Mar 06
Jeanette FriedmanHOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
By Jeanette Friedman
Sometimes serious matters cannot be reduced to mere sound bites or black and white. Complicated issues should be examined carefully before an action is taken. One of those things is HR1746, a bill now before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services. This bill, the Holocaust Insurance Accountability Act, will allow survivors to sue insurance companies that are withholding payments on policies dating back to the Holocaust Era. If passed, Congress will essentially disavow the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC) agreement.
Established in 1998, ICHEIC was created as the outcome of an international agreement signed by officials from the United States Department of State, the German government, other European countries, Israel and Jewish organizations. It also involved U.S. state insurance regulators, European insurance companies, and the European Economic Commission. It was chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, whose leadership was sought precisely because of his well-earned ethical standing.
ICHEIC worked with 75 European insurance companies and “partner entities” on a voluntary basis and resolved more than 90,000 claims. As a result of its efforts, $306 million went to 48,000+ Holocaust survivors, their heirs and families of victims, often with little or no documentation to prove their cases. More than $169 million in additional funds was also secured to benefit needy Holocaust survivors worldwide. And when ICHEIC concluded operations in 2007, individual Holocaust survivors who were dissatisfied with the process clearly could pursue legal action against insurance companies.
HR 1746 seeks to abrogate all that ICHEIC accomplished. True, ICHIEC was flawed—as internal conflicts between survivors, diplomats and industry executives persisted throughout the commission’s existence. Nevertheless, ICHEIC did what it could to get funds, and quickly, to as many survivors as possible. (See www.icheic.org for details of the process.)
The key word is quickly. Those who signed the agreement tried to put money into the hands of those who passed agreed upon criteria, into the hands of poor survivors, and to the agencies serving them around the world—from the Americas to Australia, from Israel to the FSU. The idea was to avoid lawsuits—which can take insufferable lengths of time, are prohibitively expensive, and promise little in return. While lawsuits slowly wended their way through the courts, survivors were dying at alarming rates. Impoverished survivors were dying even more quickly than that. In Israel, the former Soviet Union, Florida and New York, there were hundreds of thousands of aging survivors who needed help immediately, not years in the future. ICHEIC got the money to them for the promise of legal peace.
Klaus Scharioth, the German ambassador to the United States, wrote to the late Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and chair of the House International Relations committee: “At ICHEIC’s final session on 20 March 2007 there was overall agreement that German insurers have fulfilled all obligations under the ICHEIC trilat¬eral agreement and have therefore deserved permanent and all-embracing legal peace.”
He noted that the German Government acknowledges without qualification Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. He pointed out there are “signifi¬cant legal hurdles posed by the federal rules [in the U.S. and Germany] of evidence for claims brought in court.” The hurdles didn’t apply to the ICHEIC process, since many claimants did not have to produce documents and other evidence to get claims processed. Scharioth added that in court actions against insurance companies, one could not guarantee success and that voluntary agreements, such as ICHEIC, helped Holocaust survivors whose claims would not stand up in court.
The letter reiterated that “Claimants with sufficient documentation can still file their claims with the insurance companies concerned, as insurers promised to continue processing these claims—and apply ICHEIC standards in their decisions—even after the ICHEIC process has been con¬cluded.”
But HR 1746 demands that insurance companies seeking to do business in the United States reveal all their records from 1933 through 1945. It exacts penalties and damages for those companies failing to comply. The bill mandates the creation of a Holocaust Insurance Registry to be maintained by the federal Archivist. (The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of creating and maintaining the registry would be tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.)
HR 1746 will hurt Holocaust survivors around the world, as Scharioth explained to Lantos.
