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July 30, 2004/Av 5 5764, Vol. 56, No. 45
Plan to centralize holocaust restitution
URIEL HEILMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Was it a revolution or a resolution? After a stormy few weeks leading up to last week's annual board meeting of the Claims Conference, the main group charged with Holocaust restitution, an agreement was reached to centralize world Jewry's restitution efforts.
"Instead of sitting here and fighting about the pie, let's go out and get a bigger pie," Amir Shaviv, assistant executive vice president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, said of the new strategy to bolster worldwide restitution efforts. The JDC is a member of the Claims Conference.
The meeting may also have quelled - for the time being -the controversy surrounding the distribution of unclaimed funds left from the $1.25 billion Swiss banks settle-ment. A presentation by Claims Conference officials showed there actually may be no funds left over from that settlement once all claims have been resolved.
Depending on whom one talks to, the agreement on centralizing restitution either marked a historic revolution against Claims Conference control, or resolved criticism against the restitution group and signaled that the organ-ization is more successful and influential than ever.
For now, both sides are claiming victory. On July 22, toward the end of the two-day meeting in New York, board members approved a res-olution to create a panel to "discuss coordination of restitution efforts outside Germany and Austria" that "should include the par-ticipation of all relevant groups involved in the res-titution of funds."
It was not immediately clear which groups would be included outside of the Claims Conference and the World Jewish Restitution Organ-ization. The Claims Con-ference deals with Germany and Austria, while the WJRO is charged with securing restitution elsewhere.
The resolution came on the heels of a call by some Claims Conference board members, and by Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Net-anyahu, to create a "blue-ribbon panel" to examine how to "increase efficiency, transparency, relevance and coordination in restitution efforts."
Critics have charged that the Claims Conference, created in 1951 to press Jewish material claims against Germany, is not sufficiently representative of today's Jewish world and does too much of its work behind closed doors.
One of the conference's most vocal critics described the July 22 agreement as a "remarkable transformation."
"The bottom line is, a revolution has occurred," said Elan Steinberg, executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress and a Claims Conference board member.
Steinberg told JTA in January that the conference "should be restructured" and that its handling of the distribution of unclaimed Holocaust-era assets runs "contrary to the very principles of democracy, accountability and transparency."
After the July 22 meeting, Steinberg said the new resolution would open up the restitution process to the entire Jewish world. He said the panel would deal with restitution for every country, including Germany and Austria, which until now have been the exclusive domain of the Claims Conference.
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