A Jewish father collected hundreds of Nazi objects in the basement. His son is struggling with the most basic question: Why?

After Gilbert Tabby died, his son David Tabby began sorting through the collections he left behind. He wanted to honor his father’s memory.

But as he rifled through brimming boxes in the family basement, he discovered with a growing sense of unease that, more than anything else, his father had collected Nazi memorabilia.

Not just a few small objects, but hundreds of Nazi artifacts: helmets and medals and uniforms and banners and visor caps. There was a child-size toy Nazi helmet, a Hitler Youth exercise shirt, and a banjo made from a desecrated Torah scroll, stamped with a swastika. Gilbert Tabby’s collection, reported on previously by the Jewish Exponent, also includes objects from World War II concentration camps and Jewish ghettos.

The Tabby family is Jewish, and not direct descendants of Holocaust survivors.

“I don’t know how to say it any other way except that all the Nazi stuff kind of bothers me. I can say now that it’s necessary to tell the story. …” said David, 64, his voice trailing off. “But I don’t know how you distinguish between glorifying it and just cataloging it.”

Gilbert was intensely private about his collecting, and didn’t display or discuss the contents, his family said. Very occasionally he would refer to something, such as when, in the final months of his life and confined to his bed, he wanted David to bring him some of his favorite objects, and specifically requested the child’s Nazi helmet. Gilbert, a family physician, died from pancreatic cancer in 2019.

David had grown distant from his father as an adult. Now he wondered whether he had ever really known him at all. Why did his father have a Nazi flag so large it literally could not be displayed inside? Why had he never mentioned it? Why had David never asked?

At the same time, David was spiraling. A neurologist, he is currently on probation after a yearlong license suspension, for sexual conduct with a patient and creating inaccurate medical notes related to the patient, according to the Pennsylvania Board of Osteopathic Medicine. The patient is suing him. In October, in a separate case, he settled with the federal government for $480,000 over allegations that he accepted kickbacks from a home-infusion pharmacy.

Facing mounting legal troubles, he became obsessively focused on what his father left behind. At first, he thought he might simply ignore the Nazi part. He cleared a room in his mother’s basement in a northwest suburb of Philadelphia and set up a display of American military flags and rifles — a more palatable collection.

“I thought, no. No. This is wrong. Who am I to rewrite history? His history? I’m not going to do that,” he said.

So Tabby began again. He hauled tons of junk and broken furniture to the trash. He scrubbed the basement, painted the concrete floors, rewired the lighting, repaired a crumbling wall, and mounted dozens of shelves.

He became determined to build a museum: not a false one, showcasing only acceptable items belonging to his father, but a real one, encompassing everything.

He fit most of Gilbert’s Nazi material in a single room in the basement, which he labeled the “Nazi war machine.” Additional Nazi items, including swastika-stamped dishware and a handkerchief embroidered with the initials “A.H.,” sit in a separate glass case. He also displayed concentration camp uniforms and hundreds of letters from prisoners, which David hired experts to translate into English. There are other basement walls devoted to European Jewish ghettoes, lined with framed yellow star patches; to Italian fascists; to the Polish resistance; and to Nazi-defiled Torah scrolls.

He has shown a few friends and members of his and his mother’s synagogues the collection. Other than that, he doesn’t have a plan for it. The family says they do not intend to sell.

“I miss my dad. And it’s a tribute to him,” David said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

On a recent tour, Tabby offered up his own theories for the collection’s existence. Maybe for his father it served as some kind of necessary proof of human atrocity. Maybe it let him feel what it was like to be Jewish in Poland in 1939 (both of Gilbert’s parents already lived in the United States by then, according to his self-published memoir). Maybe it was his own version of “never again.”

Lots of collectors of grisly historical artifacts make similar arguments — most recently, Harlan Crow, the Texas megadonor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose home collection contains paintings by Adolf Hitler and other Nazi artifacts.

But the historical value of such objects is often quite limited, said Menachem Kaiser, the author of Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure, who has reported on the booming market for Nazi memorabilia.

“For most people’s collections, museums aren’t that interested, because it’s sort of more of the same. People don’t need another Nazi flag. They don’t need another helmet,” Kaiser said. “What do we do with, basically, war garbage?”

Some of it gets traded on the free market; one expert told Kaiser that annual Nazi artifact sales are as high as $100 million. (There are also scores of fakes in circulation.) The vast majority of those participating are not Nazi sympathizers, Kaiser said; they collect for reasons that can be, for an outsider, “pretty hard to relate to.”

David’s mother, Lorna Tabby, 88, isn’t interested in parsing the why. She met the man who would become her husband in 1950, when the two were teenagers, at the North Philly synagogue Adath Jeshurun. They were married for 65 years. Lorna still lives in the home they shared, and often spends time in the basement, with the swastika flags and the Nazi dishware. It makes her feel closer to her husband.

He was always a collector, ever since he was a child, she said, whether he was focused on Roman coins or Coca-Cola bottles or Nazi collaborator helmets. It didn’t much matter — that’s just what he was like.

Once, at a store in Atlantic City, she asked why he couldn’t collect something she would like, pointing to a nearby porcelain bird for sale. So he began collecting birds made by the artist Edward Marshall Boehm, for her.

David’s sister, Caryn, 61, who lives in Center City, said she couldn’t explain the contents, either, but is grateful her brother has taken on her father’s legacy.

“I knew why he collected,” Lorna told David recently, as he adjusted the frame on a Nazi anti-Jewish poster from 1941 at the dining room table. “Because he wanted a piece of history.”

The conversation had the well-worn feeling of one in which everyone has already said their piece, perhaps many times.

“Yeah, but Mom, you could say that about anything. Any kind of history. There’s a lot of history,” David said.

“Why did he want this piece of history?”