“Even if the legislation currently under discussion should clear the way for a few sur¬vivors to win large sums in court, it would certainly jeopardize the possibility of com¬pensating large numbers of Holocaust survivors through voluntary contributions, for example, by industry. Indeed, turning away from the principle of legal peace after voluntary compensation has been paid, would make it much harder to convince indus¬try not only in Germany, but anywhere in the world [to cooperate]…. HR 1746, in our opinion, is contrary to good faith…Negotiation can help Holocaust survi¬vors in a better and more timely manner than litigation ever could. Should HR 1746…become law, it would likely be impossible to enlist the support of any Ger¬man company for similar projects in the future….Hence, HR 1746 would do nothing to improve the lot of the majority of Holocaust survivors, but would at the same time jeopardize future agreements that would really serve to benefit Holocaust survivors in dire need of help….”
Secretary of State Eagleburger, former Deputy Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat and signatories of the trilateral agreements agree. They are concerned that no one will come to the table to negotiate the expansion of categories under which Holocaust survivors receive funding. In short, by reneging on the ICHEIC agreements, by creating a federal agency to become part of the litigious process against agencies that have so far, admittedly begrudgingly, opened their coffers to afford some survivor relief, all the participants in the agreements will no longer be viable partners for any future negotiations.
Considering the history of survivor litigation, the scandals concerning the handling of survivor funds, the news of some attorneys involved in such litigation being convicted of malfeasance, the last thing the U.S. and the Jewish community need is to further such a state of affairs at Holocaust survivors’ expense. Lawsuits, especially class-action suits, can take years to resolve, and then no one sees much money except the lawyers. Do the survivors really have the time?
Survivors in need have to have their needs fulfilled now. If Congress wants to initiate legislation that will cost millions of taxpayer dollars to enforce, why not expend those millions on behalf of Holocaust survivors now? Why not guarantee health care and economic sustenance instead of law suits?
The proponents of this bill say that if you are against this bill, you are against the Holocaust survivors. They paint a picture in black and white. Perhaps the many shades of gray involved here might warrant a closer look.
Nov 14
Jeanette FriedmanHOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
OP-ED
By Jeanette Friedman Published: 11/13/2007
NEW YORK (JTA) — In “Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust,” the catalog that accompanies the exhibit of the same name, the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust here puts into print the question on everyone’s lips when the survivors were liberated.
“Context is everything,” David Marwell writes. “In trying to understand the study of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, this dictum becomes especially critical. If the reader has any doubts, he or she need only think about the oft-repeated question, ‘Why did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter?’ ”
Even now, 69 years after Kristallnacht and the beginning of the Holocaust, survivors are still putting to rest the accusations that they went like sheep to their fates. Some children, prompted by the attitudes of non-survivors in their milieu, even asked their survivor parents that question.
As Tom Segev’s “Seventh Million” made clear years ago, and a recent demonstration in the streets of Jerusalem underlined, to those without context Holocaust survivors are dismissed as bars of soap, “sabon.” Worse, many American Jews snidely wondered about the survivors, and some still do, “What did they do in order to survive?”
In the catalog’s final essay, psychologist Eva Fogelman notes that everyone blames the victim. It goes way back to Job: “Who ever perished, being innocent?” But Job’s friends didn’t understand him, and those who don’t understand the variations of Jewish defiance in the Holocaust simply don’t get it. To remain human, to maintain a shred of dignity in the midst of torturous mayhem, was to defy everything for which the Nazis stood.
The definition of resistance wasn’t helped by scholars and pundits who counted only armed resistance and measured success by counting the number of dead Germans killed by Jews.
Earlier this month, to honor the achievements of the distinguished Holocaust scholar Israel Gutman, four stellar academics — Yehuda Bauer, Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Robert Shapiro and David Engel — stood before an audience of about 200 and put Jewish resistance in the Holocaust into context.
Bauer was especially passionate. Amazingly, it was an Israeli who understood that what survivors and the Second Generation years ago called “spiritual resistance” was as important as armed resistance — and often much harder to maintain. The scholars broke it down to talk about women resisters, and religious, political and cultural resistance.
