end of the struggle to reconcile my passion for acquiring and displaying sacred works of art with my knowledge that many of them were stolen came in April, 1997. Senator Paul Sarbanes wrote to tell me that he was supporting my nomination for membership on President Clinton’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC). I was not surprised, and I knew why it had happened. My testimony on behalf of Cyprus in the Kanakaria trial got the attention of Maria Kouroupas, Executive Director of CPAC. The Hellenic triangulation from Cyprus to Maria to Senator Sarbanes was obvious, and just fine by me. I was a hero among Greek-Americans for Kanakaria and for my icon exhibitions.
I suspect they also knew that I favored the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece and they had every reason to believe that as a member of CPAC, I would take a hard line on the illicit antiquities trade. I had, after all, laid out the canonical guidelines for appropriate due diligence on the stand in Indianapolis. It’s about using all best efforts and asking all the hard question in order to discover the truth of the origin of a proposed purchase or gift. This is what Dominique de Menil did with the Lysi frescoes and what Peg Goldberg did not do with the Kanakaria mosaics.
In the years just after the Kanakaria trial I spoke about the illicit antiquities trade and due diligence on many panels before a variety of audiences, from archaeologists to museum directors to art dealers. My foil was the Association of Art Museum Directors’ acquisition guidelines that seemed to me to invite hypocrisy. We directors were admonished “not knowingly” to acquire works of art that had been exported from their country of origin in violation of national laws. Not knowingly? So how is it that museum curators and directors, who go to graduate school to learn how to research every aspect of a work of art, are somehow rendered stupid and incapable when it comes to knowing the truth about the origins of the antiquities they’re buying? It sounded like Peg Goldberg, and I didn’t like it. I’m pretty sure Maria Kouroupas loved me for that and wanted me on CPAC to ensure that CPAC would do the good work of helping to interdict the international trafficking in looted antiquities.