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February 21, 2003/Adar1 19 5763, Vol. 55, No. 26
Claims conference goes off track
JONATHAN FRIENDLY
Jewish Renaissance Media
The Holocaust Claims Conference just doesn't get it.
Its first responsibility - in fact, the whole reason for its creation more than 50 years ago - is to make sure that the actual survivors of the Holocaust will be taken care of as well as humanly possible. But conference officials continue to act as if they were more concerned with taking care of the organization's future than with assuring a decent, dignified life for survivors.
At immediate issue is the conference's policy of allocating to Holocaust documentation, education and research about $85 million, about one-fifth of the proceeds from its sale of what it considers unclaimed property that Jews had owned in East Germany.
Critics say the money should be spent instead on helping needy victims of Nazi persecution in 31 countries around the world, particularly the tens of thousands of impoverished survivors in the former Soviet Union. In America alone an estimated 50,000 aging survivors rely on reparations payments to provide a quality of life beyond what Medicare and Social Security cover.
According to Julius Berman, the chairman of the organization, the East German property settlement includes the mission to "memorialize the people and the way they lived." But the terms of the settlement were negotiated by the conference itself a decade ago without publicity or opportunity for input from the survivors and their supporters. By assigning itself a role as an educational foundation, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Inc., gave itself a permanent endowment that protects the jobs of some of its 400 employees in New York, Tel Aviv and Frankfurt.
Six years ago, the Jerusalem Report magazine detailed massive self-serving by the conference in its handling of the actual recovered properties. In secret negotiations with German officials, the conference established an artificial deadline for survivors to claim the properties - among them some of the finest buildings in East Germany - and never publicized that deadline in America and the European countries, most likely where the claimants live. As a result, it took title to thousands of buildings that it has been selling through a network of favored brokers, sometimes over the objections of the actual survivors who are denied property that is rightfully theirs.
Admittedly the organization has had an enormous task in coordinating the prompt and proper dispersal of billions of dollars stemming from various restitution sources, including looted Swiss bank accounts, reparations for forced German laborers and slaves and Holocaust-era insurance, as well as the German property. It claims to have helped direct at least $50 billion to more than 500,000 survivors.
But process has been repeatedly delayed by a variety of forces, some of them outside of conference control, such as balky insurance companies that make insulting small offers to settle legitimate claims. For needy survivors, every day that goes by without proper and generous support is a hideous reminder of the Nazi atrocities. That is why the conference's ambition to educate the world about the Holocaust must take a back seat to the immediate needs of the victims.
Ultimately, responsibility for the conference rests with its board of directors, representatives of 23 major national and international Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Agency, the World Jewish Congress and agencies from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and South Africa. The board would do its own credibility a great service if it publicly reaffirmed its commitment to its founding goal of helping the lives of those the Holocaust ruined.
Jonathan Friendly is contributing editor of Jewish Renaissance Media. E-mail him at friendly@umich.edu.
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