Bauer insisted that these stories of defiance be told and taught, otherwise future generations wouldn’t know how to resist those who try to dehumanize them and those who manipulate them politically.
He is absolutely right. More interesting is that those who grew up in survivor communities were surrounded by heroes who didn’t look or act like heroes at home. Some were short and dumpy, some could never master English or modern Hebrew, and few would talk about their experiences. But walk through the exhibit and you may find your neighbors on the walls and in the videos, or read about them in the catalog.
You realize that you know other heroes who deserve to be up on those walls and in those pages, but there just isn’t enough room. They did everything from observing Judaism, blowing up ammunition trains, producing Yiddish theater and concerts, and surviving under impossible circumstances.
When the museum first opened, the curator at the time, Yitzchak Mais, gave me, the daughter of survivors, a preview.
“Do you know about spiritual resistance?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied.
I described a tiny piece of cardboard with Hebrew letters shown to me by a survivor in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn years before. The survivor had used it in hiding to teach her little brother the Hebrew alphabet.
“It’s in the showcase on the second floor,” Mais said.
That piece of cardboard is a solid reminder of how tough the survivors still must be. It’s 62 years since the war ended and they still have to defy the powers that be to maintain their dignity as they face disease and death.
Unfortunately, those who owe the survivors the most are those who stole from them, treated them with contempt and appropriated their stories. But the survivors never give up. Our survivors, those who came from “there,” have lots to teach us. They are role models of whom we should be proud. They are not statistics that drain the economy. They are not sabon.
The Jews made their voices heard long ago, in hiding, in the camps, ghettos and forests. They made their voices heard when deniers began crawling out of the woodwork in the 1970s, and they make their voices heard now in their declining years. They demand that we remember. They demand the right to medical care, food and shelter so they can live and die with dignity. It’s a battle they have already fought.
As Marwell so eloquently says, “Just because Jews were powerless does not mean they were passive.”
Not even when they get old.
Jeanette Friedman, a freelance writer and editor, is a founder of the Second Generation movement.
Jul 25
Jeanette FriedmanHOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
Give the money to those who need it; it’s theirs, anyway
by Jeanette Friedman and David Gold
In the 1950s, Israeli Holocaust survivors signed over their restitution monies to the Israeli government, which, in return, promised to care for them in their old age. The logic was that the state needed the money to establish itself and protect its citizens.
At the same time, when the state was created, the British handed Israel all the assets and bank accounts that belonged to Holocaust victims and their heirs. But the Israelis have never returned the assets in their custody, and continued to thwart the attempt to return them. Bank Leumi, which had custody of these assets, had no right to transfer those assets to the state. In 2004, a committee chaired by MK Collette Avital, a daughter of survivors, was established to look into the matter and located 2,500 Leumi accounts. The committee established that the bank owed the survivors in excess of 300 million shekels (about $68 million).
The bank recently offered a paltry 20 million shekels (approximately $4.5 million) to the Holocaust Survivors Fund run by Zev Factor and Noah Flug, the umbrella organization for survivors in Israel. When the bank applied pressure to the Avital committee, the committee rewrote the repayment formula so that the bank would owe the survivors only a small percentage of the real total, because something is better than nothing. If heirs are not found, a process that could take years, Bank Leumi will pay the remaining survivors NIS 35 million at most, and keep the rest.
More than 80,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line with very few services offered to them. They need basic medical care, money for glasses and false teeth. After last summer’s war, the psychological problems of the survivors and their condition became more public. But no funds were advanced for treatment, and even the Claims Conference refused to come forward and finance emergency medical care. The conference released a mere $100,000 for use by Israeli survivors. As Roman Kent, the Claims Conference treasurer, said, “It was too little, and came way too late.” Flug and Factor calculated that caring for each Holocaust survivor under fire in the north cost $5,000, and that 5,000 survivors desperately needed help.
You do the math ($20 per survivor).
