The Jewish Week - 07.16.2004

The Jewish Week

Showdown On Swiss Funds 

In rare move, Jewish leaders from FSU due here to press case for needy survivors there. 

Stewart Ain - Staff Writer

With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake from the Swiss bank settlement, a showdown is looming next week as Jewish leaders from the former Soviet Union fly to New York to argue that there should be no cut in the services being provided to the more than 100,000 needy survivors they represent, The Jewish Week has learned. 

In an unprecedented move, the chief rabbis of Ukraine and Moscow, Yaakov Bleich and Pinchas Goldschmidt, as well as the president of the Russian Jewish Congress, Yevgeny Satanovsky, are planning to attend the July 21-22 board meetings of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the World Jewish Restitution Organization, an umbrella group representing 12 Jewish organizations worldwide. 

They will make the case for the dire needs of survivors from the FSU using detailed records provided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. 

In what is likely to be a dramatic presentation, the senior Jewish leaders and the JDC will present a 25-volume computer printout of the names and addresses of the 128,000 needy Holocaust survivors currently being assisted by the JDC. 

The records, which were last updated in April, have been audited by the accounting firm of Ernst and Young, according to the JDC. 

The move is seen as an attempt to counter charges by some that many of those benefiting from the restitution funds are in fact not Holocaust survivors and that some of them were even born after the Holocaust. 

“These are real victims, visited weekly and known personally to our social workers,” said Steve Schwager, executive vice president of the JDC. 

Holocaust survivors in the FSU have been receiving money from the $1.25 billion Swiss bank settlement, which is administered by the JDC, as well as from the Claims Conference. The latter’s funds come principally from Jewish-owned communal and unclaimed personal property in the former East Germany. 

Not only will the FSU delegation be pressing its case that the need of poor Holocaust survivors there is great, but its members are expected to request a “seat at the table” in all Jewish bodies dealing with restitution issues that would include the Claims Conference and the WJRO. Until now the JDC has represented the FSU. 

Next week’s showdown comes after the WJRO membership decided almost unanimously — only the JDC dissented — to challenge a recommendation to Brooklyn Federal Judge Edward Korman that 75 percent of any unclaimed bank deposits be allocated to Holocaust survivors in the former Soviet Union. 

The recommendation by special master Judah Gribetz is consistent with earlier allocations from the Swiss bank settlement. But WJRO members believe it is weighted too heavily toward helping those in the Soviet Union, thus shortchanging needy survivors in the United States and Israel. 

Realizing they have no control over what Korman decides, Jewish leaders in Israel and the U.S. have raised the possibility of formulating their own settlement — a global consolidation of all restitution money to better serve needy survivors worldwide. 

Under this scenario, if Korman adopts the Gribetz recommendation, the global arrangement would reallocate funds from the Claims Conference to needy survivors in the United States, Israel and elsewhere. 

Some argue that all survivors should receive the same level of service, a move that survivors and their representatives in the FSU would welcome because it might mean more services to them. 

“The allocation system should be geography blind,” said Elan Steinberg, executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress and a WJRO board member. 

In an emotional daylong hearing on April 29, Korman heard from American survivors and representatives of survivors in Israel who claimed they were not getting their fair share because of the higher cost of living in their countries. 

Survivors in the former Soviet Union receive a $30 to $40 monthly pension without any government-provided social service benefits. 

It is unclear what impact the Russian delegation’s presentation will have on the WJRO, the Claims Conference or Korman, who has yet to decide the second wave of allocations dealing with as much as $600 million in unclaimed Swiss bank assets. 

The judge has said he plans to delay a decision pending further searches of Swiss bank records in the hope of finding additional heirs of Swiss bank depositors. About $200 million has been returned to Swiss bank depositors and their heirs. 

A group of Holocaust survivors in Florida has been insisting for the last several years that they are in need of home care and that unclaimed assets from the settlement could make such care possible. 

Gribetz found that there are 6,000 needy survivors in the U.S. and more than that in Israel.