This happened soon after Flug and Factor said they had to close the Holocaust Fund because they had no money. Finally, the Claims Conference and the government gave them an infusion of cash, but the government is at war with itself when it comes to releasing funds to care for survivors.
Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog accuses the Finance Ministry of not implementing the plan to support Holocaust survivors. The Finance Ministry refuses to accept any proposal from the Social Affairs Ministry, even after the budget was cut. Until recently, the Finance Ministry was headed by Abraham Hirchson, who resigned in disgrace after a series of scandals that included allegations that he took funds from the Claims Conference and March of the Living. Some of this money was allegedly used to fund the Likud Party.
In his treatment of Holocaust survivors, Hirchson followed in his predecessors’ footprints. When Benjamin Netanyahu was finance minister, he threatened to destroy the Claims Conference unless he was given complete control of the allocations and negotiations. His bullying failed, but the survivors in Israel continue to suffer, because his legacy remains.
Avital’s committee forced the creation of something called Hashava.org.il, The Company for Locating and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets. Hashava was established in Israel by virtue of the Holocaust Victims Property Law (5766-2006). It has published the first list of 6,000 properties and assets owned by Jews in Europe prior to World War II. The list can be viewed on the organization’s website http://www.hashava.org.il in Hebrew or in English on www.americangathering.com.
Applications in English are available at americangathering.com and will be published as the centerfold in its next issue. In the next few months, another 54,000 assets and accounts will be listed. But it will take years for people to prove who they are. The list was checked against the lists of victims at Yad Vashem to make sure that those on the list actually died in the Holocaust. No one who had an account and is still alive is listed, and those not on the list can call or write Hashava to find out if they have any unclaimed assets.
It is a waiting game — the longer it takes to determine which survivors get money, more survivors die, and the organizations get to keep a larger piece of the leftovers.
In the meantime, everyone wants to jump on the money bandwagon. Survivors’ descendants in Israel have filed suit against the German government for $10 million over a three-year period, to pay 12,000 to 20,000 for psychotherapy. They blame the Germans for their parents’ bad parenting and their own neurosis.
Studies show that, as a rule, these people are better adjusted, more successful, and have a better grasp of reality than most of their peers in any ethnic group. Are Israeli children of survivors sicker than most because of the war pressure cooker they live in? If that’s the case, it is the Israeli government’s responsibility to care for them. Why sue the Germans?
Israeli society should stop looking for handouts from American Jews and everyone else under the sun, and take responsibility for its own citizens. They should never allow 80,000 survivors to starve.
Why should the Claims Conference fund major Israeli hospitals, even on a pro-rata basis, when those hospitals have millions upon millions of dollars in their budgets?
What is really at issue in Israel, and also in the United States, is the way the Jewish community treats its Holocaust survivors. In the end, it is not the responsibility of a third party to take care of them. When money is short, the Jewish community should provide it, not just to their favorite causes, but also to impoverished survivors and their distressed sons and daughters. Each community should take of its own people, whether they are survivors or not.
Take responsibility. Don’t wait for governments. Take care of your poor Holocaust survivors wherever they are, and stop waiting for someone else’s money to pay for it. As New Jersey’s Sen. Frank Lautenberg once said, when members of the Jewish community complained that they didn’t have enough money for certain Jewish projects: “Dig a little deeper.”
It’s a disgrace when the most fragile of the Jewish community, the elderly Holocaust survivors, are dismissed as a drain on budgets, but their life experience, namely the fact that they lived through the Holocaust, is the basis for political, financial, and emotional exploitation. Anyone who wants to raise funds for their favorite cause — whether it’s fighting anti-Semitism in Europe, interfaith conversation, Jewish continuity, or other matters that engage Jews — uses the Holocaust as a bludgeon. Enough.
Jeanette Friedman, founding president of Second Generation of North Jersey, and David Gold, member of the National Council of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, are working on a forthcoming book, “The Snake Made Me Do It: Ten Lessons from The Holocaust.”
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